I Am Romantically Scattering My Own Ashes

“A photograph doesn’t necessarily speak of what is already gone but only of what once was. On one occasion a photographer gave me a picture of myself and, despite my trying really hard, I couldn’t remember where it was taken; I examined the tie, the sweater, in order to remember the occasion I was wearing it for; to no avail. However, since it was a photograph, I couldn’t deny I was there (even though I didn’t know where). This distortion of certainty and the fact of forgetting made me feel dizzy and gave me ‘detective‘ anxiety; I went to the photographer’s exhibition as if I was going to investigate, to finally learn something about myself that I already didn’t know.”

Stage essay. Free adaptation of the last text of the French philosopher and semiologist Roland Barthes.

Roland Barthes (1915–1980) studied classical literature and philology. Barthes’s work never formed a coherent whole that would follow a single theoretical line. From the criticism of history, he gradually moved to general and applied semiology, and beginning the 1970s he started developing a completely unique way of thinking about literary texts, characterized by a resignation to generalising systems and a gradual fragmentation and emphasis on singularities and contingencies. Barthes’s last text is an essay on photography, entitled Camera Lucida, which in many ways suggests a new turning point in the development of his work, abruptly interrupted by his death in a car accident in 1980.

Excerpts from Roland Barthes’s works used in the play: Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, Journal de deuil.