Category Archives: Roland Barthes

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 | 3 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

Bibliothèque nationale de France – famous reader cards, including Simone Weil, Léopold Sédar Senghor and Roland Barthes

Posted on May 22, 2024 by stuartelden

Chroniques de la BnF 100 has some of the Bibliothèque Nationale’s famous reader’s cards Simone Weil, Léopold Sédar Senghor and Roland Barthes are online at the link. I previously shared Foucault’s card, with an attempt to decipher what it meant. Here’s … Continue reading →

Posted in Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes | Leave a comment