BARTHES AND THE LESSON OF SAENREDAM.

Caygill, Howard

This article focuses on writer Ronald Barthes and his works. In his late dialogue Parmenides, Plato seems to be on the point of overturning the main achievement of his philosophy, the doctrine of ideas. The aged Parmenides disquiets the young Socrates by asking if ideas apply not only to abstractions such as the just, the beautiful, and the good, but also to hair, mud, dirt, or anything else particularly vile and worthless. Socrates thinks not, but admits being troubled by a doubt that forces him to retreat for fear of falling into some abyss of nonsense and perishing. This hint of an obverse Platonism that haunts the doctrine of ideas shares much with the later work of Barthes, which, qualifying a life's work in semiotics, seems to turn away from signs and the inquiry into their conditions of meaning to seek meaning in the smudge and the blemish.

BARTHES, Roland, 1915-1980; HUMANITIES; AUTHORS; SEMANTICS; PLATONISTS; PHILOSOPHERS; ANCIENT philosophy; SEMIOTICS

Diacritics, 2002, Vol 32, Issue 1, p38

0300-7162

Academic Journal

10.1353/dia.2004.0013