Roland Barthes Writing the Political

Book excerpt: Roland Barthes and the Political: Dialectics of Historiography, Politics and Self re-reads and re-purposes for the twenty-first century France's most important writer of the twentieth century. It argues that Barthes's wide-ranging analyses - from Voltaire to Nietzsche, Marx to myth, gay love to Japan - can be applied to debates and controversies in the contemporary world, in what he called the writer's 'double grasp'.