I don't know if it is philosophy, per se, but I'm very fond of Barthes.
The lover's discourse and barthes by barthes are my favorites. can anyone else suggest some of their favorites?
The lover's discourse and barthes by barthes are my favorites. can anyone else suggest some of their favorites?
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Re: anyone fond of barthes?
Sat, December 27, 2003 - 9:41 PMHi Francis,
I haven't read much Barthes. Can you give any recommendations?
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Re: anyone fond of barthes?
Mon, December 29, 2003 - 10:23 AMI've mainly read the essential French philosophers:
Descartes
de Beauvoir
Sartre
Foucault
Irigaray
Derrida (though who can understand him, really...)
Rousseau
In no particular order...
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Re: anyone fond of barthes?
Thu, January 15, 2004 - 11:59 AM -
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Re: anyone fond of barthes?
Thu, January 29, 2004 - 8:51 AMI love Barthes. Particularly his piece on Fourier,Sade, and someone else(can't remember). -
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Re: anyone fond of barthes?
Mon, February 2, 2004 - 7:03 AMThat other person was Loyola. I think.
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barthes issues
Thu, January 29, 2004 - 7:30 PMi dunno... i have to admit that i have some reservations about barthes.
don't get me wrong, i've found a lot of his stuff useful, but he doesn't ever seem to argue for anything. now, i'll admit that my exposure to him has been limited to a few texts that might not be representative of the rest of his work (empire of signs, and parts of: image, music, text; the pleasure of the text; s/z; mythologies), but the stuff i've seen has been awfully light on substantiation. i'm thinking, for example, of the operation he performs on, say, professional wrestling in mythologies, on balzac's sarrasine in s/z, or on chopsticks (i think it was chopsticks, chopsticks were involved) in empire of signs-- he takes some cultural artifact, and analyzes/interprets the crap out of it, but never really demonstrates why we ought to pay any attention to his interpretation. i contrast this with someone like foucault, who also analyzes/interprets the crap out of various cultural artifacts, but does so within the context of massive, detailed, and thorough historical studies.
yeah, alright, no point being diplomatic-- i must revise my above statment: i've really never found anything of value in the content of barthes work per se, but sometimes he'll introduce a suggestive term or turn of phrase that i find very helpful (ex: readerly/writerly; the death of the author; the pleasure of the text; jouissance/jouir; etc.). for me, however, it's not the way barthes uses these terms that i think is interesting-- to the contrary, it is the uses that these terms might be put to *outside* of barthes work.
well, there's my rant. i hope i've not pissed anyone off.
love,
brendan -
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Unsu...
Re: barthes issues
Sun, February 1, 2004 - 1:45 PMI do really agree with you...
I really think that Barthes is the perfect case of an over-valued philosopher. I don't think that there's any reason to read him, except that he was fahionable during the 60's...
His books are as enjoyable as a lobotomy.
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Re: barthes issues
Mon, February 2, 2004 - 7:06 AMBarthes is not a philosopher and I think he might umbrage at being referred to as such. He was a 'social critic'. For him ideas were like fashion, he was not a system builder. -
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Re: barthes issues
Mon, February 2, 2004 - 12:35 PMwell, i am not gonna disagree with you as such, but it does get a little tricky, because as i understand it *a lot* of the people that are commonly discussed as "french philosophers" would have themselves probably rejected the title "philosopher"-- i think that a bunch of people, following lacan, took up the banner of "anti-philosophy" (i have no idea what that means-- i've never read any lacan-- but i understand that it was pretty influential). so, yeah, i think you're correct when you say that barthes may not've liked being referred to as a "philosopher"-- but i don't think he has any say in it really. we get to pick.
so whaddya y'all think? should we call him a philosopher or not? :)
i vote yes, because... well, why the hell not. kind of a useless category anyway if you ask me. unnecessary territorialization.
<<<For him ideas were like fashion, he was not a system builder.>>>
this to me is an interesting point. again, i don't know barthes very well, but it seems to me that he was a structuralist early in his career, which to me is all about building systems-- and when i think about s/z, the project he undertakes is remarkably systematic-- but i think he moved towards a more post-structuralist perspective as he got older. insights?
also, whether we want to call barthes a philosopher, a literary critic, or anything else my above reservations stand.
[heart]
bc -
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Re: barthes issues
Tue, February 3, 2004 - 10:25 PMI think Barthes was more interested in being interesting and enjoyable than (God forbid!) useful. Then again, I have found Barthes very useful. S/Z, for example, raised my awareness of different modalities of speech and writing. The vision of interpretation that he articulates in S/Z makes explicit a tacit process which closely matches my actual process of reading. Any act of reflection that illuminates ordinarily unconscious activity is of value to me.
I have also found him interesting and enjoyable. And French. -
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Unsu...
Re: barthes issues
Fri, February 27, 2004 - 8:10 PMBarthes has written more than I can asses in this space, but I think the primary interest and respect I have for him is how he popularized the theory of de Saussure. This work is still vital, and frankly, in a country where the president can say: "Marriage must not be removed from its religious, cultural, and natural foundations," I think we are desparately in need of a return of Barthes. Do I even have to identify which country I am talking about?
Oh, if only he had seen that milk truck coming. -
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Unsu...
Barthes went both ways
Sat, February 28, 2004 - 9:21 AM>>he was a structuralist . . . but i think he moved towards a more post-structuralist perspective
As I understand it, this is very much the case. Within his work, we see transition on a mirco level from struc to post-struc. This may be why you do not see a satisfying meta-analysis in his earlier work. The signifer had been established as arbitrarily pointing to "a" signified, but the fact of the signifier being STRUCTURED to pallogocetntrism was germinating yet. I use upper case here for obvious reasons. -
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Re: Barthes went both ways
Thu, April 1, 2004 - 5:43 AMI think some of you folks are reading Barthes and expecting something else... he was not a psycho-analyist, metaphysician or linguistic philosopher, although he can find himself read alongside any of those domains.
I also reckon that Barthes as one of the founding members of structuralism was never really a structuralist. Even in his most early earnestly thought out systems of semiotics he was looking for what transcended the system.
In his analysis of visual culture he was looking for possibilities in "reading" images that escaped semiotic connotation (e.g. trauma, passion, the "punctum"). His project was always more concerned with the politics of the readers liberation from consumer capitalism than the structures he identifies. His work was about exposing the ideology at work in the media environment and teaching people how to read it. Or he wrote beautifully about love, music and photography.
He makes theory poetic, personal and relevant. For those of you having a go at him, think you should go back and enjoy his writing - it's not like it's hard. Don't expect to have the roots of your philosophy rhizomised, just learn to be a better reader.
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Re: barthes issues
Sun, February 29, 2004 - 4:31 PMa friend of mine knew the guy who's thesis Barthes was carrying under his arm when he stepped into the street that day..
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Re: barthes issues
Thu, March 11, 2004 - 12:52 PM>>His books are as enjoyable as a lobotomy.
good - I thought it was just me.
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Re: anyone fond of barthes?
Mon, April 5, 2004 - 12:06 PMMy favorite is "Lover's Discourse." I really like the distinction he makes between the lover story and the lover's discourse. The latter is something that goes on in the absence of the other and doesn't neccessarily have meaning, and the other is public, and imbued with meaning.
"Lover's Discourse" is kind of like a dictionary, a collage, and a wonderful set of the choicest morsels on love in Western literature. How he alludes to other works is pretty cool. He puts the name of the work, friend, or author in the margin, and with the lightest of touches makes mention of these.
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Re: anyone fond of barthes?
Tue, April 20, 2004 - 11:00 PMCan't remember which of these were Barthes and which were not... but I liked Camera Lucida and Les Choses. Although "liked" is maybe too strong a word... pomo generally leaves me cold...
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Re: anyone fond of barthes?
Thu, April 22, 2004 - 6:10 AMJust Read Brecht and Discourse: A Contribution to the Study of Discursivity from <i>The Rustle of Language</i> and it's great. The idea of Seismology to interrupt Semiology and our immersion in the logosphere are fantastic concepts. Its short and easy. Highly reccommended!
Ben -
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Re: anyone fond of barthes?
Fri, May 21, 2004 - 7:06 PMi'm with you ben. Brecht and Discourse: A Contribution to the Study of Discursivity had a big affect for me as you know from our conversations and because i read this for the Voice last year (sorry, we're on the same MA). the little metaphor of the japanese bell that rings to remind us of the put togetherness that is usually inaudible. i also agree that barthes is about an erotics, a poetics of theory, which is the MOST USEFUL and MOST PRACTICAL way of thinking the sexiness and the impossibility of the textual/sensual interface. as much as i am oneof those freeks who DO read and understand Derrida, there's a pleasure of Barthes passionate reading method that will never leave my soul and will always be more visceral than D or Foucault. -
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Re: anyone fond of barthes?
Fri, January 26, 2007 - 8:14 AMi read some really good stuff of his on the theatre. Does anyone know what the french title of the Brecht thing is. Sounds very interesting.
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Unsu...
Re: anyone fond of barthes?
Fri, January 26, 2007 - 5:04 PMMy favorite work (text ;) ) of Barthes is _The Pleasure of the Text_, in which he discusses jouissance. A key concept, and one that seems applicable to multiple realms of experience. -
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Re: anyone fond of barthes?
Tue, January 30, 2007 - 3:52 AMYes. the verb "jouir" is usually used to mean "to come", but it is also used as 'to enjoy" or even sometimes as "to benefit" (I haven't really checked this all in a dictionary, but that's what comes to mind first).
The concept itself is originally a Lacanian term. Lacan opposed it to "plaisir" in the sense that "plaisir" was something you could grasp with words and "jouissance" is beyond words.
But what's important to bear in mind that he was referring to these notions within a very specific context: that of psychoanalaytical therapy, and this gives these words a completely different meaning: "plaisir" is something you can talk about, therefore something that leaves you a certain degree of freedom, whereas "jouissance" is actually something you cannot overcome, because you can't talk about it. In this sense, "jouissance" refers to the limits of where someone can get in their therapy, their bundle of unsolved unconscious ties, in other words the neurotic stratum one never manages to get rid of. The term is ambiguous and refers to the fact that we tend to cling to those patterns and "enjoy" them (which in Freudian theory is the reason people tend not to want to start a therapy: to put it roughly, because they enjoy their suffering).
So the concept originally has a pretty nasty aspect, but I don't know to what extent Barthes was reffering to that particular aspect of the term, pulling it in another direction or playing around with it in yet a new way.
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Re: anyone fond of barthes?
Fri, March 30, 2007 - 1:10 PMI like Camera Lucida. -
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Re: anyone fond of barthes?
Tue, August 14, 2007 - 10:43 PMHis discussion of Erte in The Responsibility of Forms lives up to his critique of wrestling in his Mythologies; which is a trophy essay if ever there was one.
He's up there with Warhol, Arnheim, and Benjamin for me.
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