Since the publication of Writing Degree Zero in 1953, Roland Barthes has been creating a body of criticism that alters in an absolute sense our traditional notion of what literature—and indeed what writing itself—is. As a semiologist—a practitioner of the science of signs and symbols—he stands outside language and outside meaning to pick out the codes of which they are composed. He has always been difficult, but his style has become increasingly quirky and self-absorbed over the years. The theme which unites the three writers he is examining here is that all are "Logothetes," or founders of languages; and it may be fairly said that Barthes himself is bucking for that status. Although these pieces were originally published separately, they were intended to join each other in a book. The modus operandi of his critique of the evil writer, the great utopian and the Jesuit saint is to strip each of his social context and hortatory intention. Each is isolated into the system that is the Text, the Barthes ideal. The effect is to make them ludicrous and lovable by exposing the dependency of their ideas, their world, on words and rhetorical structures. Under Barthes' ultra-violet scrutiny, they are charming fiddlers. There are actually two pieces on Sade, which frame the meditations on Fourier and Loyola, and these comprise the liveliest discourses. Sade, the libertine, also provides more "readerly" pleasure—Barthes' criterion of excellence and apparently also his own goal, since he skips along merrily from one apercu to the next like a man jotting down his dreams the morning after. Not everyone will be willing to trip after him, but this perversely poetic critic does generate a great deal of electricity.
Pub Date: March 15, 1976
ISBN: 0520066286
Page Count: 196
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1976
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
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