Barthes and Utopia

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This book takes as its central argument the fact that a surprising proportion of the ideas of Roland Barthes, the twentieth-century writer and literary theorist who played a significant part in the intellectual movements in post-war France, are formulated through an explicit vocabulary of utopia. As the meeting-point of his lifelong concern with history, language, literature, sexuality, and the organization of everyday life, utopia is a concept - part theoretical, part ethical - that mediates the supposedly conflicting emphasis of his various `phases'. From Marxism to structuralism, from textuality and hedonism to his final preoccupation with love, pity, and death, Barthes never stopped hypothesizing and fantasizing about how things might be otherwise - otherwise, that is, than in his own alienated and class-torn society.