Writing of Lives. Barthes and Animality

This paper takes as its starting point the Barthesian notion of "writing of life", and analyzes its theoretical-critical scope, considering it highly operative to address the knot between writing and life in nowadays literature. To this end, the notion is linked, on the one hand, with other reflections of the last Barthes on the problem of animal life and, on the other hand, with some passages of Nietzschean thought that the critic himself quotes and comments in the seminars gathered together in the posthumous book The Preparation of the Novel. As an effect of these links, a transdisciplinary conceptual field is drawn. This field articulates, among others, the notions of intimacy, play, body, metabolism, animality, poverty, pleasure and co-existence, and allows us to consider the writing of lives as a way to explore the human animal identity.