Filosofisk litteratur

Adorno
Althusser
Arendt
Aristotle
Arnold
Bakhtin
Barthes
Bataille
Baudrillard
Benedict
Benjamin
Bloch
Bourdieu
Brecht
Castoriadis
Chomsky
Cixous
Deleuze and Guattari
DeMan
Derrida
Descartes
Dewey
Durkheim
Eco
Elias
Fanon
Foucault
Freud
Gadamer
Geertz
Giddens
GofTman
Gramsci
Habermas
Hall
Hegel
Heidegger
Hoggart
Horkheimer
Hume
Husserl
Irigaray
Jakobson
James CLR
Jameson
Jung
Kant
Kristeva
Kuhn
Lac an
Leavis
Le Corbusier
Le DoeurT
Levinas
Levi-Strauss
Lukacs
Lyotard
Maclntyre
Malraux
Marx
Mauss
Merleau-Ponty
Mill
Nietzsche
Nussbaum
Oakeshott
Parsons
Peirce
Plato
Popper
Rawls
Ricoeur
Rorty
Rose
Rousseau
Said
Sartre
Saussure
Schutz
Simmel
Skinner
Smith
Sontag
Taylor
Weber
Williams
Wittgenstein

BARTHES, ROLAND (1915-1980)
French literary critic who was a key figure both in the development of
structuralism — in particular in the application of techniques derived
from semiology to the analysis of everyday life and popular (as well as
high) culture — and in the post-structuralist criticism of structuralism.
His work covers an enormous range of issues and topics, including the
nature of writing, authorship and reading; myth and ideology; fashion;
photography; narrative; the work of diverse writers (including Sade,
Michelet, Proust and Balzac) and composers; and subjectivity and
sexuality.
Barthes' early works, published in the 1950s, including Writing
Degree Zero (1967a) and Mythologies (1973), are centrally concerned
with the illusions of contemporary bourgeois culture, and particularly
the bourgeois denial of the 'opacity' of language. Within contemporary
culture, it is assumed generally that language is a neutral medium
that the writer may use, without restriction, to express and communicate
his or her ideas. This culture is concerned with verisimilitude, or
the faithful and unbiased reproduction of an independent reality (both
in visual representation and is verbal description). Barthes challenges
these assumptions, arguing rather that language (or more properly writing
— ecriture) is already bound up within particular social forms, and as
such does not report an independent reality, but creates a reality.
Different forms of writing bring with them 'realities', and crucially,
realities that fuse together accounts of the sort of facts that exist in the
world and evaluations of those facts. Because bourgeois culture denies
this opacity (i.e. the fact that language creates or presupposes a reality),
the value-laden and selective realities that are offered in language
appear to be natural, and thus the way in which the world really is. It
may be noted that Barthes' work on narrative, similarly, is concerned
with the structural conventions that a story must obey, if, paradoxically,
it is to appear to the reader as if it was unfolding, not according to a
convention, but rather naturally (Barthes 1977b).
In Mythologies, in particular, Barthes analyses the way in which a
second, 'mythological', level of meaning is added onto signs. The signs
under investigation are not only linguistic signs, but also any carriers of
meaning, including photographs and other visual images. Myth, for
Barthes, works by allowing a particular image to reinforce our prejudices,
making them appear to have universal validity. A particular
image (or signifier) is fused with a value system (which, at this mythological
level, is what is signified). Thus, for example, in Barthes' most
famous example, the photograph of a French Negro soldier comes to
reinforce the positive value and legitimacy of French imperialism.
Myth works through the way in which the soldier is photographed (in
this case, loyally saluting the French flag). Mythology hides nothing,
but presents everything with a certain inflexion. Precisely because [...] etc.