ABSTRACT
More by accident than by design, Roland Barthes appears to have become the Hassan i Sabbah of contemporary literary theory: the involuntary master of an international school of assassins pledged to the ideals they perceive in his celebrated essay on “The Death of the Author.”3 Carrying this analogy a little further, it seems that just as the followers of Hassan i Sabbah lacked the unusual ability to weather the bitterly cold conditions that their master “dug a lot,” surviving only when tranquilized with liberal helpings of hashish or opium, so too Barthes’s followers seem to lack their master’s breadth of vision, and only “live with” his ideas by reducing them to a dogmatic, quite unBarthesian vision that tranquilizes the tensions within Barthes’s teachings by ignoring them. Yet these tensions-and conflicts-like the tensions and conflicts in the works and theories of William S.Burroughs and Brion Gysinshould surely not be tranquilized, but scrutinized, since they indicate the limitations that Barthes appears to have identified in his theory of intertextuality.
