This collection gathers interviews with Roland Barthes conducted during the final decade of his life, from 1970 until 1979, the year before his death in 1980. The volume presents Barthes in conversation across a wide range of contexts—radio broadcasts, magazine features, academic exchanges, and literary journals—offering a more spontaneous and dialogic dimension to his thought than appears in his formal essays and books. Through these exchanges, readers encounter Barthes reflecting on his own intellectual trajectory, elaborating on the major works he published during this period, and responding to the cultural and political currents of 1970s France.
The Interview as Form and Barthes’s Conversational Style
The interviews reveal Barthes as a remarkably generous and patient interlocutor, willing to revisit his earlier positions, clarify difficult concepts, and engage with both sympathetic and skeptical questioners. Unlike the sometimes hermetic quality of his written work, these conversations show Barthes thinking aloud, occasionally contradicting himself, and demonstrating a playful relationship to his own ideas. He frequently uses the interview format to distance himself from rigid theoretical positions, insisting on pleasure, subjectivity, and the provisional nature of intellectual work.
Throughout these exchanges, Barthes returns repeatedly to certain preoccupations: the relationship between writing and the body, the tension between system and fragment, the political implications of aesthetic choices, and his own position within—and increasingly outside—the dominant intellectual currents of structuralism and semiology. The interviews capture him at a moment of significant transition, moving away from the scientific ambitions of structural analysis toward a more personal, even hedonistic approach to texts and culture.
Major Works and Themes of the Period
The interviews provide extensive commentary on the major books Barthes published during this decade, particularly S/Z (1970), The Pleasure of the Text (1973), Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes (1975), and A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments (1977). These works mark a decisive shift in his writing, and the interviews document his own understanding of this evolution.
When discussing S/Z, his exhaustive reading of Balzac’s short story “Sarrasine,” Barthes explains his method of dividing the text into lexias—small units of reading—and analyzing them according to five codes. He describes this work as both a culmination of his structuralist period and a movement beyond it, since the proliferation of codes and the attention to the text’s irreducible plurality ultimately exceed any systematic framework. Interviewers press him on whether this kind of analysis kills the pleasure of reading, and Barthes responds by distinguishing between different kinds of pleasure: the pleasure of analysis itself, and the pleasure of abandonment to the text. He suggests that S/Z represents an extreme of analytical reading that he would not repeat, having exhausted its possibilities.
The Pleasure of the Text receives considerable attention across multiple interviews. Barthes elaborates on his crucial distinction between plaisir (pleasure) and jouissance (bliss or ecstasy), though he acknowledges the difficulty of maintaining this distinction rigorously. Pleasure, he suggests, is linked to cultural comfort, to texts that confirm our expectations and provide satisfaction within established codes. Jouissance, by contrast, involves a kind of loss, even violence—the text that unsettles, that brings the reader to a crisis. He connects this to the body, insisting that reading is a physical experience, not merely an intellectual one. The interviews show him working through the political implications of this position: is the emphasis on pleasure a retreat from political engagement, or does it represent a more radical politics of the subject?
The autobiographical Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes prompts interviewers to ask about the relationship between the writing subject and the written subject, between sincerity and performance. Barthes insists that the book is not a confession but a text, constructed through fragments and organized alphabetically in its central section. He describes it as an attempt to write about himself in the third person, to treat “Roland Barthes” as a character, thereby avoiding the trap of imaginary self-knowledge. The interviews reveal his fascination with the fragment as a form—neither aphorism nor system, but something that resists totalization while maintaining a certain density.
A Lover’s Discourse generates extensive discussion about the relationship between personal experience and textual construction. Barthes explains that the book emerged from a seminar he conducted on the discourse of love, analyzing how lovers speak and the figures (in a rhetorical sense) that structure amorous speech. He draws on sources ranging from Goethe’s Werther to psychoanalysis, but insists the book is not a novel, not a treatise, and not autobiography—though it certainly draws on lived experience. The interviews show him defending the project against charges of sentimentality or regression, arguing that attending to the lover’s discourse means taking seriously a form of speech that philosophy and social science have largely dismissed or pathologized.
Intellectual Positioning and Theoretical Debates
A significant portion of these interviews involves Barthes positioning himself in relation to the major intellectual movements of the period. By the 1970s, structuralism—with which he had been closely associated—was being challenged and superseded by post-structuralism, deconstruction, and various forms of political critique. The interviews show Barthes navigating these shifts with considerable nuance.
He repeatedly distances himself from the label “structuralist,” insisting that he was never a pure structuralist and that his interest in structure was always tactical rather than dogmatic. He acknowledges his debt to Saussure and Lévi-Strauss but emphasizes that his own work has always been more concerned with the subject, with desire, and with what exceeds or escapes systematic analysis. At the same time, he defends the value of structural analysis against those who would dismiss it entirely, arguing that attention to codes and systems remains necessary even if it cannot be the final word.
His relationship to Marxism and political engagement emerges as a recurring theme. Barthes reflects on his earlier, more politically committed work, particularly Mythologies (1957), and acknowledges a shift in his concerns. Some interviewers challenge him on this, suggesting that his turn toward pleasure and subjectivity represents a retreat from politics. Barthes responds by questioning the assumption that political engagement must take a particular form, and by suggesting that attention to the body, to pleasure, and to the singularity of experience might itself have political implications. He is skeptical of dogmatic political positions and of the demand that intellectuals align themselves with particular movements or parties.
The interviews also address his relationship to psychoanalysis, particularly Lacanian psychoanalysis, which was enormously influential in French intellectual life during this period. Barthes expresses both fascination and reservation. He finds psychoanalytic concepts useful for thinking about texts and subjectivity, but resists being absorbed into psychoanalytic orthodoxy. He is particularly interested in the psychoanalytic attention to language and the unconscious, but wary of psychoanalysis as a master discourse that would explain everything.
Teaching, Writing, and Institutional Life
Several interviews focus on Barthes’s role as a teacher and his relationship to academic institutions. In 1976, he was elected to the Collège de France, the most prestigious academic position in France, and he reflects on what this means for his work. He describes the Collège as a unique institution where professors are required to present new research each year in public lectures, without the burden of examinations or degree requirements. This freedom appeals to him, and he discusses his plans for lecture courses that would explore topics like the preparation for writing a novel.
Barthes talks about his teaching style and his relationship with students. He describes his seminars as collaborative explorations rather than authoritative pronouncements, and emphasizes the importance of listening to students and allowing the seminar to develop organically. He reflects on the tension between his public role as an intellectual authority and his private sense of uncertainty and experimentation.
The interviews also reveal his thoughts on writing itself—the physical act, the discipline required, the relationship between writing and other activities. He describes his writing practice, his preference for working in the morning, his use of index cards for organizing fragments. He discusses the difference between writing for publication and writing for oneself, and the anxiety that accompanies the former. Writing, he suggests, is always a kind of performance, always involves an imagined reader, even when one tries to write “for oneself.”
Photography, Image, and the Visual
Barthes’s interest in photography surfaces in several interviews, anticipating his final book Camera Lucida (published in 1980, after this collection’s period ends). He discusses the peculiar nature of the photographic image—its relationship to reality, its temporal structure, its emotional impact. He distinguishes photography from other visual arts, emphasizing its indexical quality, the way it is a trace of something that was actually there. The interviews show him developing ideas about the photograph’s relationship to death, memory, and loss that would become central to Camera Lucida.
More broadly, he reflects on the relationship between text and image, and on the visual culture of contemporary society. He discusses advertising, fashion photography, and film, analyzing how images function in modern media. His earlier work on fashion and advertising is revisited, and he considers how his approach to these topics has evolved.
Japan and Cultural Difference
Several interviews touch on Barthes’s experience of Japan, which he had written about in Empire of Signs (1970). He describes Japan as offering a kind of utopian space—not the real Japan, he insists, but Japan as a system of signs that allowed him to think differently about Western assumptions. The interviews reveal his awareness that his “Japan” is a construction, a fantasy, but he defends the value of this fantasy for destabilizing European certainties.
He discusses specific aspects of Japanese culture that fascinated him: the organization of space, the treatment of food, the theatrical traditions, the writing system. What interests him is not Japan as an object of ethnographic knowledge but as a provocation to Western semiology, a place where signs seem to function differently, where meaning is organized according to different principles.
Language, Translation, and Style
Given that Barthes wrote in French and was deeply concerned with the specificity of language, several interviews address questions of translation and linguistic difference. He reflects on how his work has been received in other languages, and on the challenges of translating concepts that are embedded in French intellectual traditions. He discusses his own style—his use of neologisms, his preference for certain kinds of sentences, his attention to rhythm and sound.
The interviews also show him thinking about the relationship between spoken and written language. The interview format itself becomes a topic of reflection: how does speaking differ from writing? Can one think as rigorously in conversation as on the page? Barthes suggests that the interview allows for a different kind of thought—more spontaneous, more responsive, less controlled—and that this has its own value.
Autobiography, Subjectivity, and the Personal
A persistent thread through these interviews is the question of the personal and the autobiographical. Interviewers frequently ask Barthes about his own life, his experiences, his feelings, and he responds with a complex mixture of openness and evasion. He insists that he is not interested in autobiography as confession or self-revelation, but he acknowledges that all his work is in some sense autobiographical, marked by his particular history and desires.
He discusses his childhood, his relationship with his mother (who was still alive during most of this period), his experiences during the war, his illness (he had tuberculosis as a young man), and his position as a gay man in French society, though he is often indirect about the latter. The interviews reveal someone deeply concerned with protecting his privacy while also recognizing that the personal cannot be entirely separated from the intellectual.
Reception, Influence, and Legacy
The interviews document how Barthes understood his own influence and reception. He reflects on being read, misread, and appropriated by various groups and movements. He expresses surprise at the popularity of some of his books, particularly A Lover’s Discourse, which became a bestseller. He discusses the difference between academic reception and popular reception, and the strange experience of being a public intellectual.
He also addresses his relationship to younger scholars and writers, and to the intellectual generation coming after him. There is a sense in these interviews of someone aware that his moment of greatest influence may be passing, that new concerns and new methods are emerging. He responds to this with a mixture of curiosity and melancholy, interested in what comes next but also committed to his own path.
Context and Significance
This collection captures Barthes during a particularly rich and productive period, as he moved from the height of structuralism toward a more personal and experimental mode of writing. The 1970s in France were marked by intense intellectual ferment—the aftermath of May 1968, the rise of post-structuralism, debates about the relationship between theory and politics, the influence of psychoanalysis, and the emergence of new forms of cultural criticism. Barthes was a central figure in these debates, and the interviews show him engaging with them in real time.
The volume is significant for several reasons. First, it provides access to Barthes’s thought in a more accessible and conversational register than his formal writings. Second, it documents his own understanding of his intellectual trajectory and his major works. Third, it reveals the personal and institutional contexts that shaped his work. And fourth, it shows a major intellectual figure thinking through the relationship between theory and practice, between system and pleasure, between political commitment and aesthetic experience.
For readers of Barthes, these interviews are invaluable for understanding the development of his thought during his final decade. They show him working through the implications of his earlier work, responding to critics, and developing new directions. They also reveal a more human Barthes—witty, self-deprecating, occasionally uncertain, always curious. The interviews complement the formal writings, providing a different angle on the same preoccupations and showing how Barthes’s ideas emerged through dialogue and exchange rather than in isolation.
The collection stands as a testament to the interview as a form of intellectual work—not merely a supplement to “real” writing, but a distinct mode of thought with its own possibilities and constraints. Barthes clearly took these interviews seriously, using them as opportunities to develop ideas, test formulations, and engage with interlocutors. The result is a rich and multifaceted portrait of one of the twentieth century’s most influential critics and theorists, captured in a moment of transition and transformation.
