Classé, Surclasser, Déclassé , or, Roland Barthes, Classification without Class

Abstract

This article considers the ambivalent attitude of Roland Barthes to the act, status, and usefulness of classification and of classifying. It covers three distinct periods in his career: that of journalist with Marxist leanings in the 1950s, structuralist academic in the 1960s, and writer in the 1970s. Highlighting the figure of the duck-billed platypus, a metaphor for the scandalous exception, as deployed in Barthes’s writings, the article investigates the ways in which taxonomy, and other aspects of classification, led to, first, a critique of historical formalism, second, methodological accommodation with classification, and finally an attempt by the writer to avoid, atopically, all forms of classification, especially that of social class.