ABSTRACT
In the extract from Mythologies, Roland Barthes develops what could best be seen as a semiotic theory of ideology, a term which is synonymous with his 'myth'. Mythology is the study of a type of speech, is but one fragment of this vast science of signs which Saussure postulated some forty years ago under the name of semiology. Myth is a peculiar system, in that it is constructed from a semiological chain which existed before it: it is a second-order semiological system. The signifier of myth presents itself in an ambiguous way: it is at the same time meaning and form, full on one side and empty on the other. There is a paradoxical permutation in the reading operations, an abnormal regression from meaning to form, from the linguistic sign to the mythical signifier. A signified can have several signifiers: this is indeed the case in linguistics and psychoanalysis. Grammatical exemplarity, French imperiality, is the very drives behind the myth.
