“J’ai mal à l’autre”: Barthes on Pity

What is empathy and what is its point? What is the relation between empathy and the conception of the self? And what is the relation between empathy and textual form? In this article I grapple with these questions with the help of Roland Barthes. Tracing the transformations of the concept of empathy and its derivatives compassion and pity in Barthes’s writing from Michelet par lui-même (1954) to the posthumously published Journal de deuil (2009), I discuss their significance for current cross-disciplinary debates on empathy and for the even more widely visible ‘turn to affect’ within the context of which they evolve.