French literary critic, semiotician, and essayist; the writer who, more than any other figure of his generation, opened the everyday products of modern culture — wrestling matches, soap-powder advertisements, the new Citroën, the face of Garbo, the striptease — to the kind of close reading that had previously been reserved for canonical literature, and who in doing so founded what is now called cultural studies. From the early Writing Degree Zero (1953) through the late Camera Lucida (1980), his work moved restlessly across structuralism, semiotics, post-structuralism, and a final autobiographical mode that resists all of the above, but it remained recognizably the same project: the attempt to make criticism itself a form of pleasure and a form of ethical attention.
Barthes was born in Cherbourg in 1915 and lost his father, a naval officer, the next year at the Battle of the North Sea; he was raised by his mother in straitened circumstances in Bayonne and then Paris. He contracted tuberculosis as a student, which kept him out of the war and away from the École Normale Supérieure, and spent much of the 1940s in sanatoria — an enforced reading life that shaped what came after. His first major book, Writing Degree Zero (1953), was both a Marxist account of literary form and a polemical response to Sartre's What Is Literature?: where Sartre had argued that prose was a transparent medium of political commitment, Barthes argued that every form of writing — every choice of vocabulary, syntax, tense — is itself an ideological act, and that the dream of a "neutral" or "white" writing is a particular historical project, not a natural condition.
Mythologies (1957) gathered a sequence of short essays Barthes had written for the magazine Les Lettres nouvelles, each taking some artifact of postwar French popular culture — wrestling, the brain of Einstein, plastic, the Tour de France, wine and milk, the Blue Guide — and reading it as what he called a "myth": a sign-system that naturalizes a particular bourgeois worldview by presenting it as common sense. The closing theoretical essay, "Myth Today," provides the semiotic apparatus. The book has had a longer cultural-political afterlife than any other in the structuralist canon: its method — that the products of mass culture are not too trivial to be read seriously, and that the seemingly innocent surface of the everyday is dense with ideology — is the founding gesture of cultural studies, of much of the "reading" of advertising and television that became central to the humanities in the 1970s and after.
The structuralist period — Elements of Semiology (1964), The Fashion System (1967), S/Z (1970, the elaborate code-by-code reading of a Balzac novella) — was Barthes at his most systematic, but the famous short essay of that period was the polemic "The Death of the Author" (1967), which argued that the meaning of a text is constituted by its readers and not guaranteed by the intentions of its writer. The essay is now one of the most-cited critical statements of the late twentieth century, regularly invoked, regularly attacked, and regularly misread.
The post-1970 work is looser, more personal, more avowedly hedonist, and in some ways the most distinctive: The Pleasure of the Text (1973), the autobiographical and fragmentary Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes (1975), and A Lover's Discourse: Fragments (1977), which became an unlikely international bestseller. Camera Lucida (1980), written in mourning for his mother, is his last book and the one most likely to remain widely read: a meditation on photography organized around two terms — the studium (the conventional, culturally readable content of a photograph) and the punctum (the wounding detail that punctures the viewer and that cannot be programmed in advance) — and around a single photograph of his mother as a child, which he describes in the book but refuses to reproduce. The book is the major counterweight to Sontag's On Photography (1977), with which it is in continuous implicit dialogue, and it remains the indispensable second text on the medium. Barthes was struck by a laundry van crossing the rue des Écoles in Paris in February 1980, a month after Camera Lucida was published, and died of his injuries a month later.
Barthes is on the graph because Mythologies is one of the founding works of cultural-political criticism — the demonstration that the products of mass culture can be read as ideological texts — and because Camera Lucida is the indispensable companion to Sontag's On Photography, anchoring the graph's photography axis at its theoretical end as Sontag does at its ethical-essayistic end.