Empire of Signs

by Roland Barthes

Book Overview

With this book, Barthes offers a broad-ranging meditation on the culture, society, art, literature, language, and iconography--in short, both the sign-oriented realities and fantasies--of Japan... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0374522073
• Release Date: September 1983
• Publisher: Hill and Wang
• Length: 128 Pages
• Weight: 0.28 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.0" x 0.6" x 5.4"

Customer Reviews

Empire of Signs

This strange book is at once fascinating and frustrating. Barthes' view of himself and the world is as if he were someone from another planet. I'm not sure whether I understand Japanese culture more or less from reading it, and I suspect that Barthes would find that irrelevant. Nevertheless it is a good romp and a glimpse at how a denizen of the realm of literary theory (and a gay intellectual) looks at things.

Artificiality Without Apology - Barthes is

It wearies to hear once more that Barthes' "The Empire of Signs" is an example of hypocritical cultural imperialism. It's been said too many times, and further it's an inaccurate assessment of the actual text to begin with. I don't see the need to apologize for this book before recommending it - simply a need to introduce it in terms of what it actually pretends to accomplish as well as what it never imagined it could do. In a word, it's hardly as though Barthes was a Heidegger. As the reviewer mentions, Barthes' shows his hand from the very beginning and does not attempt in the least to produce an objective or scholarly account of Japan. Who could imagine that Barthes, no stranger to genuine historical and anthropological analysis (though he wrote none of his own) would ever have imagined to himself that, here, he could have produced, spontaneously, a passable work of scholarship in a slim volume containing no documentation or critical notes whatsoever? If Barthes is working within any genre at all here, it's not that of scholarship but rather of the essay as first established by Michel de Montaigne. Montaigne's writings on indigenous Brazilians were in no way expected to provide an objective picture, much less construction, of life amongst the cannibals. Montaigne rather finds in the accounts he has heard of the Caribbeans an occasion to reflect on the concerns of his own culture, in particular epistemology, history and the value of the values of civilization. Montaigne was well aware of what he was about, as was Barthes. There is clearly no need to question the merit of thorough anthropological and historical research. However, those disciplines do not exhaust the possibilities of writing on other cultures. That we possess the methods necessary for the production of objective accounts of cultures, does not mean we no longer have a need for more subjective (or perhaps more non- or pre-objective) forms of investigation. Reason and the understanding cannot take from the imagination what is its proper due. It strikes me that the kind of phenomenological reverie evinced in Barthes' encounter with Japan (his "love affair" with chopsticks, which is openly fetishistic and evokes a dual, maternal phallus which is not-one, which does not slice but rather unswaddles or snuggles a dumpling) is highly indebted not only to Montaigne's writings but also to Bachelard's later critiques of objective science. This sort of literary entry into a "paradis artificiel" does not come without a price. And certainly the cost of entry to, or residence in, this world of maternal jouissance was one which not only Baudelaire himself, but also numerous other writers, as antique as Augustine or as recent as Barthes himself, were perfectly willing to admit, and indeed make the problematical focus of entire books and careers. Barthes' "The Empire of Signs" is not only a welcome complement to more conventional scholarly writing, but is in fact conditioned and called for b

How to look at a different culture

Barthes tells us about Japan but I would recommend his exploration into another culture as a pattern to follow in your next travelling. Signs and meanings behind the surface.

a modest, brilliant, and underestimated essay

The translation omits several of the illustrations in the original (perhaps they cost too much). As often in English translations from the French, the traps set by cognate words (faux amis) are not always avoided: respectable as "respectable" (p. 63; should be "worthy of respect"); vicieux as "vicious" (p. 68; "defective" would be better; on the same page "The Form is Empty" should be "Form is Empty"), s'inventer as "invent oneself" (p. 30; "find oneself"). Barthes offers a string of short zuihitsu-style essays, impressionistic flashes, confessing that his Japan is a fictive theoretical construct. The recurrent theme is that Japan teaches us to liberate the play of signifiers from the tyranny of the signified. The influence of Jacques Derrida's early essays, published shortly before this book, is apparent. Barthes's view of Japan is by no means as shallow or inaccurate as captious critics make out. The sure guiding hand of his friend Maurice Pinguet of Tokyo University, author of "La mort volontaire au Japon," preserves Barthes from major errors. Japan as a dance of signs referring to other signs, in a perpetual foreplay, a delicious lightness of being, may not be much in evidence in the horrible cityscapes of the present (thanks to the voracious construction and real estate industries), but that image does correspond to an aspect of the culture, going all the way back to The Tale of Genji.

Mind-tickling. Not About Japan.

An interesting, thought-provoking, pre-PostModern piece about sign and symbol, meaning, surface and interior, and all that sort of thing. An exploration of how else a culture might be, riffing off of the West's image of Japan, but not really about Japan at all.Worth a read. Short and almost mythical. Reminds me somehow of Hesse's "Journey to the East", but probably not for any very good reason.