"Simply a Particular Contemporary": Interviews, 1970–79

A major collection of essays and interviews from an iconic 20th-century philosopher in five volumes, now all available together in paperback.   Roland Barthes was a restless, protean thinker. A constant innovator—often as a daring smuggler of ideas from one discipline to another—he first gained an audience with his pithy essays on mass culture and then went on to produce some of the most suggestive and stimulating cultural criticism of the late twentieth century, including Empire of Signs, The Pleasure of the Text, and Camera Lucida. In 1976, this one-time structuralist outsider was elected to a chair at France’s preeminent Collège de France, where he chose to style himself as a professor of literary semiology until his death in 1980.   The greater part of Barthes’s published writings has been available to a French audience since 2002, but now, translator Chris Turner presents a collection of essays, interviews, prefaces, book reviews, and other journalistic material for the first time in English and divided into five themed volumes. Volume five, Simply a Particular Contemporary includes four interviews Barthes conducted between 1970 and 1979, varying widely in style and content.

Roland Barthes (1915–80) was a professor at the Collège de France until his death. His books include Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography; Image, Music, Text; and A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments. Chris Turner is a writer and translator who lives in Birmingham, England. He has translated Jean-Paul Sartre’s The Aftermath of War, Portraits, and Critical Essays and André Gorz’s Ecologica and The Immaterial, all published by Seagull Books.