SOURCE: Taylor, John.“The Art of Shaving Gently.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4827 (6 October 1995): 10-11.

In the following essay, Taylor presents an overview of Barthes's works, concluding that they remain fascinating objects of study because they reveal his inner turmoil as well as his complex critical thinking.

Of all the French structuralists and poststructuralists from the 1950s to the present day, Roland Barthes (1915-80) surely remains the most difficult to pin down. He devoted himself to an extraordinary—his critics claim “dilettantish”—variety of subjects, from professional wrestling to semiological theory, from fashion design to photography, from Japan to Michelet, from the Eiffel Tower to the Tour de France, from Racine to Brecht. In addition, his critical methodologies evolved remarkably during the thirty-eight years of his career, taking on an increasing degree of spontaneity, subjectivity and fragmentation; for a given topic, terms would be boldly coined from Latin or...