Towards the end of Mythologies (1957), Roland Barthes’s study of contemporary myths, he claimed: “I have tried to define things, not words” – surprising perhaps, given the philosopher’s popular association with language, communication and meaning. It is not that words are not also things; but the comment suggests an important corrective to the understanding of his work. Barthes was not (simply) an aesthete interested in forms, but a theorist who tried to understand how these forms constructed our imagination. As an early theorist and user of semiology, the science of signs and meanings, he offered analyses that attempted to find the intelligible in almost all human activities. Barthes was a Houdini, using the essay form to wriggle his way out of (but not necessarily, away from) the tight constrictions of post-war Hegelian thought. The essay, by being both literary andscientific, allowed Barthes to apply and, at the same time, to question Hegel’s philosophy of history as well as the tight master–slave dialectic that informed it. Thus existentialism, Marxism, phenomenology, sociology, Brechtian theatre, all slowly gave way in Barthes’s work to semiology, structuralism and semiotics.
