Roland Barthes is read about 1,266 times a day, in 67 languages.
A typical day, 30 days to 15 October 2026
The middle day of the days counted, so one week of news cannot move it. The line under it is the last 390 days, one point a day.
Something wrong?He argued the author was dead - that once a text exists, the writer's intent doesn't matter, only what the reader makes of it. The claim rattled literary criticism and made Roland Barthes the most quoted theorist in undergrad seminars for half a century.
A life in dates
Also in Deutsch
Photos 8
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In their own words 10
, Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.
The politician being interviewed clearly takes a great deal of trouble to imagine an ending to his sentence: and if he stopped short? His entire policy would be jeopardized!
The bourgeoisie is defined as the social class which does not want to be named.
About this person
Born in 1915, Barthes spent his career reading the world as a system of signs: not just novels and poems, but wrestling matches, soap commercials, the iconography of steak-frites. His 1957 Mythologies dissected the myths embedded in French popular culture, treating them with the same seriousness as high literature. A decade later, "The Death of the Author" became his most famous provocation, dismantling the idea that a writer's biography or intention should govern how we interpret a text. He taught at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales and later the Collège de France, moving through structuralism and into post-structuralism, his ideas seeding critical theory across disciplines. He died in Paris in 1980, a month after being struck by a laundry van.
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