Race and reproduction in Camera Lucida

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her life, Barthes suggests, ‘She had become my little girl, uniting for me withthat essential child she was in her first photograph’ (72). As Barthes’s motherbecomes his little girl, Barthes enters, briefly, the procreative model of genera-tion, of reproduction; he becomes a kind of parent. He declares, ‘I who hadnot procreated, I had, in her very illness, engendered my mother’ (72). Barthes,the gay male intellectual without children, is linked through his mother, bybecoming his mother’s mother, to what he deems the universal; he transcendshimself, his particularity, his death, by momentarily creating a child (his ailingmother). And yet, because this child, his elderly mother, will not live on past hisown inevitable death, Barthes’s parenting provides only a taste of the ‘Life Force’through which, according to ‘so many philosophers’, so many heteronormativephilosophers, the individual transcends Death through his or her procreativerole in the reproduction of ‘the race, the species’ (72).Barthes proclaims that after his mother’s death his vision of himself as gay-male-progenitor also dies. After the death of the mother-as-child, Barthesdeclares that he can no longer do anything but wait for his ‘total, undialec-tical death’ (72). 10 And yet, Barthes also supposes that his procreative capacitymight be re-envisioned in a utopian sense, whereby he might transcend finalitythrough writing, in which he might live beyond himself through the texts hegenerates. In this sense, writing provides an escape from the body that dies orfails or refuses to procreate; writing enables the proliferation and expansion ofthe self beyond the awkward limitation and finality of the body.As Barthes argues in his autobiography, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes ,writing also liberates the self from the limitations of its ‘narrative continuity’,from its autobiography, from its place in the ‘“family romance”’ (1977b: 4, 3).For Barthes, that discrete, continuous self, the self that must be liberated fromits singularity and confinement, is construed and anchored by ‘imagery’, by an‘image-repertoire’ – by family photographs (3, 4). It is one’s visual insertioninto the family line that connects and confines one to a genealogy. However,writing, marking, for Barthes, the beginning of ‘productive life’, can surpassthe image-repertoire (4). Here, then, photographs represent the domain of thediscrete, autobiographical, ultimately unproductive self, while writing representsthe domain of the self liberated from its private definitions, and made produc-tive.The photograph adheres one to a body, the written text only to an abstractsignifier. In Barthes’s autobiography, as in Camera Lucida , the photograph, likethe body it represents, ultimately signifies death. Writing, on the other hand,relying on the abstract linguistic signifier, can liberate one’s meaning from thebody, and thereby signify beyond life and death.Following Barthes’s ruminations on photography in his autobiography,one might also associate the photograph, as Victor Burgin has, with a kind ofexpanded semiotic sphere (in Julia Kristeva’s sense), an extended pre-symbolicstage, in which the body and its sensations, and the mother’s body, dominateself-perception (1986a: 84–5). For Barthes, the image-repertoire, and the biog-raphy it anchors, ends with one’s youth, ends as one enters the public social