Roland Barthes (1915–1980)

A provocative and exhilarating collection of essays, at once offering insights into structuralist semiotics and rushing in a paradoxical call for alternative ways of assessing signs, of displacing meaning. A gateway into the experimental potential of the essay, and "non-fiction" in general. Enjoyed the way in which Barthes constantly refutes and contradicts himself, sometimes in the same essay, to dilute the mythical authority of the intellectual figure and to reinforce in the reader a show more critical sensitivity. Definitely a challenging read, even more so with the references to Marxism and especially (mainly Lacanian) psychoanalysis. Really want to say that this is a life-changing book, as that is how I feel right now. I guess we'll see. show less

Well, it wouldn't be a dull, conventional memoir, would it? Writing about himself, Barthes limits the hard biographical facts to a few briefly annotated family photos from his childhood in Bayonne and a two-page CV, and in between them he gives us a couple of hundred index-card sized fragments talking about his "real" life, which of course revolves around ideas and writings rather than boring things like dates, places and people. None of the fragments is much more than a paragraph or two show more long, with the only slightly longer pieces being a catalogue of books he might have written but didn't, and a discussion (you can see where this is going...) of the pleasures of the very short form.

In between times, we get cartoons, photos, sample exam questions, and a couple of examples of Barthes's painting — my favourite was an abstract doodle in the middle of a sheet of Sorbonne notepaper, titled "Gaspillage" (wasting paper). As if that wasn't enough, we also get the sheet music for a song he composed — I haven't tried to play that. He was obviously the Richard Feynman of semiotics.

You probably need at least a little bit of tolerance for French semioticians to enjoy this, and it's obviously more of a bedside book to dip into than a book you should read in one go, but if you like that sort of thing... show less

A Barthes lo de leer le causa un intenso placer, erótico de hecho, una quemadura en la entrepierna que al parecer solo sofoca escribiendo impenetrables tratados sobre lo orgásmico de la lectura. Respeto los fetiches de los intelectuales franceses, y no me voy a involucrar en un kink-shaming de algo tan inocuo como esto: hay gente que deriva inmenso gozo de explotar las burbujas de plástico de los envoltorios de paquetes frágiles, y no por ello creo que haya que considerarlos bichos show more raros. Y admiro, de hecho, la capacidad tántrica de Barthes de prolongar su clímax durante 70 páginas: de no haber sido académico podría haberse dedicado perfectamente a la mamporrería.

A lo largo del texto, Barthes habla del vínculo entre autor y lector, y ojalá realmente se estableciera esa unión tan real y física, porque si pudiera atravesar las páginas y darle un puñetazo al amigo Roland, un puñetazo metafísico pero en el cielo de la boca, lo haría. Me importa tres pimientos si pretendía que este fuera un texto de placer o de gozo. Supongo que de gozo, que él identifica con el shock, el abandono del lector como sujeto pasivo, y oh, me hace querer ser de todo menos pasivo, desde luego. Pero de ser gozo lo que pretende, ¿no sería imposible hablar de esta obra, según él? Porque yo me veo hablando, vaya si me veo. Lo que es es una jerigonza insufrible, que cuando deja vislumbrar tímidos rayos de inteligibilidad los vuelve a ocultar con alguna palabra en griego que le parecía bien utilizar en ese momento.

¿Acaso he caído en la red de Barthes? ¿Era esto lo que pretendías, provocar mi ira? Porque yendo aún por la mitad de este tratado no se me ocurre cómo vas a ser capaz de llevarme al huerto antes de la última página. Miedo me da su "Le discours amoureux" como este "Le plaisir du texte" sea representativo de sus habilidades seductoras. Si no es a mí, ¿a quién está intentando camelar? Tendrá que ser a alguien que comprenda su intrincada prosa, y no se me ocurre que pueda suceder tal cosa. Veo a Barthes, beodo, gritando al oído sus teorías literarias a algún pobre muchacho aburrido en alguna boîte: "LA SUBVERSIÓN DEBE PRODUCIR SU PROPIO CLAROSCURO, ¿SABES?", exclama, como si algo de eso tuviera algún sentido con menos de cuatro litros de alcohol en sangre, mientras su oyente reprime su instinto de reventarle una botella en la frente.

Seguramente Barthes se opondría rotundamente a la idea de que es posible comunicar este tipo de conceptos sin recurrir a la glosolalia, porque si no imagino que lo habría intentado. Me pregunto qué opinaría de esta llamémosle reseña, si le produciría placer o gozo o ninguna de las dos. En cualquier caso, dudo que le entendiera. show less

This extensive study of love has disemboweled me in every sense of the word. From Goethe's Werther, Freud's Interpretation of Dreams, Nietzsche's The Gay Science, Plato's Symposium, Proust's In Search of Lost Time to countless conversations with friends together with personal experiences Barthes painstakingly dissects love beyond the philosophical, psychological, and emotional. A Lover's Discourse bridges the resolute interstices between the head and the heart; bothering gestures and show more impressions precipitating contradictions ** "Perpetual monologues apropos of a loved being, which are neither corrected nor nourished by that being, lead to erroneous notions concerning mutual relations, and make us strangers to each other when we meet again, so that we find things different from what, without realizing it, we imagined." (p159); the inane and the insane; the overthinking and overwhelming; the Image-repertoire.

"Love is neither dialectical nor reformist."

For most of us skeptic and insecure of ourselves in love, Barthes offers a place of solace and reflection in A Lover's Discourse. A heavy book of undeniable intensity, its secret is not so much in completely understanding the text but associating it with your own feelings and experiences of love and almost love. Indeed, love, although unfathomable, is a universal feeling. For the heartbroken, the confused, the frustrated, the mad, ** "The lover's solitude is not a solitude of person (love confides, speaks, tells itself), it is a solitude of system: I am alone in making a system out of it (perhaps because I am ceaselessly flung back on the solipsism of my discourse). A difficult paradox: I can be understood by everyone (love comes from books, its dialect is a common one), but I can be heard (received "prophetically") only by subjects who have exactly and right now the same language I have." (p212). All the naïvety, immaturity, ambiguity, and yearning: acknowledged and, to an extent, assuringly ordinary. It's all here, makes you feel better, relieved. And the drama in love cannot be separated from itself — love kills, can kill. Further, there is absolutely so much to take in from this. I unexpectedly gone through this quickly there is a weight on my chest as I look back on past love affairs with a different set of eyes. How much we have talked and wrote and depicted love that at times it seemed already overused, overhyped, yet it still interests, possesses, and arouses. Barthes strikes and alters. Highsmith put it memorably so: "Love was supposed to be a kind of blissful insanity." show less