Roland Barthes

Partant des débats entre « film joué » et « film non-joué » ayant entouré la sortie d’Octobre d’Eisenstein en 1927, nous interrogeons la notion de punctum de Barthes à travers le rapprochement qui a pu en être fait de celle d’attraction. Remettant en question l’existence même du punctum, d’une vérité intrinsèque de l’image, nous proposons avec Merleau-Ponty de cesser de considérer l’image cinématographique comme une « seconde chose » pour en faire valoir la rencontre, seule capable de nous en faire comprendre la réalité. Nous rappelons alors la figure de « précession réciproque » évoquée par Merleau-Ponty dans L’Œil et l’esprit, qu’il identifie à la « vision même », pour montrer combien elle peut nous aider à saisir les potentialités de l’image cinématographique déjà entrevues par Eisenstein qui voyait en elle un phénomène de « momification dynamique ».

The following essay will look at the issue of neologisms and the ‘chains of
Equivalences’ as well as ways of attaining jouissance in James Joyce’s book “Ulysses”.

The vast amount of neologisms, syllogisms, allusions, which are utilized throughout this book raise a rather substantial issue, in that the meaning/comprehensibility of the text is constantly at odds apropos the execution - act of writing. The autonomous potential – literariness – of Ulysses’ language possesses a considerable freedom from referential restraint, while at the same time it makes it epistemologically highly volatile and fragile. Suffice to say that a single signifier is capable of launching intricate phenomenological repercussions, which ought to overcast the sentiment (i.e., considerations of truth and falsehood, beauty and ugliness, good and bad etc.)  Moreover, the ‘word’ itself becomes merely a vicissitude/interchangeable with other signifiers. In other words, the Signifier word-sic and its grammatical omnipotence – literality - is perpetually trivialized and belittled by the contingency and arbitrariness of the mise-en-scene.

Suspendus aux lèvres d’un conteur, incapables d’interrompre la lecture d’un roman, captivés par un film haletant, nous faisons tous l’expérience quotidienne de ce plaisir apparemment paradoxal que nous tirons de notre insatisfaction provisoire face à un récit inachevé. Bien qu’une mode esthétique et théorique ait tenté de nous convaincre que ce plaisir était honteux, on peut néanmoins avoir l’intuition que le cœur vivant de la narrativité réside précisément dans ce nœud coulant, toujours plus serré à mesure que nous progressons dans l’histoire, qui nous attache à l’intrigue et creuse la temporalité par l’attente impatiente d’un dénouement. Si le récit a quelque chose à voir avec la manière dont nous éprouvons le temps, cette expérience n’apparaît jamais avec autant d’éclat que dans le suspense, la curiosité ou la surprise qui font la force des intrigues fictionnelles. La compréhension des fonctions narratives engage donc non seulement l’analyse littéraire, linguistique et sémiotique, mais aussi l’analyse cognitive et la psychologie des émotions.

This article contributes both to the conversation about visual communication opened by Roland Barthes’ classic book, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography and current research in communicology (semiotic phenomenology). The article offers an interpretation (third step) to the reduction (second step) of the description (first step) of Barthes’ semiotic phenomenology of communication. Attention is paid to time consciousness, the concept of the punctum, and the interplay between presence and absence opened by it. The interpretation draws on Jean Luc Nancy’s philosophy of visual images in order to expand the discussion of three emergent themes in Camera Lucida: the unseen, exposure, and death. Discussion of these themes from a communicology perspective deepens our understanding of visual communication as a sign–body experience.

In Narrative Structure in Comics: Making Sense of Fragments, Barbara Postema uses the notion of the gap to explain how comics create meaning. As texts that combine words and images, comics rely on the verbal register to communicate meaning, but they also use images in a number of different ways, many of which are based on leaving out information, forcing readers to fill in the blanks. By foregrounding the narrative qualities of comics, Postema demonstrates the ways in which comics are structured at every level of communication—image, panel, sequence, narration—to guide the reader to assemble the narrative from fragments. Besides advancing a new understanding of the structure of meaning in comics, this work’s exploration into the form of comics integrates two traditionally separate approaches to the study of comics, namely, the semiotics of the Franco-Belgian school of visual culture and comics studies, and the practice-based comics theory advanced by American cartoonists Will Eisner and Scott McCloud. It combines these traditions to advance a novel analytical framework and a vocabulary to study the form, an approach that is demonstrated through a series of readings of contemporary North-American comics.

Before we can assess the impact of the digital revolution on our conception of psychic work, the author argues, we need to understand how the new spatio-temporal coordinates instituted by the Digital Revolution demand a revisioning of our conceptions of objectivity, subjectivity, and intersubjectivity. The melancholic dimension and the narcissistic regression involved in the virtual must, therefore, be reconceived if we are to recognize the transfiguring power of the virtual phenomenon.

Metrical patterns and metrical narrativities are analyzed in the free verse of oral poet, language conservator, and slam guru Bob Holman using Annie Finch’s theory of the metrical code. The term metrical code denotes the way a free verse poem’s partial, irregular, and/or conflicting usages of meter encode the poet’s relationship to the poem’s content, other meters, and literature. The concept of metrical action, or the ways in which meter connotes, builds suspense, creates a narrative, and renders a poem dialogic with other poems, is introduced.  Scansions of Holman’s poetry in griot, postmodernist, avant, and performative free verse styles are deconstructed and metrically decoded. The meaning of meter in Holman’s work is discussed along with the connection between meter and the immediate, “one-time” nature of oral poetry. The metrical mythology of an oral poet in the 21st century is explored.

This article examines a chronicle of Bohumil Hrabal's life and work: Hlucna samota: sto let Bohumila Hrabala, 1914-2014, Too Loud a Solitude: A Hundred Years of Bohumil Hrabal, 1914-2014, the most valuable of all the publications to have come out on Hrabal's centenary. This chronology is outstanding for its critical presentation of the rich and varied archive material, in which the authors place Hrabal's key biographical and literary details, as well as some marginalia too, on his timeline. This is the first truly critical examination of Hrabal's life, and the most systematically supported by a knowledge of the sources. The chronology also raises questions that go beyond its intended horizons, as the authors are not only solving the riddles of literature, but they are also presenting the twists and turns of his life. However, as Hrabal assumes a creative and sometimes an almost imperceptibly ironic view of history and various events in the past, it would be worth considering an examination of his life from the standpoint of literature (and not just of literature from the standpoint of his life), which in spite of his considerable literary stylization is normally considered to be realistic and authentic in its way. This article focuses on further use of alternative sources that might help us to reveal certain narrative strategies that can be summarized under the term "illusion of reality". "Realism" can be seen in Hrabal's case to be an illusion constructed by particular strategies, which we can understand better by taking into account the alternative contexts.

The article examines Edward Linley Sambourne’s cartoon series ‘Mr. Punch’s Designs After Nature’ which appeared in Punch from the late 1860s onwards. The images show women morphing into animals and birds, or wearing them as exaggerated forms of decoration. Some of the cartoons explicitly satirise specific fashion trends or silhouettes, whilst others poke fun at fashion generally. The author’s focus is on the iconography of ‘Mr. Punch’s Designs After Nature’, the real 1860s and 1870s fashions giving rise to these images' creation, as well as the visual and textual tradition of satire within which Sambourne’s cartoons can be situated. The article pays particular attention to the re-evaluation of the relationship between human and non-human in the light of Darwin’s ideas, and to the gender-related aspects of Sambourne’s zoomorphic images.

Ce livre participe à la question de l’écriture des mathématiques, de leur hermétisme, de leur inutilité aussi bien, qu’on la prenne au sens métaphysique de Blaise Pascal, ou au sens pragmatique de l’application que nous imposent aujourd’hui certains tenants des algorithmes. Dans ce livre s’impose la référence à Jacques Roubaud — poète et mathé- maticien et historien critique—, l’allusion à Yves Bonnefoy, à Stéphane Mallarmé, à Samuel Beckett, et à Edgar Allen Poe. Il y a le parcours de la galerie de génies tels Galois. Et les réflexions de Leopardi, ou de Malherbe, parmi tant d’autres.

Cet ouvrage se débarrasse du genre de l’anthologie, pour accéder, grâce à trois voix bien différentes mais parallèles, à une réflexion qui n’évite pas la question de l’esthétique et du sublime, et n’en fait pas l’objet d’une dissertation imposée en classe de terminale. Est en jeu l’invention humaine, sa construction ou tout aussi bien sa découverte, mais en plus la façon dont l’inventeur aussi bien que le lecteur se les approprient. Avec le beau dilemme de savoir si doivent se louer le résultat ou la façon de le trouver ou de le retrouver, problème qui touche chacun de nous, mathématicien ou non, poète on non.

This essay analyzes Zorns Lemma (1962–1970), a film made by American artist Hollis Frampton (1936–1984). Noting Frampton’s use of Robert Grosseteste’s thirteenth-century treatise De luce [‘On Light’] as a key aspect of the film’s soundtrack, the essay argues that Grosseteste’s investigations of light as a medium played a key role in Frampton’s theorization of cinema. As such, his interest in medieval light theories spurred him to develop a powerful, idiosyncratic response to prevailing discourses of media and medium specificity during the 1960s. When examined in light of contemporaneous projects by Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922–1975) and Roland Barthes (1915–1980), Zorns Lemma points up the significance of medieval thought in the period’s conceptions of art and time.

Roland Barthes' famous essay Camera Lucida. Reflections on Photography first published in Paris, 1980, has been honoured as well as criticised in countless books and papers within the last decades. It seems to be common sense that the philosophical approach of this semiologist has contributed to our understanding of the nature and essence of photography from a spectator's point of view. His concept of the indexical character of photography, instead, was eyed with suspicion. Barthes himself foresaw this when he wrote: "the Photograph, they say, is not an analogon of the world; what it represents is fabricated". Nevertheless, Barthes cherishes the idea that this "argument is futile: nothing can prevent the Photograph from being analogical". This assertion has been questioned rightly. But, as far as I am aware of, the layout of the photographic pictures printed in the book, which were chosen and discussed by Barthes, have never been scrutinised critically. This paper aims to undertake a first step in order to fill this gap by focusing on one concrete example.
In his 39th chapter, Barthes refers to a photograph taken by Alexander Gardner in 1865 that shows Lewis Payne. The picture is accompanied by a quotation of the text itself and reads as follows: "He is dead and he is going to die...". With this the author wants to emphasise the concept of the punctum of the photograph, which means in this case the visual experiencable anticipation of the death of every single person being photographed. He believes that this aspect is most obvious in historical photographs such as the one of Lewis Payne who was sentenced to death. As the premise of this readability and, supplementary, as a fundamental condition of photographic images, Barthes defines their pure mimetic capacity as mentioned above. Following Barthes, it is only the motif but never the picture itself that we see.  Therefore, it seems to be astonishing that he chose exactly this historical photograph in order to underline his argument since it is rather qualified to make a claim to the contrary.  When we have a look at the image as it appears in the book, he can hardly be doubted; whereas its original size, as to be seen in the Library of Congress in Washington, let us view the picture in a different light. What has got lost on its way into this book? What was cut off?
This paper will show that the photograph bears distinctive traces of its production which enable us to reconstruct the photographic setting and, consequently, to initialise a new dimension of interpretation.

Este estudo visa a articulação entre fotografia e melancolia presentes na obra do escritor lusitano Al Berto (1948-1997). Essa relação se intensifica e se ilumina com base em Giorgio Agamben e Sigmund Freud. No caso da articulação com o psicanalista, a abordagem é menos associada à afecção melancólica – suas derivações nosográficas e psicologizantes –, do que àquela feita pela via estética, mais explícita no pensador italiano. As relações mais estreitas entre fotografia e melancolia se estabelecem ainda por meio das reflexões de Roland Barthes e Susan Sontag, autores que dedicaram livros e estudos sobre o assunto.

Drawing from Alain Badiou's concept of inaesthetics, which proposes that art conditions philosophical thought, this essay offers an inaesthetic reading of The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros (2005) and suggests that it is a film that offers enabling possibilities in the thinking of love by providing the spectator with a different experience of cinematic attention in the visual field. The author suggests that the film raises the philosophical question " What is love? " and attempts to answer the very question it poses through punctual encounters, which are moments of cinematic interruption—described by Roland Barthes as " what I add. .. and what nonetheless is already there " (A Lover's Discourse 55)—that may offer opportunities for philosophical speculation. This essay further argues that those punctual moments initiate a new form of attention that is not sustained by " visual pleasure, " as theorized by Laura Mulvey, but by the " movement of thought " (Badiou, Cinema 17). The film uses that mode of attention as a way to think about love while also suggesting that love itself is a form of attention.

Introduction / Richard J. Gray II and Betty Kaklamanidou -- Globalization. Exceptional Recognition: The U.S. Global Dilemma in The Incredible Hulk, Iron Man, and Avatar / Anthony Peter Spanakos -- "You Took My Advice About Theatricality a Bit -- Literally": Theatricality and Cybernetics of Good and Evil in Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, and X-Men / Johannes Schlegel and Frank Habermann -- Power, Choice, and September 11 in The Dark Knight / Christine Muller -- Gender. The Mythos of Patriarchy in the X-Men Films / Betty Kaklamanidou -- Vivacious Vixens and Scintillating Super-Hotties: Deconstructing the Superheroine / Richard J. Gray II -- Evolving Portrayals of Masculinity in Superhero Films: Hancock / Christina Adamou -- Genre. Genre and Super-Heroism: Batman in the New Millennium / Vincent M. Gaine -- Super-Intertextuality and 21st Century Individualized Social Advocacy in Spider-Man and Kick-Ass / Justin S. Schumaker -- The Watchmen, Neo-Noir and Pastiche / Phillip Dav...

In 1957 Roland Barthes published Mythologies, a text examining how culture has the power to shape social perception and interpretation of the world around us. Following the same line of thought, in 2010, black feminist and theorist Moya Bailey coined the term ‘misogynoir’ to mimic sentiments expressed by early black feminists such as Pauli Murray surrounding the earlier vernacular “Jane crow.” These terms verbalized concepts of intersecting racial and gender hierarchies that uniquely converge to articulate the discrimination experienced by black women in particular. These discriminations in society that targeted black women arose from a long history of the dynamics between mythologies in a Barthesian sense within our collective and immutable perception of the world. The word misogynoir encapsulates the professed ‘second language’ or code that shapes our reality according to Barthes. Misogynoir played a major influencing role in the development of the Civil Rights Movement, which acted as a critical notion in the development of the narrative and actions of the Civil Rights Movement. Through an analysis of the movement so intertwined with and influenced by misogynoir, this paper aims to more fully understand its impact on hierarchical subjugation established through cultural signs and semiology’s second language, as well as how we interpret the world around us. Hence, the Civil Rights Movement serves as a lens to examine the intersections between race and gender, and the consequential manifestation of misogynoir, in patriarchal society.

Presque trente ans après sa disparition, le critique-écrivain suscite toujours autant la lecture et le commentaire. Cette fois, il « refait signe », comme le déclare le titre d'un numéro du Magazine littéraire, à travers deux publications posthumes, les Carnets du voyage en Chine et le Journal de deuil, où on retrouve avec bonheur l'intellectuel émouvant et personnel, fragilisé par le deuil, reclus dans sa solitude méditative, en éternel décrochage des effets de mode et des discours trop répétés.

Khaidir Anwar telah menghadirkan teori kebudayaan, dan jika diikuti oleh para murid dan  koleganya di Kampus Limau Manis Universitas Andalas Padang, maka sudah mengalirlah sebuah mata air keilmuan, sebuah mazhab Limau Manis. Dulu skripsiku dibimbing oleh beliau, dengan demikian pemikiran beliau yang aku pahami, menurutku, adalah sebuah teori kebudayaan, dengan kata lain; itu adalah mutiara, yang sempat aku pungut, teori itu sudah aku gunakan dalam penulisan tesis S2-ku. Seandainya teori ini berkembang, mengalir sepanjang zaman, aku berharap ini menjadi pahala dan penghargaan untuk beliau di alam baka sana. Hormatku pada beliau.

《電影符號學：從古典到數位時代（新版）》是電影理論工作者齊隆壬長期研究的成果，詳細耙梳並剖析符號學的發展源流與變革，以及著名學者的理論，如索緒爾、李維史陀、羅蘭巴特、皮爾斯等。接著帶出電影理論的關鍵人物──克利斯蒂安．梅茲，闡釋他如何把符號學，以及相關領域如語言學、結構主義、精神分析運用至電影分析，奠定電影符號學在電影理論界的重要地位。也因電影符號學涵蓋的範圍甚廣，而讓電影分析有了更多可能性。除了回顧西方符號學與電影符號學的理論與沿革，作者也把討論拉回台灣與中國大陸，介紹電影符號學在兩岸的發展脈絡與特點。

　　在理論層面之外，作者也引用許多影片分析的範例，清楚說明電影符號學是如何應用於電影研究之中。而近來電影科技日新月異，已進入數位電影時代，因此第九章即在討論電影由膠卷轉為數位影像的變革，除了提及古典電影如《波坦金戰艦》、《月球之旅》等必會出現的經典例子，更舉《阿凡達》、《全面啟動》、《雨果的冒險》為例，把電影符號學理論連結至最新的影片發展上。

　　電影符號學雖看似古典，在現今的數位環境中非但沒有過時，反而受到電影理論學者大量援用，依然能夠提供理論架構和基本論點。而本書由符號學的發展開始，一直到電影符號學與數位電影的連結，提供了全面且獨到深入的見解，堪稱是近期電影理論的重量級著作，研究電影者不可不看！

This short article examines a photograph in a 1956 catalogue for the French department store Galeries Lafayette in the context of the country’s postwar modernization, Paris renovations and the development of the readymade garment industry. It relates the production of image to the construction and dissemination of fashion and femininity in the print media. In particular, it notes how the use of changing technologies in image production, notably Kodachrome color film, shaped and exposed these constructions. Drawing on the notion of myth, as formulated by Roland Barthes, this article asks how the image spoke to modernity’s inherent contradictions, notably between old and new, in its depiction of bodies, plastic and synthetic fabric. Finally, it shows why this was particularly relevant in the culture of postwar France.