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Titre:
The Neutral

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Résumé:
"I define the Neutral as that which outplays the paradigm, or rather I call Neutral everything that baffles paradigm." With these words, Roland Barthes describes a concept that profoundly shaped his work and was the subject of a landmark series of lectures delivered in 1978 at the College de France, just two years before his death. Not published in France until 2002, and appearing in English for the first time, these creative and engaging lectures deepen our understanding of Roland Barthes' intellectual itinerary and reveal his distinctive style as thinker and teacher. "The Neutral" ( le neutre), as Barthes describes it, escapes or undoes the paradigmatic binary oppositions that structure and produce meaning in Western thought and discourse. These binaries are found in all aspects of human society ranging from language to sexuality to politics. For Barthes, the attempt to deconstruct or escape from these binaries has profound ethical, philosophical, and linguistic implications. "The Neutral" is comprised of the prewritten texts from which Barthes lectured and centers around 23 "figures," also referred to as "traits" or "twinklings," that are possible embodiments of the Neutral (sleep, silence, tact, etc.) or of the anti-Neutral (anger, arrogance, conflict, etc.). His lectures draw on a diverse set of authors and intellectual traditions, including Lao-tzu, Tolstoy, German mysticism, classical philosophy, Rousseau, Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin, and John Cage. Barthes' idiosyncratic approach to his subjects gives the lectures a playful, personal, and even joyous quality that enhances his rich insights. In addition to his reflections on a variety of literary and scholarly works, Barthes' personal convictions and the events of his life shaped the course and content of the lectures. Most prominently, as Barthes admits, the recent death of his mother and the idea of mourning shape several of his lectures.

Titre:
Criticism and truth

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Résumé:
Written in 1966 in response to an attack on Barthes's sur Racine, this polemic answers many of the charges brought against French new criticism by conservative, academic, 19th-century-oriented critics: lack of "objectivity," fondness for "jargon," indifference to the author's intention, etc. More positively, Barthes outlines some key concerns: plurality of meanings; analysis, based on linguistics, of the structures of possible meanings; the idea of a science of literature; and the dynamics of reading. Though some of the issues are specific to the French literary-academic situation, the bulk of this brief essay is a lively and accessible statement of an important modern critical position that is worth reading.

Titre:
L'aventure sémiologique

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Roland Barthes a été aussi un chercheur au plein sens du terme, un de ceux qui, après Saussure et Greimas, ont fondé la sémiologie. Ce sont les travaux où il pose les assises de cette discipline nouvelle qui sont ici réunis.

Titre:
Roland Barthes Camera Lucida Reflections on Photography

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"This is a great book-flawed, impossible, infuriating, and moving . . . but he has accomplished in this extraordinary book something finer than mere polemic. En route to his last painful discovery, Barthes takes the reader on an exquisitely rendered, lyrical journey into the heart of his own life and the medium he came to love, a medium that flirts constantly with the 'intractable reality' of the human condition." Douglas Davis, Newsweek

Titre:
Mythologies

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Résumé:
"Mythologies" illustrates the beautiful generosity of Barthes's progressive interest in the meaning (his word is signification) of practically everything around him, not only the books and paintings of high art, but also the slogans, trivia, toys, food, and popular rituals (cruises, striptease, eating, wrestling matches) of contemporary life . . . For Barthes, words and objects have in common the organized capacity to say something; at the same time, since they are signs, words and objects have the bad faith always to appear natural to their consumer, as if what they say is eternal, true, necessary, instead of arbitrary, made, contingent. Mythologies finds Barthes revealing the fashioned systems of ideas that make it possible, for example, for 'Einstein's brain' to stand for, be the myth of, 'a genius so lacking in magic that one speaks about his thought as a functional labor analogous to the mechanical making of sausages.' Each of the little essays in this book wrenches a definition out of a common but constructed object, making the object speak its hidden, but ever-so-present, reservoir of manufactured sense." -Edward W. Said

Titre:
Mythologies

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$17.00
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Résumé:
"No denunciation without its proper instrument of close analysis," Roland Barthes wrote in his preface to Mythologies. There is no more proper instrument of analysis of our contemporary myths than this book—one of the most significant works in French theory, and one that has transformed the way readers and philosophers view the world around them. Our age is a triumph of codification. We own devices that bring the world to the command of our fingertips. We have access to boundless information and prodigious quantities of stuff. We decide to like or not, to believe or not, to buy or not. We pick and choose. We think we are free. Yet all around us, in pop culture, politics, mainstream media, and advertising, there are codes and symbols that govern our choices. They are the fabrications of consumer society. They express myths of success, well-being, or happiness. As Barthes sees it, these myths must be carefully deciphered, and debunked. What Barthes discerned in mass media, the fashion of plastic, and the politics of postcolonial France applies with equal force to today's social networks, the iPhone, and the images of 9/11. This new edition of Mythologies, complete and beautifully rendered by the Pulitzer Prize–winning poet, critic, and translator Richard Howard, is a consecration of Barthes's classic—a lesson in clairvoyance that is more relevant now than ever.

Titre:
Mythologies: édition illustrée

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Résumé:
Ce volume contient l'intégralité du texte des Mythologies et environ 120 illustrations. Parues en 1957, les Mythologies de Roland Barthes constituent un cas à part dans l'édition : depuis plus de cinquante ans, elles ont eu des centaines de milliers de lecteurs ; attachées à saisir une époque, elles n'ont pourtant pas pris une ride. Bref, les Mythologies sont désormais inscrites dans notre patrimoine littéraire. Pourquoi illustrer les Mythologies ? Avant tout parce que leur objet est très souvent visuel. On sait l'intérêt que Barthes portait à la photographie. Son regard sur la presse ( Paris-Match, Elle )et la publicité est tout aussi omniprésent dans le livre. Ce volume entend donc donner à voir l'univers visuel de Barthes, le texte caché en quelque sorte. Le résultat est fort, surprenant, parfois drôle.

Titre:
How to live together : novelistic simulations of some everyday spaces

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$38.00
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Résumé:
In The Preparation of the Novel, a collection of lectures delivered at a defining moment in Roland Barthes’s career (and completed just weeks before his death), the critic spoke of his struggle to discover a different way of writing and a new approach to life. The Neutral preceded this work, containing Barthes’s challenge to the classic oppositions of Western thought and his effort to establish new pathways of meaning. How to Live Together predates both achievements, a series of lectures exploring solitude and the degree of contact necessary for individuals to exist and create at their own pace. A distinct project that sets the tone for his subsequent lectures, How to Live Together is a key introduction to Barthes’s pedagogical methods and critical worldview.