Barthes Soundbites

Here are a few soundbites from Jonathan Culler’s Barthes: A Very Short Introduction (OUP, 2002):

In his inaugural lecture at College de France on forgetting and unlearning Barthes defined “Sapientia [wisdom]: no power, a little knowledge, a little wisdom, and as much flavour as possible” (Lecon, p46/478)

In 1971 Barthes claimed his historical position was “in the rearguard of the avant-garde” (Responses, p102)

“any biography is a novel that dare not speak its name” (Responses, p89)

In Lecon Barthes jokes that he hopes to make his Chair of Literary Semiology into a wheelchair, always on the move, “the wildcard [joker] of contemporary knowledge” (p38 / 474)

Or more seriously:

“the birth of the reader must be requited by the death of the Author” (Le Bruissement de la langue, p69/55)

literature (it would be better from now on to say writing), by refusing to assign a ‘secret’, an ultimate meaning, to the text (and to the world-as-text), liberates an activity we may call counter-theological, an activity that is truly revolutionary since to refuse to fix meanings is, the end, to refuse God and his hypostases – reason, science, law. (Le Bruissement de la langue, p68/53f)

We now know that a text is not a line of words releasing a Single “theological” meaning (the “message” of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from innumerable sources of culture (Le Bruissement de la langue, p67; pp52-3)