Barthes on Love

Abstract

Published in 1977, Fragments d'un discours amoureux was an immediate success, rapidly becoming something of a French bestseller. Magazines, from Elle to Playboy, jostled for interviews. A television program cordially brought together Barthes and FranCoise Sagan to confer on love (the same television and same Sagan who had served as witness in book to the most worn-out of stereotypes: just last night, I heard it uttered in a play by Sagan: every other night, on TV, someone says: I love you).2 A theatrical adaptation by Pierre Leenhardt played in Paris at Theatre Marie-Stuart. And novelist Marie Cardinal, misunderstanding an invitation by Nouvelles littdraires to provide a pen-portrait of Prime Minister Raymond Barre, wrote a piece instead on ... Roland Barthes, ending with confession that what annoyed her most was that he, not she, had managed to produce such a fine account of love. Fragments, in other words, marks great moment of cultural resonance of Barthes's writing, its prestige, Barthes as almost a novelist, whereas Mythologies, twenty years earlier, had marked moment of force of his writing as cultural analysis and criticism (analysis and criticism of, among other things, very magazines --the journal Elle, a real treasure-house of myth-that now sought him for their pages). Between two books runs a whole movement (that of semiology, of study of signs and systematic conditions of their signification, followed by increasing attention to terms of production of meanings and of relations of individual as subject in that production) in which Barthes can be seen as a constant initiator of shifts and displacements, his own work returning more and more, spiral of a return differently, to questions posed from a certain liking for aspects of an innerness of language and experience, from points of subjective response of intensity: pleasure (Le Plaisir du texte [ 1973]), I, novel of masks and personae and resistances of ego (Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes [1977]), or, as in Fragments, a discourse of love. Fragments had one beginning in January, 1975 in Barthes's seminar at Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. Just as previously he had devoted two years of seminar to analysis of Sarrasine, a short novel by Balzac,