Imagen recobrada: Barthes como lector de Proust

Abstract

This paper deals with the intertextual relation between Marcel Proust and Roland Barthes. In Camera Lucida, Barthes makes reference to In Search of Lost Time. While Proust works with mental images, Barthes focuses on photographic images. Both of them are looking for recovering time and the lost instant. For Barthes, photography is inseparable from death and an irremediable absence; in the case of Proust, memory compensates the threat of oblivion and death, although it is a mourning experience. A photograph becomes catastrophic when it reveals the memory of the departed. The event, which happened just once, is there again like a form to give name to absence. Photography as well as memory carries a finite charge, the unavoidable presence of death.