ABSTRACT
Roland Barthes was a French semiologist, literary critic, and cultural theorist. Born in 1915 in Cherbourg, France, he was raised in a Protestant bourgeois family. The first half of Barthes’s career presents structuralist interpretations of literature and popular culture. The second half of Barthes’s work begins in the late 1960s, when he turned away from a structuralism with scientific conceits and toward a discourse of desire. The strength of Barthes’s critique lies in his explanation of the conceit of realist representation: the ideological claim that language is transparent and neutral. Barthes’s text is weighted more toward the second and third concepts he develops. The importance of Barthes’s work for contemporary critical practice is that he produces texts in which one can see him translating his theory into practice. Barthes’s phenomenological-ontological reading of photography—his interrogation of the medium from a position circumscribed by death—leads to a thesis about ascertaining “the impossible science of the unique being”.
