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Roland Barthes
"Barthes par Barthes is a genuinely post-modern autobiography, an innovation in the art of autobiography comparable in its theoretical implications for our understanding of autobiography to Sartre's The Words."--Hayden White, University of California
Paperback, 186 pages
Published
September 28th 1994
by University of California Press
(first published January 1st 1975)
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Whenever I put my pen onto paper or I type on a computer, I often think of Roland Barthes. For the sole reason he's a very entertaining writer and a great thinker as well. This book is his autobiography or memoir. But it goes off the subject and comes back freely. Right now working on my own memoir and i often think about this book as a role model for my own work. The thing is I am not that good or brilliant as him. But the key is to find the 'voice' that is your voice. And I learned that from t...more
Read an 1977 version of this book, bought for 1 cent on Amazon, and it crumbled in my hands as I read it(something I found oddly satisfying). This is the part that made me laugh on the train:
La côtelette ~ The rib chop
Here is what I did with my body one day:
At Leysin, in 1945, in order to perform an extrapleural pneumothorax operation, a piece of one of my ribs was removed, and subsequently given back to me, quite formally, wrapped up in a piece of medical gauze (the physicians, who were Swiss,...more
La côtelette ~ The rib chop
Here is what I did with my body one day:
At Leysin, in 1945, in order to perform an extrapleural pneumothorax operation, a piece of one of my ribs was removed, and subsequently given back to me, quite formally, wrapped up in a piece of medical gauze (the physicians, who were Swiss,...more
having read blanchot's many years with an excuse for a doctoral thesis which hides my real joy of reading blanchot's, i felt often bereft of what to write because, reading blanchot's, i learned how to pause writing and, forget what i have learned, which seems to explain why i loved reading blanchot's. but reading 'roland barthes by roland barthes' this early 2012 summer, i feel i am almost regaining something to resume writing, overcoming my impassivity; that my emotion is defended in writing in...more
skimmed the hell out of this but it's the best I could do. I love this guy and really wanted the book to be more personal, RB's own themes & image-repertoire, but shoulda known: he's too recursive for that! instead of writing a semiotics of himself, he wrote a semiotics of the autobiography format. I mean it's relentlessly evasive. I love thinking about the process, too, but here it's not insightful; it's boring, straying, elitist, and lazy. all his brilliant analyzing is an interference, li...more
Baris "Alone and forever alone" yang ditulis di bawah gambar Barthes sedang berbaring mengiring di tepi pantai di zaman mudanya, membuatkan saya ketawa besar dengan rakan-rakan.
Ada sesuatu tentang buku ini, seolah-olah ia kajian yang rapi tentang hal-hal yang tersentuh pada diri Barthes, perasaaannya, ungkapannya, kesukaannya/kebenciannya, perkataan dan hal-hal lain mengenai dirinya sendiri. Saya telah memilih untuk membaca secara tebuk-tebuk fragmen-fragmen enigmatik yang ditulis ringkas.
Roland...more
Ada sesuatu tentang buku ini, seolah-olah ia kajian yang rapi tentang hal-hal yang tersentuh pada diri Barthes, perasaaannya, ungkapannya, kesukaannya/kebenciannya, perkataan dan hal-hal lain mengenai dirinya sendiri. Saya telah memilih untuk membaca secara tebuk-tebuk fragmen-fragmen enigmatik yang ditulis ringkas.
Roland...more
Mar 02, 2010
Damon
marked it as to-read
I just glanced at this up at St Mark's Books last night. I opened to a place where he is talking about having a piece of rib removed in an operation, and how the doctors gave it to him afterward wrapped in gauze, and from this he launches into a discussion of those things like old movie stubs that we can't bring ourselves to throw away. I frequently have this experience with Barthes where I feel like he is finishing a thought I didn't realize I had, but which feels so intimately familiar.
Roland Barthes, in his autobiography, Barthes by Barthes, arranges the fragments of his life in alphabetical order, deliberately subverting the artifice of presenting the continuous “flow of life” prevalent in traditional autobiographies.
Barthes’ alphabetical autobiography functions like an index, collapsing time, the way it is collapsed when we reflect on our lives. The text of our lives, like the text of a book, parallels Roman Ingarden’s assertion that, once read, a book “exists simultaneous...more
Barthes’ alphabetical autobiography functions like an index, collapsing time, the way it is collapsed when we reflect on our lives. The text of our lives, like the text of a book, parallels Roman Ingarden’s assertion that, once read, a book “exists simultaneous...more
This is my second reading. I love what he was doing here -- and that his intellectual elitism read as funny and thought-provoking -- but the book was also a tedious and painful read a majority of the way. I probably won't read it again.
if you are into barthes' quirkiness you will enjoy this. he writes caption headings and then lists about himself as an autobiography.
This isn't Barthes' best work, but it is always interesting reading him and seeing how his criticism continually evolves. The problem with this meta-autobiography is, like he says near the conclusion, "an aphoristic tone hangs" about it. His reading/interest base is so broad that it lacks focus much of the time. And since his "aphorisms" are quite humorless, unlike the ones by his "model" for this book, Nietzsche's, they can be a slough. While this is no "The Plesure of the Text" or the infinite...more
Exactly the kind of enigmatic, fragmented autobiography you’d expect. Lovely to read if you like Barthes—and no doubt frustrating if you don’t. Worthwhile just to get some sentences like this stuck into my mind: “This is to say that the art of living has no history: it does not evolve: the pleasure which vanishes vanishes for good, there is no substitute for it. Other pleasures come, which replace nothing. No progress in pleasures, nothing but mutations.”
My favorite book by Barthes. Autobiography in the third person. Or to adapt a phrase by Barthes, the autobiographical without the autobiography. Barthes shows how thoroughgoing attention to one's mental habits -- with the lightest dose of self-deprecation -- can bring great rewards.
An "autobiography" by the man who deemed the author dead. Where does that leave us?
Barthes is my favorite cultural/literary critic. Though, I should probably reread this before I add any more comments.
Barthes is my favorite cultural/literary critic. Though, I should probably reread this before I add any more comments.
I have no idea why nobody reads barthes anymore in anthropology. He's prettier than Foucault, less obtuse than Levi-Strauss and more current than Benjamin.
Quietly became one of my favorite books ever this summer.
***This might be a required reading for every August from here on out for me.
***This might be a required reading for every August from here on out for me.
ive already forgotten most of what i learned from this book... have to read it again..
all of our lives are texts being written. we are fictional characters.
I loved this.
May 19, 2013
Dolores
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Roland Barthes was a French literary critic, literary and social theorist, philosopher, and semiotician. Barthes' work extended over many fields and he influenced the development of schools of theory including structuralism, semiotics, existentialism, Marxism and post-structuralism.
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“But I never looked like that!’ - How do you know? What is the ‘you’ you might or might not look like? Where do you find it - by which morphological or expressive calibration? Where is your authentic body? You are the only one who can never see yourself except as an image; you never see your eyes unless they are dulled by the gaze they rest upon the mirror or the lens (I am interested in seeing my eyes only when they look at you): even and especially for your own body, you are condemned to the repertoire of its images.”
—
22 people liked it
“The art of living has no history: it does not evolve: the pleasure which vanishes vanishes for good, there is no substitute for it. Other pleasures come, which replace nothing. No progress in pleasures, nothing but mutations.”
—
19 people liked it
More quotes…
Mar 30, 2008 06:48am