SOURCE: de Man, Paul. “Roland Barthes and the Limits of Structuralism.” In Romanticism and Contemporary Criticism: The Gauss Seminar and Other Papers, edited by E. S. Burt, Kevin Newmark, and Andrzej Warminski, pp. 164-77. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993.

[In the following essay, written in 1972, de Man discusses Barthes's ideas in Mythologies and several other works and notes that Barthes's theory of the impossibility of ultimate signification also calls into question the logic of any type of literary criticism.]

Despite the refinements of modern means of international communication, the relationship between Anglo-American and continental—especially French—literary criticism remains a star-crossed story, plagued by a variety of time lags and cultural gaps. The French have only just gotten around to translating an essay by Empson,¹ and by the time American works of literary theory or literary criticism appear in Paris, they often have lost much of their youthful freshness. There is more good will and more curiosity in the other direction, yet here too a mixture of misguided enthusiasm and misplaced suspicion blurs the issues. Even some of the most enlightened among English and American critics keep considering their French counterparts with the same suspicion with which English-speaking tourists might approach the café au lait they are served for breakfast in a French provincial hotel: they know they don't like it but aren't entirely certain whether, for lack of some ritualistic initiation, they are not perhaps missing out on a good thing. Others are willing to swallow French culture whole, from breakfast coffee to Mont Saint Michel and Chartres, but since intellectual fashions change faster than culinary tastes, they may find themselves wearing a beret and drinking Pernod when the French avant-garde has long since switched to cashmere sweaters and a diet of cold milk. The essays² by Roland Barthes that have just become available in excellent English translations date from 1953 to 1963; Mythologies, which appears in a regrettably shortened version, goes back to 1957.³ I cannot help worrying about all the things that could go wrong in the reception of texts that now combine a nostalgic with a genuine but out-of-phase revolutionary quality. Perhaps the most useful function for an American-based view of Roland Barthes may be to try to anticipate unwarranted dismissal for the wrong reasons as well as excessive enthusiasm for parts of the work with which Barthes himself might no longer be so pleased. Writing Degree Zero, the first of Barthes's essays to be translated into English, appeared with an introduction by Susan Sontag that raises very high expectations which, at first sight, may not seem to be fulfilled by these two later volumes.⁴

For despite the considerable emphasis on structure, code, sign, text, reading, intratextual relationships, etc., and despite the proliferation of a technical vocabulary primarily derived from structural linguistics, the actual innovations introduced by Roland Barthes in the analytical study of literary texts are relatively slight. Even in his more technical works such as S/Z, the study of a story by Balzac,⁵ and the various articles on semiology and on narrative techniques published mostly in the review Communications,⁶ the contribution to practical criticism is not as extensive as the methodological apparatus would lead one to expect. The work of “pure” structuralists such as the linguist Greimas and his group or of some among Barthes's most prominent associates, such as Gérard Genette or Tzvetan Todorov, is more rigorous and more exhaustive than Barthes's—though it is only fair to point out its avowed indebtedness to him. Hence the risk of disappointment or overhasty dismissal.

Barthes is primarily a critic of literary ideology, and as such, his work is more essayistic and reflective than it is technical, perhaps most of all when the claim to methodological precision is most emphatically stated. The close integration of methodology with ideology is an attractive characteristic of European intellectual life ever since structuralism became a public issue in the sixties—and, for better or worse, French writers on literature are still much closer to being public figures, committed to articulate positions, than their American equivalents. Barthes played a very prominent part in the recent “Battles of the Books,” and his work bears the traces of his involvements. It has to be read and understood as an intellectual adventure rather than as the scientifically motivated development of a method. He is at least as interested in the reasons for advocating certain technical devices as in their actual application. Hence the polemical tone of many of the essays, the many interviews, pamphlets, position papers, etc. Barthes should be read within the context of the particular situation to which he reacts, which is that of the ideological tensions underlying the practice of literary criticism in France. This situation is idiosyncratically French and cannot be transposed tel quel to the American scene. It does not follow however that the story of Barthes's intellectual journey is without direct interest for American readers. American criticism is notoriously rich in technical instruments but frustrated in its attempts to relate particular findings to the larger historical, semantic, and epistemological issues that have made these findings possible. That such difficulties exist is by no means a sign of weakness; it only becomes one if the broader inferences of a method are misconstrued. Barthes's enterprise is of wide enough significance to have paradigmatic value for all students of literature willing to put the premises of their craft into question.

A somewhat euphoric, mildly manic tone runs through Barthes's writings, tempered by considerable irony and discretion, but unmistakably braced by the feeling of being on the threshold of major discoveries: “A new anthropology, with unsuspected watersheds of meaning is perhaps being born: the map of human praxis is being redrawn, and the form of this enormous modification (but not, of course, its content) cannot fail to remind us of the Renaissance.”⁷ This statement dates from 1966, but one still finds similar trumpet blasts, only slightly muted, in recent utterances. It is the tone of a man liberated from a constraining past, who has “the earth … all before (him)” and who looks about “with a heart / Joyous, not scared at its own liberty.”⁸ The exact nature of this liberation can best be stated in linguistic terms, in a formula partly borrowed from Barthes himself: it is the liberation of the signifier from the constraints of referential meaning.

In all the traditional polarities used throughout the ages to describe the inherent tension that shapes literary language—polarities such as content/form, logos (what is being said) and lexis (the way of saying it), meaning/sign, message/code, langue/parole, signifié/signifiant, voice/writing, etc.—the implicit valorization has always privileged the first term and considered the second as an auxiliary, an adjunct or supplement in the service of the other. Language itself, as the sign of a presumably nonlinguistic content or “reality,” is therefore devalorized as the vehicle or carrier of a meaning to which it refers and that lies outside it; in the polarity man/language, it seems commonsensical enough to privilege the first term over the second and to rate experience above utterance. Literature is said to “represent” or “express” or, at most, to transform an extralinguistic entity which it is the interpreter's task to reach as a specific unit of meaning. Whatever shadings are used in describing the relationship (and they are infinite), it remains best expressed by the metaphor of a dependence of language on something in the service of which it operates. Language acquires dignity only to the extent that it can be said to resemble or to partake of the entity to which it refers. The Copernican revolution heralded by Barthes consists not in simply turning this model around (and thus in claiming that, instead of being the slave of meaning, language would now become its master) but in asserting the relative autonomy of what the linguist Saussure called the signifier, that is, the objective properties of the sign independently of their semantic function as code, such as, for example, the redness of a traffic light considered as an optical, or the sound of a word considered as an acoustic, event. The possibility for the signifier to enter into systems of relationship with other signifiers despite the constraint of the underlying⁹ meaning proves that the relationship between sign and meaning is not simply one of dependence. It suggests that the metaphorical language of hierarchies and power structures fails to do justice to the delicate complexity of these relationships. The science that sets out to describe the functions and interrelations of signifiers (of which reference is one among others) is called semiology or semiotics, the study of signs independently of their meanings, in contrast to semantics, which operates on the level of meaning. Barthes is one of the leading representatives of this science, not so much as its initiator—he is the first to acknowledge his debt to Saussure, Jakobson, Hjelmslev, and others—but as one of its most effective advocates.

One may well wonder why ideas about language leading up to the science of semiology acquired such polemical vigor in the hands of Roland Barthes. They had been around for quite a while, not only in the field of linguistics, but in various philosophies of language and in the formalist schools of literary criticism that dominated the scene in many countries, with the notable exception of France. It is true that the French have a way of taking hold, often belatedly, of other people's ideas and suddenly rediscovering them with so much original energy that they are positively reborn; this happened, in recent years, with Hegel, Heidegger, Freud, and Marx, and it is about to happen with Nietzsche. In Barthes's case, however, there is more to it than mere Gallic energy. His deliberate excursion into the realm of ideology is typical of the development that made the catchall phrase structuralism part of intellectual popular culture. And of all his books, the early Mythologies is perhaps best suited to illustrate the process I am trying to describe.

Barthes is a born semiologist, endowed with an innate sense of the formal play of linguistic connotation, the kind of eye and mind that notices at once how an advertisement for a brand of spaghetti seduces the onlooker by combining, in the picture of the red tomatoes, the white spaghetti, and the green peppers, the three colors of the house of Savoia and of the national Italian flag, thus allowing the consumer to taste all that makes Italy Italian in one single bite of canned pasta.¹⁰ He has used this gifted eye to scrutinize not only literature, but social and cultural facts as well, treating them in the same manner as a formalistically oriented literary critic would treat a literary text. Mythologies, a book that remains remarkably fresh although the facts it evokes belong to the bygone era of pre-Gaullist France in the early fifties, undertakes precisely this kind of semiocritical sociology. Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno are among the undisputed masters of the genre, but I doubt that Barthes, although he was an early exponent of the work of Brecht in France, knew their work well at the time of writing the Mythologies. The common ancestry is nevertheless apparent from the reference, in the important concluding essay on history and myth, to Marx's German Ideology, the model text for all ideological demystifications.

Almost any of the Mythologies can be used to illustrate Barthes's main insight. Take, for instance, the opening essay on catch-as-catch-can wrestling as an example of the contrast between a referential, thematic reading and the free play of signifiers. The point is not that, in the world of catch as catch can, all the fights are rigged; this would not make the event less referential but merely displace the referent from the theme, “competition,” to that of “deceit.” What fascinates Barthes is that actors as well as spectators fully acquiesce to the deceit and that all pretense at open contest has been abandoned, thus voiding the event of all content and all meaning. There only remains a series of gestures that can be highly skillful at mimicking competition (the triumph of winning, the abjection of defeat, or the drama of reversal or peripeteia) but that only exist formally, independently of an outcome that is no longer part of the game. Catch is not a game but a simulacrum, a fiction: Barthes calls it a “myth.”

Myths of this kind abound in the fabric of any society. Their attraction is not due to their actual content but to the glitter of their surface, and this glitter, in turn, owes its brilliance to the gratuity, the lack of semantic responsibility, of the fictional sign. This play is far from innocent. It is in the nature of fictions to be more persuasive than facts and especially persuasive in seeming more real than nature itself. Their order, their symmetry is possible because they are accountable only to themselves, yet these are precisely the qualities wishfully associated with the world of nature and necessity. As a result, the most superfluous of gestures also become the hardest to do without. Their very artificiality endows them with a maximum of natural appeal. Fictions or myths are addictive because they substitute for natural needs by seeming to be more natural than the nature they displace. The particular shade of bad conscience associated with fiction stems from the complicity involved in the partial awareness of this ambivalence, coupled with an even stronger desire to avoid the revelation, public or private, of this knowledge. It follows that fictions are the most marketable commodity manufactured by man, an adman's dream of perfect coincidence between description and promotion. Disinterested in themselves, they are the defenseless prey of any interest that wishes to use them. When they are thus being enlisted in the service of collective patterns of interest, including interests of the highest moral or metaphysical order, fictions become ideologies. One can see why any ideology would always have a vested interest in theories of language advocating correspondence between sign and meaning, since they depend on the illusion of this correspondence for their effectiveness. On the other hand, theories of language that put into question the subservience, resemblance, or potential identity between sign and meaning are always subversive, even if they remain strictly confined to linguistic phenomena.

Barthes's Mythologies are fully aware of this; they bring the subversiveness into the open by exposing the structure of the social myths as well as their manipulation. The political implications are clearly visible as the Mythologies move from the relatively harmless mystifications of catch as catch can or the Tour de France to consumer goods such as the Citroën DS, steak pommes frites, or the singing style of the baritone Gérard Souzay, to reach finally the domain of the printed word and image as they appear in Paris-Match or in the movies. After having been the target of a heavy-handed and vicious attack by Raymond Picard, a Sorbonne professor of French literature whose main field of specialization is the life of Racine, Barthes wrote perhaps his best “mythology” in the first part of the counterattacking pamphlet entitled Critique et vérité (1966), in which the ideological infrastructure of the French academic literary establishment is revealed with masterful economy and without an ounce of personal spite.

The demystifying power of semiology is both a source of strength and a danger. It is impossible to be so consistently right at the expense of others without some danger to oneself. Barthes's social criticism and the means used in accomplishing its highly laudable aim engender their own mystification, this time at the level of method rather than of substance. The very power of the instrument creates an assurance that generates its own set of counterquestions. In this case, the questions have to do with the claim of having grounded the study of literature on foundations epistemologically strong enough to be called scientific. The heady tone alluded to earlier appears whenever this claim is being made. Putting it, in its turn, into question nowise means a desire to turn the clock back, a foolish wish at best, for there can be no return from the demystifying power of semiological analysis. No literary study can avoid going through a severe semiocritical process, and there is much to be said for going through these fires with as urbane, surefooted, and entertaining a guide as Roland Barthes. What happens on the far side of this crossing remains an open question. At stake here is the future of structuralism as an intellectual movement but also as a methodological blueprint for scientific research that, like Rousseau's state of nature, “no longer exists, has perhaps never existed and will probably never come into being”¹¹ but which we nevertheless cannot do without.

As in Barthes's social myths, the referential, representational effectiveness of literary language is greater than in actual communication because, like his wrestlers, it is so utterly devoid of message. As we say of bombs that they overkill, we can say of literature that it overmeans. This referential suggestiveness, which accounts for the fact that one responds with much stronger emotion to a fictional narrative than to an actual event, is of course illusionary and something for which a science of literature (whether we call it stylistics or semiology) should account without being taken in by it. The classical way of dealing with the question is to bypass it, as when Roman Jakobson rightfully asserts that, in literature, language is autotelic, i.e., “focused on the message for its own sake,”¹² rather than on its meaning. By getting rid of all the mess and muddle of signification, the formula opens up a heretofore undiscovered world of scientific discourse covering the entire field of literary syntax, grammar, phonology, prosody, and rhetoric. With the inevitable result, however, that the privileged adequation of sign and meaning that governs the world of literary fictions is taken as the ideal model toward which all semantic systems are assumed to tend. This model then begins to function as a regulatory norm by means of which all deviations and transformations of a given system are measured. Literature becomes, to borrow a phrase from the title of Barthes's first book, a degree zero of semantic aberration. We know that it owes this privileged position to the bracketing of its referential function, which is dismissed as contingency or ideology and not taken seriously as a semantic interference within the semiological structure.

The seduction of the literary model has undoubtedly worked on Barthes, as it is bound to work on all writers endowed with a high degree of literary sensitivity. Up through Mythologies, it takes at times a rather naive form, as when, in the concluding essay of that book, literature, in opposition to ideology, is held up as a “transformation of the sign into meaning: its ideal would be … to reach, not the meaning of words, but the meaning of things in themselves” (Mythologies, 241). In the manifesto Critique et vérité, in which the vocabulary is more transformational than structural, closer to Chomsky than to Jakobson, the position is more complex but not essentially different. It now takes the form of a three-pronged, hierarchized scheme of approach to literature, in which a distinction is made among literary science, literary criticism, and literary readings. The controlling authority of the first discipline, the only one to be free from the error of semantization and to lay claim to truth, is beyond question:

If one is willing to admit the textual nature of the literary work (and draw the proper conclusions from this knowledge), then a certain type of literary science becomes possible. … Its model will undoubtedly be linguistic. … The object of literary science will have for its aim not to explain why a certain meaning has to be accepted, not even why it has been accepted (this being the task of historians), but why it is acceptable not in terms of the philological rules of literary meaning but in terms of the linguistic rules of symbolic connotation.

(Critique et vérité, 57-58; de Man's translation)

By emphatically drawing attention to its own methodological apparatus, S/Z, Barthes's most systematic piece of literary analysis to date, allows itself to be taken as a first exemplary move in the elaboration of such a science. The impact of this example on literary studies deserves to be extensive and long lasting, although it will be resisted in many ways, including the most insidious way of all: the use of praise in order to protect oneself against the consequences of insight. It will not do, for example, to dismiss the methodological claims as a device used by a writer of more traditional literary virtues. We cannot reassure ourselves by stressing the elegance, the sensitivity, the strongly personal, even confessional, element that is part of Barthes's tone and that makes him one of the “best” writers at work today in any genre, in the most traditional sense of this qualitative epithet. Nor can we merely classify and dismiss him as one more example of a “modern” alienated consciousness. The theoretical challenge is genuine, all the more so since the particular quality of Barthes's writing is due to his desire to believe in its theoretical foundations and to repress doubts about their solidity.

The unresolved question remains whether the semantic, reference-oriented function of literature can be considered as contingent or whether it is a constitutive element of all literary language. The autotelic, self-referential aspect of literature stressed by Jakobson cannot seriously be contested; why then is it always and systematically overlooked, as if it were a threat that had to be repressed? The just-quoted passage from Critique et vérité laying down the directives for the literary science of the future is a good example: Barthes can be seen fluttering around the question like a moth around a live flame, fascinated but backing away in self-defense. All theoretical findings about literature confirm that it can never be reduced to a specific meaning or set of meanings, yet it is always reductively interpreted as if it were a statement or message. Barthes grants the existence of this pattern of error but denies that literary science has to account for it; this is said to be the task of historians, thus implying that the reasons for the recurrent aberration are not linguistic but ideological. The further implication is that the negative labor of ideological demystification will eventually be able to prevent the distortion that superimposes upon literature a positive, assertive meaning foreign to its actual possibilities. Barthes has never renounced this hope; in a recent interview, despite many nuances and reservations, he still speaks of “the ultimate transparency of social relationships”¹³ as the goal of the critical enterprise. Yet, in the meantime, his methodological postulates have begun to erode under the impact of the question which he hoped to delegate to other, more pragmatic disciplines.

That literature can be ideologically manipulated is obvious but does not suffice to prove that this distortion is not a particular aspect of a larger pattern of error. Sooner or later, any literary study must face the problem of the truth value of its own interpretations, no longer with the naive conviction of a priority of content over form, but as a consequence of the much more unsettling experience of being unable to cleanse its own discourse of abhorrently referential implications. The traditional concept of reading used by Barthes and based on the model of an encoding/decoding process is inoperative if the master code remains out of reach of the operator, who then becomes unable to understand his own discourse. A science unable to read itself can no longer be called a science. The possibility of a scientific semiology is challenged by a problem that can no longer be accounted for in purely semiological terms.

This challenge reached Barthes from the somewhat unexpected quarter of philosophy, a discipline that earlier structuralists had discarded in favor of the so-called sciences of man: psychology, anthropology, and linguistics. The dismissal proved to be premature, based as it was on an inadequate evaluation of the specifically philosophical ability to put the foundations of its own discipline into question in a self-destructive manner that no science could ever dare to emulate. The work of Michel Foucault and especially of Jacques Derrida (whose determining influence on literary theory is confirmed by the recently published book La Dissémination) treats the problem of linguistic delusion in a manner which semiological critics of Barthes's persuasion cannot afford to ignore.¹⁴

Barthes's intellectual integrity is apparent in his reaction to this philosophical challenge. For the time being, it has taken the form of a retreat from the methodological optimism that still inspired S/Z. More recent theoretical papers—though not more recent books such as L'Empire des signes, inspired by a trip to Japan, or Sade, Fourier, Loyola, in which the semiological euphoria is allowed to reign undisturbed—sketch out a much less ambitious program that sounds like a return to a pragmatic collecting of literary data. One of these papers, available in English translation and sharply aware of the inability of semiology to account for the stylistic tension between written and spoken language, invites us to embark on

the search for models or patterns: sentence structures, syntagmatic clichés, divisions and clausulae of sentences; and what would inspire such work is the conviction that style is essentially a citational process, a body of formulae, a memory (almost in the cybernetic sense of the word), a cultural and not an expressive inheritance. … These models are only the depositories of culture (even if they seem very old). They are repetitions, not essential elements; citations, not expressions; stereotypes, not archetypes.¹⁵

Traces of many readings, from Propp to Gilles Deleuze, are noticeable in these sentences, and American readers will rightly think of Northrop Frye's Anatomy as a related enterprise. But the attitude cannot represent a definitive position. The mind cannot remain at rest in a mere repertorization of its own recurrent aberrations; it is bound to systematize its own negative self-insights into categories that have at least the appearance of passion and difference.

There is every reason to suppose that Barthes's future work will participate in this development, as he participated decisively in the development that led up to it. The arde review Tel Quel, whose attitude toward orthodox structuralism has always been healthily uncomplacent, recently devoted an entire issue to Roland Barthes,¹⁶ thus creating, probably unintentionally, the impression that it was trying to make a monument out of a man who is about as monumental as a Cheshire cat. Whoever assumes this to be possible would seriously misjudge the resilience of one of the most agile minds in the field of literary and linguistic studies.

As far as American criticism is concerned, its reaction to Barthes is still unclear. The recent translations are a useful but still inadequate first step in introducing his work to English readers. The Critical Essays stem from the period that precedes the development of semiology—roughly 1963—and are mostly interesting in that they map out the domain of Barthes's discontent with the prevailing methods of literary criticism in France during the fifties and his delight at discovering the new perspectives opened by his readings in linguistics. They create the somewhat misleading impression that his main interests are confined to the theater of Brecht and to the novels of Robbe-Grillet, and they should certainly not be taken as a comprehensive sample of his accomplishments.¹⁷ There is more semiological finesse to be gathered from the Mythologies. How the availability of his more important theoretical writings (Critique et vérité, S/Z, various theoretical papers) might influence American criticism can begin to be inferred from the reaction of some specialists who are already familiar with this work. It is fair to assume that it will meet with considerable resistance. Even as informed a scholar as the American practitioner of stylistics, Seymour Chatman, who has done a great deal to bring continental and American literary theory closer together, takes Barthes to task for putting the referential function of literary language into question. In a recent essay entitled “On Defining Form,” he writes: “It is difficult to understand why one should deny that there are, ultimately, contents or signifiés referred to. … The content of a literary work is not the language but what the language stands for, its reference. … The language is a mediating form between the literary form (structure-texture) and the ultimate content.”¹⁸ The main point to be learned from Barthes is not that literature has no referential function but that no “ultimate” referent can ever be reached and that therefore the rationality of the critical metalanguage is constantly threatened and problematic. I have suggested that Barthes may have been all too hopeful in having believed, for a time, that the threat could be ignored or delegated to historians. The self-assurance he thus gained was productive and has a negative validity, as far as it goes; now that it seems to know its horizons, it remains a necessary part of any critical education. To return to an unproblematic notion of signification is to take a step backwards into a pseudoscience too remote from its object to be demystified by it. As long as the “libération du signifiant” is being resisted for the wrong reasons, the full impact of Barthes's work cannot become manifest.

Notes

1. William Empson, “Assertions dans les mots,” Poétique 6 (1971): 239-70. It must be added, however, that the same review has also published very recent American work of younger authors, in some cases before they appeared in this country.

2. Roland Barthes, Essais Critiques (Paris: Seuil, 1964), trans. Richard Howard as Critical Essays (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1972).

3. The book consists of a series of brief texts on miscellaneous topics. The texts are complete in themselves, but several have been left out, probably on the wrong assumption that their local setting would make them unintelligible for English readers. Roland Barthes, Mythologies (Paris: Seuil, 1957), trans. Annette Lavers as Mythologies (New York: Hill & Wang, 1972). Further references appear in the text.

4. Writing Degree Zero, ed. Susan Sontag (New York: Hill & Wang, 1968).

5. The enigmatic title S/Z is deliberately and playfully ambiguous. It takes off from an anomaly in Balzac's spelling of his hero's name: the sculptor Sarrasine, who falls in love with the castrato singer Zambinella and whose name would normally be spelled Sarrazine. Beyond this fact, the title has many allusive connotations. The most obvious points to the work of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, author of an influential article on the revelatory power of letter substitutions. The formulaic figure S/Z mimics the notation S/s, also used by Jacques Lacan to represent the relationship between signifier and signified (significant and signifié) in which the slash, /, can be read as the symbolic sign of the repression or castration represented as a thematic event in Balzac's fiction. S/Z (Paris: Seuil, 1970), trans. Richard Howard as S/Z (New York: Hill & Wang, 1974).

6. Some of the essays first published in Communications have been reprinted in Roland Barthes, L'Aventure sémiologique (Paris: Seuil, 1985) and in English in Roland Barthes, The Semiotic Challenge, trans. Richard Howard, (New York: Hill & Wang, 1988).

7. Roland Barthes, Critique et vérité (Paris: Seuil, 1966), 48. Further references appear in the text.

8. See the opening of Wordsworth's Prelude: 1805, ed. E. de Selincourt, rev. Helen Darbishire (London: Oxford University Press, 1959), bk. 1, ll. 15-16.

9. One could just as well say, with equal metaphorical authority, overstanding (or transcendental) as underlying.

10. The example is taken from an article published in the journal Communications 8 (1964) and entitled “Rhétorique de l'image,” trans. Stephen Heath as “Rhetoric of the Image,” in Roland Barthes, Image-Music-Text (New York: Hill & Wang, 1977).

11. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discours sur l'origine et les fondements de l'inégalité parmi les hommes, in Oeuvres complètes, ed. B. Gagnebin and M. Raymond (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), 123. De Man translates.

12. Roman Jakobson, “Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics,” in Selected Writings, ed. Stephen Rudy (The Hague: Mouton, 1981), 3:25.

13. See Roland Barthes, “Réponses,” Tel Quel 47 (Autumn 1971), special issue on Roland Barthes, 107.

14. Jacques Derrida, La Dissémination (Paris: Seuil, 1972). In English as Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).

15. Roland Barthes, “Style and Its Image,” in Seymour Chatman, ed., Literary Style: A Symposium (London: Oxford University Press, 1971), 9-10.

16. Tel Quel 47 (Autumn 1971).

17. The important group of essays On Racine was published in English translation in 1964 but, possibly because of the specialized French subject matter, has not received the attention it deserves. The book raises the question of Barthes's complex relationship to psychoanalytical methods of interpretation, a topic perhaps best approached from the perspective of the later S/Z. See Roland Barthes, On Racine (New York: Hill & Wang, 1964).

18. In New Literary History 2 (1971): 219-28.

This essay appears to date from 1972. It was commissioned by the New York Review of Books as a review of extant translations of Barthes's work into English but was never printed. Correspondence indicates that the editors found the essay too technical for a general readership. The essay differs from the previously published version appearing in Yale French Studies, 77 (1990). It is based on a typescript that came to light after the YFS publication and that incorporates de Man's revisions. The notes accompanying this essay are de Man's. The editors have supplied additional bibliographical information where necessary (i.e., to bring the apparatus into conformity with current practices or to provide missing references).