In the works that came afterwards - S/Z, Empire of Signs, Sade/Fourier/Loyola, The Pleasure of the Text, A Lover's Discourse and Camera Lucida - writing as a duty gave way to reading for pleasure.īarthes was devoted to Julia Kristeva, apparently once even declaring: 'She's the only person I'm really in love with, the only woman who could make me change my sexuality.' But by far the most important woman in his life was his mother. The 1960s were years of Structuralism, not just for Barthes but for France, but with the appearance of The Fashion System (a surprisingly dry and weighty treatise of the late 1960s) Barthes' desire for systemisation had been exhausted. Sent to the Lycee Louis-le-Grand, an elite school adjacent to the Sorbonne, he seemed destined for the prestigious cole Normale Superieure.Įven advertisers began to take the new discipline seriously. A precocious child, while still a teenager he tried his hand at a satirical Platonic dialogue and a novel, and was a founding member of a small anti-fascist group, the Defense Republicaine Antifasciste. He was brought up, first in Bayonne and then in Paris, in an almost exclusively feminine world like so many intel- lectuals, including his mentor Sartre, he was cosseted, indulged, lonely and, yes, bored. Barthes' father died in the First World War, when Barthes was still a baby: 'No father to kill, no family to hate, no milieu to reject: great Oedipal frustration', as he put it. It is ironic that he should be the subject of a biography.

Barthes was the theorist who famously proclaimed 'the death of the author' and set himself against biographical interpretation. Unfortunately, any reviewer of this Life is almost compelled to open with a point itself tediously obvious. ROLAND BARTHES had a morbid, near- hysterical fear of beinand to discover what the author 'really meant', refused the opportunity for stimulation 'texts' and 'discourses' could offer.

A Lover's Discourse by Roland Barthes