Early in La Chambre claire, Barthes explains that in his writing he has always hovered between two sorts of discourse; he feels the ‘inconfort’ of a subject ‘ballotté entre deux langages, l'un expressif, l'autre critique’. His only sense of certainty, within the network of discourses in which he finds himself, is that he feels an ineradicable ‘résistance […] à tout système réducteur’ (CC, 794). His own subjectivity, ‘“l'antique souveraineté du moi” (Nietzsche)’, must be used as a methodological starting-point. Selecting the photographs he would use for the book, Barthes had the ‘bizarre’ thought that perhaps, after all, it is by examining contingent individuality that a general validity can be reached – a ‘mathesis’ or knowledge which would respect particularity, and yet ultimately lead to the attainment of general truths:

Here we see the culmination of a method which Barthes had been setting out with increasing confidence over the course of the Collège de France teaching: the ‘idée bizarre’ of a mathesis singularis was in gestation during this time.