Roland Barthes Writing the Political

Renowned specialist of Roland Barthes, Andy Stafford has co-edited Barthes’s 1968–1969 seminar notes on Sarrasine. His work on Barthes is translated into Chinese, French and Portuguese.

‘This book is daring yet meticulous intervention into the myth of ‘an apolitical Barthes’ and a convincing foregrounding of ‘other spaces for critique to take place’. This enables the author to cast new light on a set of intertextual affinities between Barthes and Marx, thereby reinterpreting the former’s work in the context of a uniquely Marxist materialism or the ‘Capital of linguistics’. What emerges is a new insight into the multiple significances of Barthes’s preoccupation with paradox and dialectic.’—Fuhito Endo, Seikei University, Tokyo.

• 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