Product Description: The most famous name in French literary circles from the late 1950s till his death in 1981, Roland Barthes maintained a contradictory rapport with the cinema. As a cultural critic, he warned of its surreptitious ability to lead the enthralled spectator toward an acceptance of a pre-given world...read more

Product Description: Roland Barthes was one of France's leading literary critics and cultural commentators who died in 1980. This work is a kind of autobiography, both personal and theoretical, giving an account of his tastes, his childhood, his education, his passions and regrets which have gone into his work...read more

Product Description: In 1974 Roland Barthes travelled in China as part of a small delegation of distinguished French philosophers and literary figures. They arrived in China just as the last stage of the Cultural Revolution was getting underway - the campaign to criticize Lin Biao and Confucius...read more

Product Description: In these interviews, given between 1962 and 1980, Barthes speaks about the development of his thought, explaining why and how he wrote his many books, paying tributes to philosophers, linguists, novelists, poets, painters and film-makers who have inspired him, as well as discussing how his life became dedicated to an exploration of semiotics...read more

The late French literary and social critic's intimate journal, first published after his death and translated into English here for the first time, and three other autobiographical texts in which he explores his homosexuality are combined in one volume. Original. (view table of contents)

In Sade/Fourier/Loyola, eminent literary theorist Roland Barthes offers a fascinating treatise on the nature of philosophical creation. Barthes examines the parallel impulses of Loyola, the Jesuit saint, Sade, the renowned and sometimes pornographic libertine philosopher, and Fourier, the utopian theorist. All three, he makes clear, have been founders of languages--Loyola, the language of divine address; Sade, the language of erotic freedom; and Fourier, the language of social perfection and happiness. Each language is an all-enveloping system, a "secondary language" that isolates the adherent from the conventional world. The object of this book, Barthes makes clear, is not to decipher the content of these respective works, but to consider Sade, Fourier, and Loyola as creators of text. "Here they are all three brought together, the evil writer, the great utopian, and the Jesuit saint. There is not intentional provocation in this assembling (were there provocation, it would rather consist in treating Sade, Fourier, and Loyola as though they had not had faith: in God, the Future, Nature), no transcendence (the sadist, the contestator, and the mystic are not redeemed by sadism, revolution, religion), and, I add of these studies, although first published (in part) seperately, was from the first conceived to join the others in one book: the book of Logothetes, founders of language."--from the Preface

Product Description: En cualquier intento de expresión podemos distinguir tres niveles: el nivel de la comunicación, el del significado, que permanece siempre en un plano simbólico, en el plano de los signos, y el nivel que R. Barthes llama de la significancia...read more

Product Description: Aggressively elegant, viscerally beautiful, Cy Twombly's work is, in the words of exhibition curator and contributing writer Julie Sylvester, "fundamentally subjective, truthful, and uncompromising." His work finds its most personal expression in his intimately sized drawings and paintings on paper...read more

Product Description: 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...read more