Roland Barthes and the Political: History, Dialectics, Self

Roland Barthes 2.0is a re-reading and a re-purposing for the twenty-first century of the critical theories of France’s most important writer of the twentieth century. The volume argues that Barthes’s wide-ranging analyses - from Voltaire to Nietzsche, Marx to myth, gay love to Japan - can be applied to debates and controversies in the contemporary world. The study takes up a seldom-discussed notion and critical practice which Barthes had originally developed in relation to the nineteenth-century historian Jules Michelet: that of the ‘double grasp’. Applying his 1958 essay on Voltaire to the aftermath in France of the 2015 terrorist attacks, using Edouard Glissant’s work to look at post-colonial writing strategies and the ‘double grasp’ to think about photography and innovative forms of historiography, the volume sets out a dialectical critical practice for our complex world of political, ethical and aesthetic choices. It considers the persistence (and functions) of myth in the era of image-saturated social media, whilst relating Barthes’s radical homosexuality and his questioning of binary structures to today’s debates on post-gender. The book ends with discussion of Barthes’s essay-writing and its similarities with the theories on the essay of Hungarian Marxist George Lukacs in his 1910 ‘Letter to Leo Popper’.