Product Description

A series of essays in which Barthes seeks to tear away masks and demystify the signs, signals, gestures and messages through which western society sustains, sells, identifies and yet obscures itself.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #105646 in Books
• Published on: 1993-07-15
• Original language: French
• Binding: Paperback
• 128 pages

Customer Reviews

Great
...I was made to read this book as part of my Philosophy degree, a few years back. It was one of the few which had a lasting impression on me. Yes, you can compare it with the Tarantino Star Wars scene if you like ...but only if you read it superficially. The thing I figured out about French philosophy is that the way its worded initially strikes an Anglo-Saxon palate as being pompous, pretentious, and full of hot air. Maybe most of it is, I don't know - I loathe Derrida for these same reasons. But not this book by Barthes. Get past the initial culture shock and you find yourself starting to see how people mythologize just about everything. It's funny. It's illuminating. And it's also pretty salient, when you see how advertisers have tapped into these same impulses. Read it, and do yourself a favour. It's like an immunity shot against so much of the BS we seem to get fed.

This book is brilliant!
This is a masterpiece of social critique, picking apart the ideological underpinnings of many of the things which a lot of people take as "obvious". The unifying theme is the idea of "myth" - basically, a type of signification which projects an additional meaning onto an existing concept so as to make it carry a second, ideological meaning. Because the second meaning is smuggled into the sign, it isn't argued by those who use it, but appears as an "obvious" connotation. Barthes identifies and exposes many such myths in a variety of short essays (originally newspaper columns) dealing with aspects of French society in his day. In addition, this volume contains the long essay "Myth Today", in which Barthes sets out the theoretical underpinnings of his critiques.

If you're one of the people who's taken in by myths, this book could change your life. If not, you'll hopefully appreciate Barthes's efforts enough to start making your own efforts to critique myths. The only slight problem with this book is that its reference points are rather dated. For this reason it's worth reading it alongside something more recent, such as Len Masterman's Television Mythologies collection or one of the Glasgow Media Studies Group books. All in all, though, this can't be faulted.

why some reviewers hate this book
This book is a founding gesture in the history of semiotics. It carries a clear and precise recontextualization of Hjelmslev's theory of language (in the concluding section 'myth today'), one amplified and developed in Barthes' later "Elements of Semiotics". This subsequently became immensely important for social theory (and sociology in particular). It is a stage in Barthes' gradual move to a position that escapes Levi-Strauss' "underlying model" of structure, a transition that culminated in his extraordinary masterpiece "S/Z".

The idea is to begin the work of taking apart the self-evidence of everyday understanding (as produced by "democratized", mediatized and commercial interests) but using Hjelmslev's (as such a radical critique of Saussure) techniques rather than merely phenomenological ones. It is hardly surprising that some reviewers find this offensive: it is meant to be, to all those self-certainties they treasure.