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With typical rhetorical flourish and beholden to paradox, Roland Barthes defines his work on ‘myth’ as an attempt to ‘define things’; and yet he is known foremost for his work on language. The aim of this book is to take ‘things’ here as social relations, objects and other human beings with which the self interacts. It does so via language. And language in Barthes’s conception is double: alienating, alienated on the one side; liberating, inspiring on the other. It is this double that we investigate in this book: A spectre is haunting Barthes studies, the spectre of dialectics; and the spectral presence of dialectics is what we will define in this book as the Barthesian ‘spirit’, in both senses of the word, that is, haunting his analyses and, at once, providing us with a double approach. ‘I have tried to define things, not words’ (Barthes 2009, 131n1).
‘Stafford shatters a common assumption about Barthes’s writing. Against the grain of the dominant strain in Barthes scholarship that views him as an aesthete whose work has little–to-no political dimension, Stafford convincingly demonstrates that the political is a key component of his work. The aesthete is dead – long live the political Barthes!’—Jeffrey R. Di Leo,Co-editor, Understanding Barthes, Understanding Modernism; Professor of English and Philosophy, University of Houston, USA; Series editor, Anthem symploke Studies in Theory.
Acknowledgements; Foreword; Chapter One ‘The dialectical logic of Love’; Chapter Two ‘Amorous dialectic’; Chapter Three ‘The People chorus’; Chapter Four ‘Double grasp’; Chapter Five ‘Stereographic space’; Chapter Six ‘Non-classifiable’; Chapter Seven ‘New Dialectic’; Chapter Eight ‘Opacity’; Chapter Nine ‘Undialectics’; Afterword: Essayism and the Politics of Writing; Bibliography; Index