A personal relationship linked me with Roland Barthes while he was alive, and it did not end with his death. I cannot claim even the illusion of impartiality if I am to speak of him. Not only will I be irresistibly tempted to suppress anything in him that does not suit me and to valorize the ways in which he is close to me, but I cannot find in myself the necessary strengths that would allow me to see him as a closed entity capable of being completely circumscribed, an object, as Genet had become for Sartre. So I shall not deal with Roland Barthes in the pages that follow, but with "my" Barthes.

On Roland Barthes's Contribution to Contemporary Though:

Roland Barthes was central to the post-structuralist project, as he was to the semiological and structuralist projects preceding it. As a writer largely on the margin of...