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SubStance 33.1 (2004) 152-155



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Ribière, Mireille. Roland Barthes: A Beginner's Guide. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2002. Pp. 82.

Among the cultural icons that have marked the continental structuralist movement of the 1960s and 1970s, Roland Barthes is certainly the one who has best resisted the winds of intellectual change. While no one today regularly refers to A.J. Greimas, T. Todorov, or even J. Kristeva in matters of cultural or literary [End Page 152] studies, the work of Barthes is still commented, seminars are still devoted to his work and, in Paris, the Beaubourg Cultural Center recently organized a six-month long exhibit devoted to his life, his times and his work. This sustained celebrity is the reason why Mireille Ribière, a well-known specialist of Georges Perec, proposes this extremely useful "introduction" to the main aspects of Barthes's legacy, in a collection usually reserved for indisputable "great" thinkers of our contemporaneity (Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, etc.). To devote a book to a coherent and comprehensive presentation of Barthes for an English-speaking audience appears especially timely to Ribière because, for her, his intellectual production is one of the most useful of the "pensée-68" movement that was so influential then, and whose heritage is still pervasive in many authoritative intellectual works of today's Anglo-Saxon critical production. Thus, she writes:

In the current [world of humanistic studies], Barthes's work continues to provide seminal references. Given his keen awareness of history, his interest in the way we are manipulated by cultural forms, as well as his overriding concern with meaning and the way we make sense of the world, this is hardly surprising.
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In today's Anglo-Saxon world, we find more and more studies of the continental movement of the 1960s and 1970s that are organized thematically. The result is that the reader loses a sense of the evolution of certain concepts and the understanding that thinkers have developed diverse hypotheses and concepts prior to elaborating the operative concepts or theories for which they are known. The genealogic aspect of the evolution is thus lost in a format that, with the loss of the awareness of evolution, has a tendency to place side by side positions that have been expressed years apart, and that should even cancel each other out, since they were phases moving towards a final formulation that made all the previous ones obsolete.

The advantage of Ribière's chronological presentation is that she can clearly show how the Barthes of Mythologies is not the Barthes of Empire des signes. Thus, presenting side by side these two texts as part of a Barthesian project of social analysis is to miss the dialectical confrontation between two very opposite approaches separated by many years. It is one of the great merits of this study to offer direct and elucidating statements on the intellectual genealogy of Barthes's work, such as:

Clearly, Barthes's approach in Camera Lucida is the antithesis of the deductive method used in semiology, and "The Photographic Message" in particular. Not only that, but the notions of universality, reality and truth which Barthes has so strenuously combated, dominate this autobiographical essay.
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In order to facilitate our understanding of Barthes's intellectual evolution and his different projects and specific terminology, the book proposes seven chapters devoted to the main articulations of Barthes's opus: "Mythologies," "Semiology," "New Criticism," "Structuralism," "Reader/ Writer and Text, " "Pleasure: The Body and the Self," and "Photography." In each chapter, Barthes's ideas are contextualized by an overview of the associated debates in the intellectual world of the period, and thus the reader understands in which way Barthes's conclusions always show his own brand of intellectual imagination and his preference for individually crafted resolutions.

In addition to these seven chapters devoted to a very well informed presentation of Barthes's intellectual career, three other chapters offer a general overview and appreciation of Barthes's place in the intellectual debates and movements of the last fifty years: "Barthes in Perspective," "Barthes's...

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