Roland Barthes, writer in France in 1972. Photo by Louis Monier.
Gallery of Roland Barthes
1972
France
Roland Barthes, writer in France in 1972. Photo by Louis Monier.
Gallery of Roland Barthes
1972
France
Roland Barthes, writer in France in 1972. Photo by Louis Monier.
Gallery of Roland Barthes
1975
Paris, France
French philosopher Roland Barthes on 24th June 1975. Photo by Sophie Bassouls.
Gallery of Roland Barthes
1975
Paris, France
French philosopher Roland Barthes on 24th June 1975. Photo by Sophie Bassouls.
Gallery of Roland Barthes
1975
Paris, France
French philosopher Roland Barthes on 24th June 1975. Photo by Sophie Bassouls.
Gallery of Roland Barthes
1975
Paris, France
French philosopher Roland Barthes on 24th June 1975. Photo by Sophie Bassouls.
Gallery of Roland Barthes
1977
Paris, France
Roland Barthes on the set of TV Show Apostrophes.
Gallery of Roland Barthes
1977
3 Rue d'Ulm, 75005 Paris, France
Roland Barthes, writer, critic, and teacher, delivers a speech for his appointment as a professor at the College de France. Photo by Jacques Pavlovsky.
Gallery of Roland Barthes
1977
3 Rue d'Ulm, 75005 Paris, France
Roland Barthes making his inaugural speech at the College de France. He held the Semiology chair at the College de France from 1977 to 1980.
Gallery of Roland Barthes
1978
Paris, France
Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, and Pierre Boulez in Paris, France on February 23, 1978. Photo by Gilbert Uzan.
Gallery of Roland Barthes
1978
Paris, France
French philosopher Roland Barthes in Paris on 9th June 1978. Photo by Sophie Bassouls.
Gallery of Roland Barthes
1978
Paris, France
French philosopher Roland Barthes in Paris on 9th June 1978. Photo by Sophie Bassouls.
Gallery of Roland Barthes
1978
Paris, France
French philosopher Roland Barthes in Paris, 9th June 1978. Photo by Sophie Bassouls.
Gallery of Roland Barthes
1978
Paris, France
French philosopher Roland Barthes in Paris, 9th June 1978. Photo by Sophie Bassouls.
Gallery of Roland Barthes
1979
Paris, France
French philosopher Roland Barthes poses during a portrait session held on January 25, 1979, in Paris, France. Photo by Ulf Andersen.
Gallery of Roland Barthes
1979
Paris, France
French philosopher Roland Barthes poses during a portrait session held on January 25, 1979, in Paris, France. Photo by Ulf Andersen.
Gallery of Roland Barthes
1979
Paris, France
French philosopher Roland Barthes poses during a portrait session held on January 25, 1979, in Paris, France. Photo by Ulf Andersen.
Roland Barthes, writer, critic, and teacher, delivers a speech for his appointment as a professor at the College de France. Photo by Jacques Pavlovsky.
(Is there any such thing as revolutionary literature? Can ...)
Is there any such thing as revolutionary literature? Can literature, in fact, be political at all? These are the questions Roland Barthes addresses in Writing Degree Zero, his first published book and a landmark in his oeuvre. The debate had engaged the European literary community since the 1930s; with this fierce manifesto, Barthes challenged the notion of literature's obligation to be socially committed. Yes, Barthes allows, the writer has a political and ethical responsibility. But the history of French literature shows that the writer has often failed to meet it - and from Barthes's perspective, literature is committed to little more than the myth of itself. Expert and uncompromising, Writing Degree Zero introduced the themes that would soon establish Barthes as one of the leading voices in literary criticism.
("No denunciation without its proper instrument of close a...)
"No denunciation without its proper instrument of close analysis," Roland Barthes wrote in his preface to Mythologies. There is no more proper instrument of analysis of our contemporary myths than this book - one of the most significant works in French theory, and one that has transformed the way readers and philosophers view the world around them. Our age is a triumph of codification. We own devices that bring the world to the command of our fingertips. We have access to boundless information and prodigious quantities of stuff. We decide to like or not, to believe or not, to buy or not. We pick and choose. We think we are free. Yet all around us, in pop culture, politics, mainstream media, and advertising, there are codes and symbols that govern our choices. They are the fabrications of consumer society. They express myths of success, well-being, or happiness. As Barthes sees it, these myths must be carefully deciphered and debunked. What Barthes discerned in mass media, the fashion of plastic and the politics of postcolonial France applies with equal force to today's social networks, the iPhone, and the images of 9/11.
(The Elements here presented have as their sole aim the ex...)
The Elements here presented have as their sole aim the extraction from linguistics of analytical concepts which we think a priori to be sufficiently general to start semiological research on its way. In assembling them, it is not presupposed that they will remain intact during the course of research; nor that semiology will always be forced to follow the linguistic model closely. We are merely suggesting and elucidating a terminology in the hope that it may enable an initial (albeit provisional) order to be introduced into the heterogeneous mass of significant facts. In fact, what we purport to do is furnish a principle of classification of the questions.
(In his consideration of the language of the fashion magaz...)
In his consideration of the language of the fashion magazine - the structural analysis of descriptions of women's clothing by writers about fashion - Barthes gives us a brief history of semiology. At the same time, he identifies economics as the underlying reason for the luxuriant prose of the fashion magazine: "Calculating, industrial society is obliged to form consumers who don't calculate; if clothing's producers and consumers had the same consciousness, clothing would be bought (and produced) only at the very slow rate of its dilapidation."
(What is it that we do when we enjoy a text? What is the p...)
What is it that we do when we enjoy a text? What is the pleasure of reading? The French critic and theorist Roland Barthes's answers to these questions constitute "perhaps for the first time in the history of criticism, not only a poetics of reading but a much more difficult achievement, an erotics of reading. Like filings which gather to form a figure in a magnetic field, the parts and pieces here do come together, determined to affirm the pleasure we must take in our reading as against the indifference of (mere) knowledge.
(First published in 1975, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes...)
First published in 1975, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes is the great literary theorist's most original work - a brilliant and playful text, gracefully combining the personal and the theoretical to reveal Roland Barthes's tastes, his childhood, his education, his passions and regrets.
(These essays, as selected and translated by Stephen Heath...)
These essays, as selected and translated by Stephen Heath, are among the finest writings Barthes ever published on film and photography, and on the phenomena of sound and image. The classic pieces "Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative" and "The Death of the Author" are also included.
(A Lover's Discourse was revolutionary: Roland Barthes mad...)
A Lover's Discourse was revolutionary: Roland Barthes made unprecedented use of the tools of structuralism to explore the whimsical phenomenon of love. Rich with references ranging from Goethe's Werther to Winnicott, from Plato to Proust, from Baudelaire to Schubert, A Lover's Discourse artfully draws a portrait in which every reader will find echoes of themselves.
(The essays in this volume were written during the years t...)
The essays in this volume were written during the years that its author's first four books were published in France. They chart the course of Barthe's criticism from the vocabularies of existentialism and Marxism (reflections on the social situation of literature and writer's responsibility before History) to the psychoanalysis of substances (after Bachelard) and psychoanalytical anthropology (which evidently brought Barthes to his present terms of understanding with Levi-Strauss and Lacan).
(A Barthes Reader includes his earliest essay (on Gide), h...)
A Barthes Reader includes his earliest essay (on Gide), his Inaugural Lecture at the Collège de France, and “Deliberation,” none of which had previously been published in English. It also offers a broad sampling from the most representative of his major works: On Racine, Writing Degree Zero, Mythologies, Critical Essays, The Pleasure of the Text, Sade/Fourier/Loyola, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, Image-Music-Text, A Lover’s Discourse, The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies, and New Critical Essays. The texts are presented in their entirety, except in the case of a few of the lengthier ones, from which Sontag has chosen substantial key sections. All the selections are eloquently translated, and Sontag’s introductory essay - itself an important contribution to Barthes studies - stands as a definitive evaluation and summation of the author and his work.
(This book brings together the great majority of Barthes’s...)
This book brings together the great majority of Barthes’s interviews that originally appeared in French in Le Figaro Littéraire, Cahiers du Cinéma, France-Observateur, L'Express, and elsewhere. Barthes replied to questions - on the cinema, on his own works, on fashion, writing, and criticism - in his unique voice; here we have Barthes in conversation, speaking directly, with all his individuality. These interviews provide an insight into the rich, probing intelligence of one of the great and influential minds of our time.
The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art, and Representation
(These late essays of Roland Barthes's are concerned with ...)
These late essays of Roland Barthes's are concerned with the visible and the audible, and here the preoccupations are particularly intense and rewarding, in part because Barthes was himself, by predilection, an artist and a musician, and in part because he was of two minds about the very possibility of attaching to art and to music a written text, a criticism. These late essays of Roland Barthes's are concerned with the visible and the audible, and here the preoccupations are particularly intense and rewarding, in part because Barthes was himself, by predilection, an artist and a musician, and in part because he was of two minds about the very possibility of attaching to art and to music a written text, a criticism.
(Extended essays on such writers as Chateaubriand, La Roch...)
Extended essays on such writers as Chateaubriand, La Rochefoucauld, Flaubert, and Proust constitute a meditation on the relation between literature and history and reflect Barthes's continuing interest in what he calls the responsibility of form.
(The essays collected in Incidents, originally published i...)
The essays collected in Incidents, originally published in French shortly after Barthes’ death, provide a unique insight into the author’s life, his personal struggles, and his delights. Though Barthes questioned the act of keeping a journal with the aim of having it published, he decided to undertake a diary-like experiment in four parts. The first, which gives the collection its title, is a revealing personal account of his time living in Morocco. The second, "The Light of the Southwest," is an ode to Barthes’ favorite region in France, while in "At Le Palace Tonight," Barthes describes a vibrant Paris nightspot. Finally, the journal entries of "Evenings in Paris" reveal Barthes as an older gay man, struggling with his desire for young lovers.
The Neutral: Lecture Course at the College de France
(The Neutral (le neutre), as Barthes describes it, escapes...)
The Neutral (le neutre), as Barthes describes it, escapes or undoes the paradigmatic binary oppositions that structure and produce meaning in Western thought and discourse. These binaries are found in all aspects of human society ranging from language to sexuality to politics. For Barthes, the attempt to deconstruct or escape from these binaries has profound ethical, philosophical, and linguistic implications.
The Neutral is comprised of the prewritten texts from which Barthes lectured and centers around 23 "figures," also referred to as "traits" or "twinklings," that are possible embodiments of the Neutral (sleep, silence, tact, etc.) or of the anti-Neutral (anger, arrogance, conflict, etc.). His lectures draw on a diverse set of authors and intellectual traditions, including Lao-tzu, Tolstoy, German mysticism, classical philosophy, Rousseau, Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin, and John Cage. Barthes's idiosyncratic approach to his subjects gives the lectures a playful, personal, and even joyous quality that enhances his rich insights.
(Roland Barthes, widely regarded as one of the most subtle...)
Roland Barthes, widely regarded as one of the most subtle and perceptive critics of the 20th Century, was particularly fascinated by fashion and clothing. The Language of Fashion brings together all Barthes' untranslated writings on fashion. The Language of Fashion presents a set of remarkable essays, revealing the breadth and insight of Barthes' long engagement with the history of clothes. The essays range from closely argued essays laying down the foundations for structural and semiological analysis of clothing to a critical analysis of the significance of gemstones and jewellery, from an exploration of how the contrasting styles of Courrges and Chanel replayed the clash between ancient and modern to a discussion of the meaning of hippy style in Morocco, and from the nature of desire to the role of the dandy and colour in fashion. Constantly questioning, always changing, Barthes' ideas about clothes and fashion remain to provoke another generation of readers seeking to understand not only the culture of fashion but the fashion of culture.
(A little-known gem, the text of Barthes’s What Is Sport? ...)
A little-known gem, the text of Barthes’s What Is Sport? was never reprinted in the Seuil editions of his Complete Works - neither the three-volume version nor the later five-volume edition. It is published here in a graceful and faithful English translation by Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Howard. Originally commissioned by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation as the text for a documentary film directed by Hubert Aquin, What Is Sport? was written three years after the publication of Barthes’s Mythologies (1957) and bears considerable resemblance to that work. Some of Barthes’s best writing seems to have been inspired by popular culture.
(The day after his mother's death in October 1977, Roland ...)
The day after his mother's death in October 1977, Roland Barthes began a diary of mourning. For nearly two years, the legendary French theorist wrote about a solitude new to him; about the ebb and flow of sadness; about the slow pace of mourning, and life reclaimed through writing. Named a Top 10 Book of 2010 by The New York Times and one of the Best Books of 2010 by Slate and The Times Literary Supplement, Mourning Diary is a major discovery in Roland Barthes's work: a skeleton key to the themes he tackled throughout his life, as well as a unique study of grief - intimate, deeply moving, and universal.
The Preparation of the Novel: Lecture Courses and Seminars at the Collège de France
(Completed just weeks before his death, the lectures in th...)
Completed just weeks before his death, the lectures in this volume mark a critical juncture in the career of Roland Barthes, in which he declared the intention, deeply felt, to write a novel. Unfolding over the course of two years, Barthes engaged in a unique pedagogical experiment: he combined teaching and writing to "simulate" the trial of novel-writing, exploring every step of the creative process along the way. Barthes's lectures move from the desire to write to the actual decision-making, planning, and material act of producing a novel. He meets the difficulty of transitioning from short, concise notations (exemplified by his favorite literary form, haiku) to longer, uninterrupted flows of narrative, and he encounters a number of setbacks. Barthes takes solace in a diverse group of writers, including Dante, whose La Vita Nuova was similarly inspired by the death of a loved one, and he turns to classical philosophy, Taoism, and the works of François-René Chateaubriand, Gustave Flaubert, Franz Kafka, and Marcel Proust. This book uniquely includes eight elliptical plans for Barthes's unwritten novel, which he titled Vita Nova, and lecture notes that sketch the critic's views on photography. Following on The Neutral: Lecture Course at the Collège de France (1977-1978) and a third forthcoming collection of Barthes lectures, this volume provides an intensely personal account of the labor and love of writing.
Roland Barthes was a French essayist and social and literary critic. His writings on semiotics, the formal study of symbols and signs pioneered by Ferdinand de Saussure, helped establish structuralism and the New Criticism as leading intellectual movements.
Background
Roland Gérard Barthes was born on November 12, 1915, in Cherbourg-Octeville, Cherbourg-en-Cotentin, France to the family of naval officer Louis Barthes and Henriette Binger. His father died in World War I and Barthes was raised by his mother, his aunt, and grandmother in the village of Urt and the city of Bayonne. His maternal grandfather was the explorer Louis-Gustave Binger, who had become governor of the colonies, and his grandmother, Noémi, was widely respected in the Paris intellectual circles.
Education
Roland Barthes attended Lycée Montaigne and Lycée Louis-le-Grand. Barthes studied at the University of Paris, where he took a degree in classical letters in 1939. He also obtained his diplôme d'études supérieures in 1941 with a thesis on Greek tragedy. In 1943, he obtained the certificate in grammar and philology of classical languages, which enabled him to transform his license into a teaching license. His life from 1939 through 1948 was largely spent obtaining a license in grammar and philology, publishing his first papers, taking part in a little pre-medical study and continuing to struggle with his health.
In 1948, Roland Barthes returned to purely academic work, gaining numerous short-term positions at institutes in France, Romania, and Egypt. During this time he contributed to the leftist Parisian newspaper Combat, out of which grew his first full-length work Writing Degree Zero (1953). In 1952 Barthes was able to settle at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique where he studied lexicology and sociology. During his seven-year period there he began writing bimonthly installments for Les Lettres Nouvelles, a popular series of essays that dismantled myths of popular culture (later gathered in the Mythologies collection published in 1957).
Barthes spent the early 1960s exploring the fields of semiology and structuralism, chairing various faculty positions around France, and continuing to produce more full-length studies. Many of his works were too discursive to the traditional academic view of literary theory. His unorthodox style led to a conflict with another French thinker, Raymond Picard, who attacked New Criticism (an ill-fitting label for Barthes) as obscure and disrespectful to the culture’s literary roots. Barthes' rebuttal in Criticism and Truth (1966), would accuse the old, bourgeois criticism of being unconcerned with the finer points of language and capable of selective ignorance towards challenging concepts of theories like Marxism.
By the late 1960s, Barthes had established a reputation. He traveled to America and Japan, delivering a presentation at Johns Hopkins University, and producing his most well-known work, the 1968 essay "The Death of the Author," which, in light of the growing influence of Jacques Derrida's deconstructionist theory, would prove to be a transitional piece that would investigate the logical ends of structuralist thought. Barthes continued to contribute with Philippe Sollers to the avant-garde literary magazine Tel Quel. In 1970 Barthes produced what many consider to be his most prodigious work, the dense critical reading of Honore de Balzac’s Sarrasine entitled S/Z. Throughout the 1970s Barthes would continue to develop his literary criticism, pursuing new ideals of textuality and novelistic neutrality through his works.
In 1977, Roland Barthes was elected to a rather lauded position as chair of Sémiologie Littéraire at the Collège de France. Sadly, the same year his mother passed away. The loss of the woman who had raised and cared for him was a terrible blow to Barthes. He had often written works of theory on photography, dating back as far as his individual works in Mythologies. His last great work was Camera Lucida. The text, which was a meditation on an old picture of his mother, was half theory of communication through the photographic medium and half act of grief to his mother’s memory. Roland Barthes would die less than three years after his mother. On February 25, 1980, after leaving a lunch party held by François Mitterrand (who would be elected president of France the next year), Barthes was struck by a laundry truck while walking home through the streets of Paris. He succumbed to his injuries a month later, passing away on March 26.
The basis of Barthes' thought, although not expressly stated, appears to be thorough-going atheism. The "Death of the Author" is a symbolic statement about the death of the author of all stable, fixed meanings, God.
Politics
In his earlier, Marxist period, Barthes critiqued what he took to be a fallacy of bourgeoius culture, the capitalist appropriation of signs to create the illusion of stable, fixed meaning. In the transitional Death of the Author he begins to leave behind the illusions of Marxism, rejecting the notion of author as a stable location for meaning, and thus relativizing all meaning (including that of Marxism as well).
Views
Barthes' earliest work was very much a reaction to the trend of existentialist philosophy that was prominent during the 1940s, specifically towards the leading figure of existentialism, Jean-Paul Sartre. In his work What Is Literature? (1947) Sartre finds himself disenchanted with both established forms of writing, and more experimental avant-garde forms, which he feels alienates readers. Barthes’ response is to determine what can be considered unique and original in writing. In Writing Degree Zero (1953) Barthes, in keeping with the formalism of his day argues that language and style are both matters that appeal to conventions, and are thus not purely creative. Rather, form, or what Barthes calls ‘writing,’ the specific way an individual chooses to manipulate conventions of style for a desired effect, is the unique and creative act. One’s form is vulnerable to becoming a convention once it has been made available to the public. This means that creativity in writing is an ongoing process of continual change and reaction. He saw Albert Camus’s The Stranger as an ideal example of this notion for its lack of any embellishment or flare.
Barthes' many monthly contributions that made up Mythologies (1957) would often interrogate pieces of cultural material to expose how bourgeois society used them to assert its values upon others. For instance, the portrayal of wine in French society as a robust and healthy habit would be a bourgeois ideal perception contradicted by certain realities (i.e. that wine can be unhealthy and inebriating). He found semiology, the study of signs, useful in these interrogations. Barthes explained that these bourgeois cultural myths were second-order signs or significations. A picture of a full, dark bottle is a signifier relating to a signified: a fermented, alcoholic beverage - wine. However, the bourgeois take this signified and apply their own emphasis to it, making ‘wine’ a new signifier, this time relating to a new signified: the idea of healthy, robust, relaxing wine. Motivations for such manipulations vary from a desire to sell products to a simple desire to maintain the status quo. These insights brought Barthes very much in line with similar Marxist theory.
In The Fashion System Barthes showed how this adulteration of signs could easily be translated into words. In this work, he explained how in the fashion world any word could be loaded with idealistic bourgeois emphasis. Thus, if popular fashion says that a ‘blouse’ is ideal for a certain situation or ensemble, this idea is immediately naturalized and accepted as truth, even though the actual sign could just as easily be interchangeable with ‘skirt,’ ‘vest’ or any number of combinations. In the end, Barthes Mythologies became absorbed itself into bourgeois culture, as he found many third parties asking him to comment on a certain cultural phenomenon, being interested in his control over his readership. This turn of events caused him to question the overall utility of demystifying culture for the masses, thinking it might be a fruitless attempt, and drove him deeper in his search for individualistic meaning in art.
Barthes' work with structuralism began to flourish around the same time as his debates with Picard, making the investigation of structure one intended to reveal the importance of language in writing he felt was overlooked by old criticism. Barthes "Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives" is concerned with examining the correspondence between the structures of narrative with that of a sentence, thus allowing Barthes to view narrative along linguistic lines. Barthes split work into three hierarchical levels: ‘functions,’ ‘actions,’ and ‘narrative.’ ‘Functions’ are the elementary pieces of a work, such as a single descriptive word that can be used to identify a character. That character would be an ‘action’ and consequently be one of the elements that make up the narrative. Barthes was able to use these distinctions to evaluate how certain key ‘functions’ work in forming characters. For example keywords like ‘dark,’ ‘mysterious,’ and ‘odd,’ when integrated together, formulate a specific kind of character or ‘action.’ By breaking down the work into such fundamental distinctions Barthes was able to judge the degree of realism given functions have in forming their actions and consequently with what authenticity a narrative can be said to reflect on reality. Thus, his structuralist theorizing became another exercise in his ongoing attempts to dissect and expose the misleading mechanisms of bourgeois culture.
While Barthes found structuralism to be a useful tool and believed that the discourse of literature could be formalized, he didn’t believe it could become a strict scientific endeavor. In the late 1960s, radical movements were taking place in literary criticism. The post-structuralist movement and the deconstructionism of Jacques Derrida were testing the bounds of such structuralist thinking as Barthes indulged in. Derrida identified the flaw of structuralism as its reliance on a transcendental signified; a symbol of constant, universal meaning would be essential as an orienting point in such a closed-off system. That is to say, without some regular standard of measurement, a system of criticism that references nothing outside of the actual work itself could never work. But since there are no symbols of constant and universal significance, the entire premise of structuralism as a means of evaluating writing (or anything) is hollow.
Such groundbreaking thought led Barthes to consider the limitations of not just signs and symbols, but also Western culture’s dependency on beliefs of constancy and ultimate standards. He traveled to Japan in 1966 where he wrote Empire of Signs (published in 1970), a meditation of Japanese culture’s contentment in the absence of a search for a transcendental signified. He notes that in Japan there is no emphasis on a great focus point by which to judge all other standards, describing the center of Tokyo, the Emperor’s Palace, as not a great overbearing entity, but a silent and non-descriptive presence, avoided and unconsidered. As such, Barthes reflects on the ability of signs in Japan to exist for their own merit, retaining only the significance naturally imbued by their signifiers. Such a society contrasts greatly to the one he dissected in Mythologies, which was revealed to be always asserting a greater, more complex significance on top of the natural one.
In the wake of this trip Barthes wrote what is largely considered to be his best-known work, the essay "The Death of the Author" (1968). The notion that criticism should refer back to an author or authorial intention had already been posited by Formalism and New Criticism. But Barthes went further, suggesting that the notion of the author imposes an ultimate meaning of the text. By imagining an ultimate intended meaning of a piece of literature one could infer an ultimate explanation for it. But Barthes points out that the great proliferation of meaning in language and the unknowable state of the author’s mind makes any such ultimate realization impossible. As such, the whole notion of the ‘knowable text’ acts as little more than another delusion of Western bourgeois culture. Indeed, the idea of giving a book or poem an ultimate end coincides with the notion of making it consumable, something that can be used up and replaced in a capitalist market. "The Death of the Author" is sometimes considered to be a post-structuralist work since it moves past the conventions of trying to quantify literature, but others see it as more of a transitional phase for Barthes in his continuing effort to find significance in culture outside of bourgeois norms.
Since there can be no originating anchor of meaning in the author's intentions, Barthes considers what other sources of meaning or significance can be found in the literature. He concludes that since meaning can’t come from the author, it must be actively created by the reader through a process of textual analysis. In his ambitious S/Z (1970), Barthes applies this notion in a massive analysis of one of Balzac's short stories, Sarrasine. The end result was a reading that established five major codes for determining various kinds of signification, with numerous "lexias" (a term created by Barthes to describe elements that can take on various meanings for various readers) throughout the text. The codes led him to define the story as having a capacity for plurality of meaning, limited by its dependence upon strictly sequential elements (such as a definite timeline that has to be followed by the reader and thus restricts their freedom of analysis). From this project, Barthes concludes that an ideal text is one that is reversible, or open to the greatest variety of independent interpretations and not restrictive in meaning. A text can be reversible by avoiding the restrictive devices from which Sarrasine suffered, such as strict timelines and exact definitions of events. He describes this as the difference between the writerly text, in which the reader is active in a creative process, and a readerly text in which they are restricted to just reading. The project helped Barthes identify what it has he sought in literature: an openness for interpretation.
In the late 1970s, Barthes was increasingly concerned with the conflict of two types of language: that of popular culture, which he saw as limiting and pigeonholing in its titles and descriptions, and neutral, which he saw as open and noncommittal. He called these two conflicting modes the Doxa and the Para-doxa.
Quotations:
"Myth is depoliticized speech."
"By reducing any quality to quantity, myth economizes intelligence: it understands reality more cheaply."
"What the public wants is the image of passion, not passion itself."
"The Text is not a definitive object."
"A work has two levels of meaning: literal and concealed."
"The Text is plural. Which is not simply to say that it has several meanings, but that it accomplishes the very plural of meaning: an irreducible (and not merely an acceptable) plural. The Text is not a co-existence of meanings but a passage, an overcrossing; thus it answers not to an interpretation, even a liberal one, but to an explosion, a dissemination."
"Whereas the work is understood to be traceable to a source (through a process of derivation or "filiation"), the Text is without a source - the "author" a mere "guest" at the reading of the Text."
Personality
Barthes was a contradictory figure. He combined a Protestant passion for order and routine with nights in Tunisian brothels and Parisian gay bars. He was a radical critic of the fashion system who liked classic English clothes, a Marxist who recoiled from '68, a champion of hedonism who never publicly proclaimed his homosexuality. But whatever the antinomies in his life, Barthes remained, it is clear, an enormously alluring and sympathetic. Friends insisted on his loyalty and his kindness: he suffered from an inability to say no to any request made to him, writing prefaces to books he evidently had not read.
Physical Characteristics:
Barthes was plagued by ill health throughout the period of his university studies, suffering from tuberculosis that often had to be treated in the isolation of sanatoria. His repeated physical breakdowns interfered with the progress of his academic career, affecting his studies and his ability to take certain qualifying examinations. However, it also kept him out of military service during World War II.
Quotes from others about the person
"He [Barthes] was an ambiguous character, on the side of order and also on the side of difference at the same time." - Julia Kristeva, a Bulgarian-French philosopher
"Barthes's discovery and articulation of the "new" liberatory category of perception and deciphering, semiotic-mythology, belongs to the praxis of his heroic mythologist, alone. This unfortunate theoretical strategy makes the articulation of a coalitional consciousness in social struggle impossible to imagine or enact. His terminologies appropriate the technologies of the oppressed for use by academic classes." - Chela Sandoval, an American theorist of postcolonial feminism and third world feminism
Interests
photography
Philosophers & Thinkers
Ferdinand de Saussure
Writers
Julia Kristeva
Music & Bands
Robert Schumann, Franz Peter Schubert, Gabriel Fauré, Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel
Connections
Bathes was a gay. He never married or had any children.