Category Archives: Roland Barthes

Clémentine Fauré-Bellaïche, A Protestant Air: Gide, Sartre, Barthes, and the Religion of Literary Modernity –  Cornell University Press, June 2026

Posted on April 6, 2026 by stuartelden

Clémentine Fauré-Bellaïche, A Protestant Air: Gide, Sartre, Barthes, and the Religion of Literary Modernity –  Cornell University Press, June 2026 A Protestant Air focuses on the Protestant connection linking three intellectual giants of twentieth-century French thought: André Gide, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Roland … Continue reading →

Posted in Jean-Paul Sartre, Roland Barthes, Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Trevor Pateman on Barthes as a teacher, and attending classes by Foucault, Derrida, Lévi-Strauss and Jakobson

Posted on February 18, 2026 by stuartelden

A very interesting short piece about spending the 1971-72 academic year in Paris – Trevor Pateman, “Roland Barthes: Writer, Intellectual, and also Professor”, Barthes Studies, 2025 (open access). It briefly mentions Foucault: But Barthes’ preferences were very similar to Foucault’s … Continue reading →

Posted in Claude Lévi-Strauss, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Roman Jakobson | Leave a comment

Umberto Eco, Philosophers, Mythologists and Linguists

Posted on February 15, 2026 by stuartelden

19 February 2026 marks the 10th anniversary of the death of Umberto Eco. I only heard Eco speak once, at a book reading in October 1995 for The Island of the Day Before. Mario Vargas Llosa was the other scheduled speaker, but … Continue reading →

Posted in Claude Lévi-Strauss, Emile Benveniste, Georges Canguilhem, Georges Dumézil, Italo Calvino, Jacques Lacan, Louis Althusser, Mapping Indo-European Thought in Twentieth Century France, Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Roman Jakobson, Sunday Histories, The Archaeology of Foucault, Umberto Eco, Uncategorized | 4 Comments

Indo-European Thought in Twentieth-Century France update 31 – Paris archives, library problems, and working towards a complete draft

Posted on February 12, 2026 by stuartelden

The draft of the Mapping Indo-European Thought manuscript is slowly coming together. I’ve just begun a Fernand Braudel fellowship at the European University Institute in Florence. My plan was to come here with a complete draft, and to leave with a better … Continue reading →

Posted in Claude Lévi-Strauss, Clémence Ramnoux, Emile Benveniste, Felix Guattari, Georges Dumézil, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, Mapping Indo-European Thought in Twentieth Century France, Marcel Detienne, Michel Foucault, Mircea Eliade, Roland Barthes, Sunday Histories, Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Roland Barthes’s Seminar on the Metaphor of the Labyrinth, and the presentations by Marcel Detienne, Gilles Deleuze and Pierre Rosenstiehl

Posted on February 1, 2026 by stuartelden

In 1978-79 Roland Barthes held a seminar at the Collège de France on “The Metaphor of the Labyrinth”. It was another spatial theme, after his discussion of territory and territoriality in Comment Vivre Ensemble/How to Live Together the previous year, which I … Continue reading →

Posted in Gilles Deleuze, Marcel Detienne, Roland Barthes, Sunday Histories | 5 Comments

Roland Barthes and the Question of Territory – Animals, Spaces and Sound

Posted on January 25, 2026 by stuartelden

Roland Barthes only taught at the Collège de France for a short period, from the 1976-77 academic year until shortly before his premature death in early 1980. I was drawn to his lecture courses there for my current work because he sometimes … Continue reading →

Posted in André Leroi-Gourhan, Boundaries, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Emile Benveniste, Felix Guattari, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Lacan, Mapping Indo-European Thought in Twentieth Century France, Music, Noam Chomsky, Roland Barthes, Roman Jakobson, Sunday Histories, Territory, Theory | 2 Comments

Jean Berthier, Voyage tranquille au pays des horreurs: Sollers, Barthes, Kristeva, Pleynet, Wahl… en Chine – Le Cherche Midi, January 2026

Posted on January 12, 2026 by stuartelden

Jean Berthier, Voyage tranquille au pays des horreurs: Sollers, Barthes, Kristeva, Pleynet, Wahl… en Chine – Le Cherche Midi, January 2026 Thanks to Barthes Studies on Bluesky for the link. Le roman documenté du voyage de Philippe Sollers, Roland Barthes, … Continue reading →

Posted in Julia Kristeva, Roland Barthes | 2 Comments

Did Benveniste read Derrida’s Of Grammatology?

Posted on October 12, 2025 by stuartelden

Jacques Derrida was certainly a careful reader of Émile Benveniste. He wrote a critique of Benveniste in “Le supplément de copule. La philosophie devant la linguistique” which appeared in 1971, in a special issue of Langages, “Épistémologie de la linguistique” edited … Continue reading →

Posted in Alexandre Koyré, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Emile Benveniste, Felix Guattari, Ferdinand de Saussure, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Julia Kristeva, Marcel Mauss, Martin Heidegger, Roland Barthes, Sunday Histories, Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Josué V. Harari, the Marquis de Sade, and Michel Foucault’s 1970 lectures in Buffalo

Posted on June 15, 2025 by stuartelden

Josué V. Harari plays a small but important role in the story of Foucault in the United States. A PhD researcher at the University at Buffalo when Foucault visited in the early 1970s, he went on to edit a 1979 volume … Continue reading →

Posted in Claude Lévi-Strauss, Edward Said, Friedrich Nietzsche, Georges Bataille, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Marcel Mauss, Maurice Blanchot, Michel Foucault, Michel Serres, Pierre Klossowski, Roland Barthes, Sunday Histories | 6 Comments

Books received – The Anti-Security Collective, Barthes, de Beistegui, Duchesne-Guillemin, Nabokov, JHI, Barua, Dumézil

Posted on August 27, 2024 by stuartelden

A pile of recently bought or sent books including The Anti-Security Collective, The Security Abolition Manifesto, Miguel de Beistegui, Lacan: A Genealogy, Jacques Duchesne-Guillemin, Zoroastre, Vladimir Nabokov’s translation of The Song of Igor’s Campaign, the most recent issue of the … Continue reading →

Posted in Georges Dumézil, Jacques Lacan, Mapping Indo-European Thought in Twentieth Century France, Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Uncategorized | Leave a comment