In La Paresse, Jean-Luc Godard’s fifteen-minute contribution to the film Sept péchés capitaux, Eddie Constantine plays a B-movie actor who turns down an offer of sex from an ambitious young starlet.² He refuses, he tells her, because he cannot bear the thought of having to get dressed all over again afterward. In a note on this short film, Alain Bergala observes: “Eddie Constantine marvelously embodies that very special state given by an immense lassitude, an apparent inertia which is in fact a state of great porosity to the strangeness of the world, a mixture of torpor, of loss of reality...

I begin with two photographs, both of them family snapshots of what are evidently a young mother and her little boy in a country setting (Figures 2.1 and 2.2). Neither is what we would call a “good” (i.e., well-composed) picture. True, the one is more “expressive,” the anxious little boy clinging somewhat fearfully to his mother (Figure 2.1), whereas the impassive woman and child look straight ahead at the camera (Figure 2.2).

The second pair of photographs are class pictures (Figures 2.3 and 2.4): The first, an end-of-the-year group photo of a smiling high-school class with their nonsmiling male teacher...

Culture, states Roland Barthes, is “a contract arrived at between creators and consumers” (CL, 28). Contract implies expectations between its participants; expectations, however, limit and direct interpretation and response and act, so to speak, as a filter. Through his ruminations on the photograph in Camera Lucida, Barthes ruptures the “filter of culture.” Specifically, he breaches the limits of semiology–the science of the sign that was his principal methodology in the 1950s and 1960s. As a contract sustained by culture, semiology may encompass and elucidate a large realm of human knowledge and experience, but ultimately Barthes understands that it remains...

The last decade has witnessed a veritable avalanche of work around the recently dead. Not just Barthes but Foucault and Lacan look set to be buried underneath a mudslide of biographies and studies. How is one to account for this mountain of print, a mountain for which I can think of no historical parallels? The most cynical reason is the professional. The injunction to publish or perish is so deeply engraved within the academic system through annual salary review and research selectivity that there is now no alternative; we perish by publishing. But when publishing has become the vacuous activity...

Searching for a name to give to the excessive, exorbitant meaning he senses in certain Eisenstein stills, Roland Barthes comes upon the Latin word obtusus, or perhaps more accurately, it comes to him. He explains why it seems just right:

Obtusus means blunted, rounded [ ... ] An obtuse angle is greater than a right angle: an obtuse angle of 100°, says the dictionary; the third meaning, too, seems to me greater than the pure perpendicular, the trenchant, legal upright of the narrative [ .... ] I even accept, for this obtuse meaning, the word’s pejorative connotation: the obtuse meaning...

In the process of reading and analyzing Barthes’s last book, Camera Lucida, I kept experiencing a forking of my sensibilities. On the one hand I was taken by the clever and convincing elucidation of pictures scattered throughout the text, yet on the other hand, I kept resisting the alarmingly reductive “readings” of the photographs, as well as the phenomenological leap of faith I felt invited to perform. But before I elaborate, let me reveal something about my own attitude toward photographs. I do so encouraged by the subtitle to the English-language translation of Camera Lucida: “Reflections on Photography.”

I remember...

This chapter can be located at an intersection of theory, at a place where Roland Barthes’s rhetorical analysis of the image meets a method of narratology he first set forth in “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives.” In his earlier work, Barthes spoke primarily about the cultural codes that inform our reading of individual images, suggesting only in passing that images arranged in sequence, like those of a magazine photo-essay, could have a cumulative effect. “Naturally,” he said, “several photographs can come together to form a sequence [ . . . ]; the signifier of connotation is then no...

A myth, as Roland Barthes insists, is a repetition of images. It is also a message and a system of communication.¹ Which message, however, can be transmitted by a particular photograph? And when and how does photography enter the mythological realm?

In Camera Lucida, Barthes tries to decipher this image’s message in sketching an archaeology of sight that reaches beyond his native French. Two Latin words serve this task. The term studium is used as the “application to a thing, taste for someone, a kind of general, enthusiastic commitment” (CL, 26). This contextual application is punctured and disturbed by another...

In the photo section of Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, Barthes reproduces a nineteenth-century IOU note from his paternal grandfather to his great-great-uncle. In the comment he places beneath this, Barthes contrasts the traditional function of writing as the guarantee of a debt, contract, or representation with its more recent departure toward “text” and “perversion.” On the opposite page stands a representation of the “family romance” to which Barthes owes his race and class: a posed family photo of the same grandfather as a young man, surrounded by Barthes’s great-grandparents and his great-uncle and great-aunt. Here the comment specifies Barthes’s...

From the provocative brilliance of Writing Degree Zero to the seductive and moving novelistic essay that looks back at us through Camera Lucida, Barthes’s writing articulates the relations between language and desire. At every turn, the voice of Proust can be heard as Barthes intricately unfolds the origami-style forms of these relations. The often-proclaimed principle of lightness and insignificance that Barthes calls légèreté leads him to stage the intricacies of language and desire as a series of effects: légèreté is closely linked to the voluptuous “luxury of language.” Meaning is conceptualized as the object of a search through the effects...

“I have a disease. I see language” begins a memorable fragment of Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes. Cast in the first-person singular, the statement borders on confession understood as the admission of a fault, wrong-doing, or sin. Use of the verb devoir in the conditional tense marks the force of a convention or norm that the narrator is presumably unable to meet: “What I should simply hear, a strange pulsion—perverse in that in it desire mistakes its object, reveals it to me as a ‘vision,’ analogous (all allowances made) to the one Scipio had in his dream of the...

For a long time, French grade crossings have greeted road travelers with this warning: Attention! Un train peut en cacher un autre. (Caution! One train can hide another approaching train.) It is no less true of titles, and mine might well hide another. In fact, the first draft of this chapter announced “Barthes and Marx.” No matter how slight, the distortion had me worried; somehow, it sounded too much like David and Goliath. Thanks to Jean-Michel Rabaté’s diligence, the original with has been restored, only to elicit new concerns that the chosen conjunction might be misleading. It is not my...

In his preface to The Physiology of Taste, Barthes analyzes Brillat-Savarin’s comments on the physiological effects of champagne: first, champagne stimulates you; then, after a while, it makes you drowsy. This example allows Barthes to posit what he calls “one of Modernity’s most important formal categories: the gradation of phenomena.”¹ This category is so important for Barthes that he does not hesitate to coin a new word to designate it: “Let us call this ‘indenting,’ this scale of champagne a ‘bathmology.’ Bathmology would be the field of discourses in so far as degrees come into play.”

One finds a similar...

I have read many different Roland Bartheses; we all have known numerous Roland Bartheses—in succession and perhaps simultaneously. Once one caught up with him, he had already settled, or paused, somewhere else. Raymond Picard, for instance, at the time of the notorious controversy that brought such publicity to the so-called Nouvelle Critique around 1965, blamed Barthes for speaking in On Racine of the author in spite of his denials, because Barthes considered that all Racine’s tragedies constituted a single comprehensive work whose deep, unconscious, determining structure or organization was to be discovered and established.¹ Picard was not altogether wrong:...

Neither an art historian nor an art critic, Roland Barthes writes so rarely on painting that when he does we anticipate his commitment to something else. This is the case when we discover that Barthes wrote on the art of Cy Twombly—not once but twice. The question immediately presents itself: what urgency or scintillation does this art possess for him, a littérateur of cultural scope? Answers may strike us with peculiarly vivid force if we regard Barthes’s literary interpretation of Twombly from the perspective of art history, because from the vantage of art history the semiology Barthes pursues is...

This is a story that we should be able to tell in the historical past, the simple past (French passé simple), the tense that has been so sharply analyzed and demystified by Barthes in Writing Degree Zero and that he himself used as the basis of the subtle rhetoric of Camera Lucida. The story translated into English, and in a much shortened version, would run more or less like this:

During the 1960s, traditional philology and literary history, which prevailed in the field of literary studies in spite of existentialist inroads, were superseded by structuralism, which was then replaced by...

In a 1977 interview for the Nouvel Obseroateur, Bernard-Henry Lévy asked Roland Barthes about his much criticized acceptance of a lunch invitation from Giscard d’Estaing. Barthes began his reply, “[A] myth-hunter, as you know, must hunt everywhere” (GV, 269). Barthes, as semiologist, linguist, cultural critic, and literary theorist, disseminated himself in the landscape of myths, left and right, high and low. I argue that texts he wrote in the late 1960s and 1970s—The Empire of Signs, the preface to Pierre Loti’s 1879 Aziyadé, Alors la Chine?,¹ and “Incidents”—remythify, in however Barthesian a manner, the difficulties of travel and...

Roland Barthes’s S/Z has a long-standing reputation, amply confirmed by its continuous circulation ever since its appearance about a quarter of a century ago. Persistence of circulation is, however, a complex and often problematic criterion, as Barthes knew very well and as the opening elaborations of S/Z suggest. The special position of the book, however, as marking—and, in many ways, enacting—a transition from structuralism to poststructuralism has, by now, been well established and productively used in many recent discussions.¹ S/Z appears to have successfully entered the post-poststructuralist and post-postmodernist landscape as well. A number of recent works explore...

I really shouldn’t have been doing it. I had a book to write, poems that needed care and breaking apart and confidence, I wasn’t getting much exercise, and of course there was real life, family, teaching, the out-of-date inspection sticker on the Honda . . . Anyway, in spite of all this, and because of it too, no doubt, I found myself in front of the tube, in a curious state of wakeful paralysis. Never had the remote control felt more present, not exactly flesh of my flesh, but anticipatory, fateful, quirky. I noticed that it had many more buttons...