SOURCE: Saint-Amand, Pierre. “Barthes's Laziness.” Yale Journal of Criticism 14, no. 2 (fall 2001): 519-26.

In the following essay, Saint-Amand discusses the concept of laziness as it applies to Barthes and several of his writings, noting that for Barthes it remained a form of desire that never became a reality.

In Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, Barthes confesses his passion for dialectic, for binary play: in Barthes's view, this demon of contradiction is the beginning of meaning, of writing as “deporting.”¹ In the constellation of dialectical terms that cut across his work, I would like to explore the opposition between work and leisure, which fuels Barthes's discourse and his imaginary. The junction of leisure and work undergoes an interesting development about which I would like to make some observations. This opposition is also at the heart of a “technique of the self” (in the Foucauldian sense), of an emancipation of the...