Volume 23, Number 3 · March 4, 1976
Rules of the Game
By Michael Wood
Sade, Fourier, Loyola
by Roland Barthes, translated by Richard Miller
Hill and Wang, 192 pp., $8.95
The Pleasure of the Text
by Roland Barthes, translated by Richard Miller
Hill and Wang, 67 pp., $2.95 (paper)
L'Empire des signes
by Roland Barthes
Skira, 156 pp., 48F
S/Z
by Roland Barthes, translated by Richard Miller
Hill and Wang, 271 pp., $3.95 (paper)
Roland Barthes
by Roland Barthes
Ecrivains de toujours/Seuil, 192 pp., 10.40F (to be published by Hill and Wang in July)
'Language is never innocent,' Roland Barthes wrote in Writing Degree Zero (1953), the book that began his career as the most provocative critic to emerge in France since the war. In Sade, Fourier, Loyola (published in 1971 and now translated into English), he tells us that a belief in the innocence of language is not innocent either: 'This myth is not innocent.' The phrases make Barthes sound like a latter-day Robespierre, and in his more theoretical moments he does affect this stance: severe scrutineer of society's self-deceptions, demystifier general, the man against the masks.
Review, 5233 words
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