Roland barthes

Roland Barthes (12 November 1915 in Cherbourg - 26 March 1980 in Paris) was a French critic, literary theorist, semiotician and structuralist philosopher who was interested in and wrote about literary criticism., linguistics, philosophy of language, signs, symbols and photography.

Biography

His father died during military service in 1916 in a naval combat in the North Sea, so his orphanhood was a burden at first, although the state would later pay a pension for his studies. His early childhood was spent in Bayonne, and at the age of ten he moved to Paris, although in spite of this in the summers he returned to the house of his paternal grandparents. Her mother was Protestant, he lived with her until her death in 1977. Barthes completed his secondary studies at the Louis-le-Grand Institute, to later do classical philology at the Faculty of Letters at the University of Paris.

He had a first attack of tuberculosis in 1934, and he was cured until the following year in the Pyrenees. He graduated in Classical Letters (1939) and later in Grammar and Philology (1943), since he had to interrupt his activities in 1941 due to his illness, and then until 1947 he was in different French and Swiss clinics. He was very active in an Ancient Theater Group that he founded when he was a student.

Barthes was a French lecturer in Bucharest and Alexandria in the years 1948–1950. After World War II, between 1952 and 1959 he worked at the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) in Paris. Finally, he was appointed head of Research Works and then (1962), head of studies at the Escuela Práctica de Altos Estudios, an organization where he dedicated himself to developing a sociology of symbols, signs and representations. From this date his name began to grow thanks to his books, articles and teaching. His career culminated in his appointment to the College of France in 1977: see his Leçon of January 7.

Barthes died in the spring of 1980, after being run over by a van in the rue des Écoles, opposite the Sorbonne. His latest book La Chambre claire (Camera Lucida ), about photography, had come out a few days before.

The new critique

Barthes is part of the structuralist school, influenced by the linguists Ferdinand de Saussure, Émile Benveniste, and Jakobson as well as the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. He criticized the positivist concepts in literature that circulated in French educational centers in the 1950s. A part of Barthes's early work, although heterogeneous and often abstract, can be accessible with a methodical and concentrated reading; the concepts proposed for semiological analysis, at first coming from linguists such as those already mentioned and Hjelmslev and others, are drifting to a greater specificity that allows us to advance along the then little traveled path of semiotics, which he develops in his book Elements of Semiology.

His literary production underwent several evolutions: from Sartrean and Brechtian origins, he later developed a strictly semiological investigation, with a special interest in linguistics. For a time he was interested in the "textual" field: the literary work considered from various points of view, never unilaterally, and which implied either a philosophy of the subject of a psychoanalytic type or a philosophy of society of a Marxist or political type.. Roland Barthes considers that the intention of an author when writing a work is not the only valid meaning anchor from which a text can be interpreted. He believes that other sources of meaning and relevance can be found in literature. Since the meaning is not given by the author, it must be actively created by the reader through a process of textual analysis.

In 1953 he wrote his first essay, Le degré zero de l'écriture (The Zero Degree of Writing), it was followed by an original Michelet , and his Mythologies, which earned him a well-deserved reputation for his sociological insight. In 1963 he published a controversial Sur Racine (On Racine) and the following year appeared an excellent collection of Essais critiques (Critical Essays), which was translated into several languages. His brief work Critique et vérité ( Criticism and truth ) served to defend the new criticism, in 1966, against academic attacks. He then published two more technical books, Système de la mode (System of Fashion ) and S/Z , a reading of Balzac.

In S/Z, from 1970, he makes an extensive analysis of a short story, Honoré de Balzac's Sarrasine, where he tries to identify other sources of meaning and relevance. With his reading so open, he establishes five great codes that determine the types of meaning, and that can be found in a text through multiple lexias. These great codes led him to define that stories have the capacity to offer a plurality of meanings, although this is limited by other formal elements, such as the linear sequence of writing: being a definitive timeline, which must be followed by the reader, restricts his analytical and interpretive freedom. From this project he concludes that an ideal text should be reversible; that is, open to a great variety of different interpretations. A text can only be reversible by avoiding the restrictive artifacts that Sarrasine has, for example restrictive timelines, as well as exact event definitions. He describes it as the difference between a "writeable" text, in which the reader freely reinterprets and takes an active role in the creative process; and a "readable" text, in which these possibilities are restricted and are simply read texts. This project helped him identify what he was looking for in literature, the opening for multiple interpretations. His notion of writable texts is similar to the concept of hypertext, which will be developed later by other authors.

Barthes, writer

During the 1970s, Barthes radically renewed his literary criticism, appealing to Jacques Derrida, Philippe Sollers or Jacques Lacan and other philosophers and analysts. He sought each time, above all, the convergence between rigorous essay and his desire to be a writer, whose model had been André Gide from his youth.

The three authors chosen in Sade, Fourier, Loyola, 1971, in a text more in favor of a certain narrative neutrality, are followed by works such as L'Empire des signes (The Empire of Signs), 1971, the result of an almost sensory trip to Japan, Nouveaux essais critiques (New critical essays), 1972, and a year later his famous and succinct Le plaisir du texte (The pleasure of the text), where he clearly shows his new way of analysis, allowing subjectivity to enter.

In 1975, he took a major turn with his Roland Barthes, a rare and highly suggestive fragmentary autobiography in the form of anecdotes, small theorizations and aphorisms. This work was to a certain extent extended by his book on love speech ( Fragments d & # 39; un discours amoureux , 1977) which achieved such success that in his opinion it was paralyzing. But he continued with his courses at the College and eventually wrote his book on photography La chambre claire , from 1980.

After his death, a series of books of individual essays were published in the eighties, grouped thematically, which revealed the variety and high quality of his essays: El grano de la voz, interviews; The obvious and the obtuse, The semiological adventure and The whisper of language; In addition, Incidentes appeared, with very personal writings with an almost invisible border with literary creation.

All of his books have been translated into Spanish and other languages (and reprinted several times): in life he gave classes and lectures from Oxford to Harvard or Tokyo, in Latin America in Chile and in Mexico.

Barthes as image theorist

Roland Barthes began in the philosophy of the image analyzing cinema for the first time in 1960, trying to find a code, a structure within that representation of reality and later on he would try it with literature. Barthes was deeply influenced by linguistics and the philosophy of language when analyzing images (whether in a text or in a photograph, film, etc.), that is, he sees the image fully encoded, as if it were a message written in a visual language and all the elements of this image are signs. This way of analyzing an image is based on semiotics, a science that studies the signs in an image in a technical and cultural way.

It is in his text The photographic message (1961), published by Communications magazine, where he develops his own theory on the image, its analysis and the reading that the viewer gives of it. Barthes defends the codification of the image (as the basic communicative scheme says) by expanding the scheme. It divides the message into two parts: the denoted part, the one that has the raw message of the image, without a code, and the connoted part, that part that the sender consciously inserts to create a specific reaction in the receiver (the deceit of the images). In other words, his theory, purely semiotic, rejects the idea that there is a message in the image that can create different emotions when it comes into contact with the receptors that has not been previously placed in the image in question.

However, he makes a clear differentiation between journalistic photography and any other way of representing reality, since he considers that it lacks a code and therefore deception, but it is a message. Journalistic photography has structural autonomy and, in the eyes of Barthes, requires its own study.

Probably the most curious aspect of Barthes' facet as an image theorist is the evolution that exists between his two most important texts on the subject. If in The Photographic Message Barthes's theory moved between linguistics and semiotics, in Camera Lucida he discussed himself and denied everything previously said.

In his last work Camera Lucida (1980) we find a totally new Barthes. His interest in the image has changed radically, he believes in its message, the emotional creation between the image itself and the receiver, without any intention on the part of the sender. In this text, he breaks with the universal interpretations of an image, his theory is based mainly on the fact that the receiver captures the message in the work and that this message changes with each receiver, but at the same time, that message created at the beginning can change depending on the moment in which the receiver is found or even disappear. In the new theory he introduces two fundamental concepts: punctum and studium . Barthes himself will describe the punctum as a pang that goes through the recipient's heart when seeing an image (either by the image in general, by a characteristic object, etc.) that refers to memories, people or past emotions. On the other hand, the studium is still the interest that you can have for something or someone, a way of studying photography on a cultural level.

The most interesting part of Camera Lucida is how Barthes creates his theory about the punctum around an image of his mother, recently deceased, that causes him to have a crush on his heart, that reminds him of her, that he feels his mother in the photo (even if the photo was taken when she was a child) but never shows that image in that work. The reason for hiding this photograph is to preserve the punctum that he sees in that image as something personal, individual, his, since that is how the punctum should be, proper to each one. Barthes did not want to show that photograph because it would turn his feelings into a universalism and his theory opposes them.

Influences

Barthes, who belonged to the structuralist school, greatly influenced that school, authors such as Jean Baudrillard, Julia Kristeva, Philipe-Joseph Salazar, Eric de Kuyper, Susan Sontag and his friend, the philosopher Michel Foucault.

Barthes' ideas explored a wide range of fields and influenced the development of many schools of theory, including the aforementioned structuralism, semiotics, social theory, design theory (not to be confused with intelligent design), anthropology and poststructuralism. He was particularly known for developing and expanding the field of semiotics through the analysis of a variety of sign systems, mainly derived from Western popular culture.

New editions and recoveries

In 1993 his Œuvres complètes (Complete Works) began to be published, with a large number of scattered works and some unpublished ones; he appeared in Seuil, the publisher of all his work. This compilation was republished, in 2002, in a more accessible way on the occasion of the important exhibition R / B at the Pompidou Center on his person and legacy.

But there were more traces of his work: the teacher and the annotator. Between 2002 and 2003, the first volumes of his seminars also appeared: Comment vivre ensemble , Le neutral and La préparation du roman . Somewhat later another one was published: Le discours amoureux. Seminaire. And in 2009 two other unpublished books were recovered, extracted from his notes: Journal de deuil and Carnets de voyage en Chine .

Since 2010, a handful of valuable books on the author have appeared, notably those by Éric Marty, Roland Barthes, le métier d'écrire (2011), who is editor of his work; Marie Gil, Roland Barthes. Au lieu de la vie (2012) and Collete Fellous, La préparation de la vie (2014). But in 2015 the most extensive and in-depth biography of the author appeared, by Tiphaine Samoyault ( Roland Barthes , Seuil), with numerous information coming from Barthes' letters to his friends and acquaintances, from that he was very young. She reveals that his idea of writing a novel was a project started around the age of twenty, and that it was in his starting concerns. RB's literature, his dense and rich prose, already stands out in those unpublished documents.

Works

• I swallowed him from l'écriture., 1953 (The zero grade of writing21st Century, 2005, ISBN 978-84-323-1210-6)
• Michelet1954
• Mythologies, 1957 (Mythologies21st Century, 2009, ISBN 978-84-323-0381-4)
• Sur Racine, 1963 (About Racine)
• Essais critiques, 1964 (Critical testing, Seix-Barral, ISBN 978-84-322-0866-9)
• The Eiffel Tour, 1964 (The Eiffel Tower), illustrated article
• Elements de sémiologie, 1965 (Elements of semiology)
• Introduction à l’analyse structurale des récits, 1966, (Introduction to structural analysis of accounts, Centro Editor de América Latina, 1977).
• Critique et vérité, 1966 (Criticism and truth21st Century, 2005, ISBN 978-84-323-1212-0)
• Le système de la mode, 1967 (The Fashion System, Paidós, 2005, ISBN 978-84-493-1348-6)
• S/Z, 1970 (S/Z21st Century, 2001, ISBN 978-84-323-0373-9)
• L'Empire des signes, 1970 (The Empire of SignsMondadori, 1991, ISBN 978-84-323-0806-2)
• Sade, Fourier, Loyola, 1971 (Sade, Fourier, LoyolaChair, 1997, ISBN 978-84-376-1520-2)
• Nouveaux essais critiques, 1972 (New critical trials)
• Le plaisir du texte1973 (The pleasure of the text)
• Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes1975 (Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, Paidós, 2002, ISBN 978-84-493-1553-4)
• Fragments d'un discours amoureux, 1977 (Fragments of a loving discourse21st Century, 2007, ISBN 978-84-323-0806-2)
• Leçon1978 (The pleasure of text and inaugural lesson21st Century, 2002, ISBN 978-84-323-1249-6)
• Sollers écrivain1979
• The claire shawl, 1980 (The lucid camera: note on photography, Paidós, 2009, ISBN 978-84-493-2293-8)

Posthumous

• Le grain de la voix1981 (The grain of the voiceinterviews.
• L'obvie et l'obtus, 1982 (The obvious and he got it., Paidós, 2002, ISBN 978-84-7509-400-7)
• Le bruissement de langue1984 (The whisper of language, beyond word and writing, Paidós, 2009, ISBN 978-84-493-2275-4)
• L'aventure sémiologique1985 (The semiological adventurePaidós, 2009)
• Incidents, 1987 (IncidentsAnagram, 1987, ISBN 978-84-339-3112-2)
• Œuvres complètes, Seuil, 1993-1995, 3 vols, presented by Éric Marty
• Variations in literature, Paidós, 2002, ISBN 978-84-493-1267-0; extracted from Œuvres complètes
• Writing variations, Paidós, 2002, ISBN 978-84-493-1300-4 Œuvres complètes
• Written on the theatre, Paidós, 2009, ISBN 978-84-493-2289-1, extracted from Œuvres complètes
• Comment vivre ensembleSeuil, 2002, 1976-1977, dir. Eric Marty.
• Le neutreSeuil, 2002Neutral), course 1977–1978, dir. Eric Marty.
• La préparation du roman, I et IISeuil, 2003, 1978-1980, dir. Eric Marty.
• Le discours amoureux. SéminaireSeuil, 2007, 1974-1976, dir. Eric Marty.
• From sport and men, Paidós, 2008, ISBN 978-84-493-2110-8 Text recovery for a TV program
• Journal deuil (1977-1979)Seuil, 2009, set by Nathalie Léger; Diary of mourning, Paidós, 2009, ISBN 978-84-493-2321-8.
• Carnets de voyage en ChineBourgois, 2009; Carnets of a trip to China.
• Lexique de l'auteur, Seuil, 2010, with new discarded fragments of Roland Barthes