polity
First published in French as L’amitié de Roland Barthes, © Éditions du Seuil, 2015 This English edition © Polity Press, 2017
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All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-1335-2
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Sollers, Philippe, 1936- author.
Title: The friendship of Roland Barthes / Philippe Sollers.
Other titles: Amiti?e de Roland Barthes. English
Description: Malden, MA : Polity Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016029143| ISBN 9781509513314 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509513321 (pbk.) | ISBN 9781509513352 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Barthes, Roland--Friends and associates. | Sollers, Philippe, 1936---Friends and associates. | Barthes, Roland--Correspondence. | Sollers, Philippe, 1936---Correspondence. | Linguists--France--Correspondence. | Critics--France--Correspondence. | Authors, French--20th century--Correspondence.
Classification: LCC P85.B33 S6513 2017 | DDC 410.92 [B] --dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016029143
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Sollers often refers to Barthes’s texts without giving publication details or page numbers; I have translated all the quotations from Barthes afresh, with due thanks to the excellent translators who have served Barthes so well.
The pieces gathered in this small volume vary in style. ‘Friendship’ is a memoir in the form of an improvised monologue; ‘R.B.’ deploys the language of 1970s French intellectual polemic at its prickliest and most elliptically formulaic; the ‘Appendices’ look back, at times wryly, on the trip to China that Barthes and Sollers undertook, and also re-state Sollers’s claim that Barthes’s political analyses have lost none of their trenchancy in an age when a new mutation of Poujadism (paranoid, protectionist and xenophobic) is on the rise – and not just in France. Barthes’s letters show a more intimate and unguarded side of him than we usually see: he was clearly an affectionate, loyal and caring friend. I have tried to stick fairly closely to the different tones in these pieces, with their sudden tangential breaks and occasional obscurities. I have kept annotation to a minimum: to explain what Sollers meant, in 1971, by ‘dogmatico-revisionism’, or to detail all the writers, publishers, academics and review editors mentioned by Sollers and Barthes, would involve a mini-history of French intellectual life since the 1960s. It seems less important to dwell on the doctrinal – or purely personal – polemics of forty years ago than to get a sense of why Sollers thinks that now, more than ever, might be a good time for us to be reminded of Barthes’s lifelong and lucid awareness of the ever-present menace of terrorism.