ABSTRACT
A seemingly all-sufficing love of exploring the world as constructed in language informs the ‘mind of theory’ Roland Barthes shares with friends and intellectual contemporaries in the orbit of Tel Quel. His is a world viewed as discourse, text and sign, a world lightened of intrinsic meaningfulness, divorced from nature and Origin - indefinitely deconstructible as mind-made artifice:
He feels himself in solidarity with all writings which affirm as a principle that the subject is merely an effect of language [...] he imagines a very vast science of the effects of language, in the enunciation of which the scientist would at length include himself.2
