ABSTRACT
Barthes’s writing in the 1970s increasingly resists the tendency in language to revert to the signified (stable meaning) and thus to undermine or simply absorb writing (language on the level of the signifier). Acutely aware of the violent potential within language, Barthes in works such as The Pleasure of the Text (1973), Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes (1975) and A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments (1977) developed theoretical approaches to writing texts which move ever further away from anything that might be described as generalized, methodological or even repeatable.
