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…held chairs in lexicology, the social and economic sciences, and finally semiology.        
 

 

..S/Z 1970…
 

 

“What is Criticism?” first appeared in Critical Essays (1964), a collection that marks the beginning of Barthes’s work in structuralism…
 

 

…structuralism is an activity—not a school of movement—that reconstructs an “ ‘object’ in such a way as to manifest thereby the rules of functioning . . . of this object.”
 

 

…its functions, invisible in its “natural” state, are realized.
 

 

…Barthes’s definition of “metalanguage,” which is a “second language” or “discourse upon discourse.”
 

 

…produce the text’s intelligibility.
 

 

…reconstruct not a work’s meaning but the :rules and constraints of that meaning’s elaboration”; in other words, the critic reconstructs the system of a text because literature isa “language . . . a system of signs.”
 

 

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What is Criticism
 

 

It is always possible to prescribe major critical principles in accord with one’s ideological situation…
 

 

…Sartre’s critical works, his Baudelaire, his Flaubert, the shorter articles on Proust, Mauriac, Giraudoux, and Ponge, and above all his splendid Genet.
 

 

…how sterile orthodox Marxism has proved to be in criticism…
 

 

…Lucien Goldmann’s work explicitly owes a great deal to Lukacs…
 

 

…most flexible and the most ingenious criticism which takes social and political history as its point of departure.
 

 

…in France today, the best representative of Freudian criticism is Charles Mauron, but here too it is the “marginal” psychoanalysis which has been most fruitful…
 

 

Finally structuralism (or to simplify to an extreme and doubtless abusive degree: formalism): we know the importance, even the vogue of this movement in France since Levi-Strauss…
 

 

…find, in particular, the influence of linguistic models constructed by Saussure and extended by Jakobson…
 

 

…Russian formalist school…metaphor and metonymy.
 

 

…owes little or nothing to Anglo-American criticism, to Spitzer and his followers, to the Croceans…
 

 

…spirit of Lanson…has controlled, through countless epigones, the whole of academic criticism for fifty years.
 

 

…rigor and objectivity n the establishment of facts, one might suppose that there is no incompatibility between Lansonism and the ideological criticisms, which are all criticisms of interpretation.
 

 

…tension between interpretive criticism and positivist (academic) criticism.
 

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…the psychology of Lansonism is utterly dated, consisting essentially of a kind of analogical determinism, according to which the details of a work must resemble the details of a life, the soul of a character must resemble the soul of the author…
 

…psychoanalysis, for example, has posited contrary relations, relations of denial, between a work and its author.
 

…Lansonism is not to be blamed for its prejudices but for the fact that it conceals th4em, masks them under the moral alibi of rigor and objectivity: ideology is smuggled into the baggage ofscientism like contraband merchandise.
 

…ideological choice does not constitute the Being of criticism and because “truth” is not its sanction.
 

…capital sin in criticism is not ideology but the silence by which it is masked…
 

…good conscience, or again, bad faith.How could we believe, in fact, that the work is an object exterior to the psyche…
 

…would the profound communication which most critics postulate between the work and its author cease in relation to their own enterprise…
 

All criticism must include in its discourse (even if it is in the most indirect and modest manner imaginable) an implicit reflection on itself; every criticism is a criticism of the work and a criticism of itself.
 

…a series of intellectual acts profoundly committed to the historical and subjective existence (they are the same thing) of the man who performs the act.
 

Every novelist, every poet, whatever the detours literary theory may take, is presumed to speak of objects and phenomena, even if they are imaginary, exterior and anterior to language…
 

…criticism is discourse upon a discourse; it is a second language, or a metalanguage (as the logicians would say), which operates on a first language (or language object)…
 

… “friction” of these two languages which defines criticism…
 

…logic, which is also based on the distinction between language object and metalanguage.
 

…its task is not at all to discover “truths,” but only “validities,”
 

……rules of literary language do not concern the conformity of this language to reality whatever the claims of the realistic schools), but only its submission to the system of signs the author has established…
 

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…logic, in short whose systematics can collect or better still can “integrate” (in the mathematical sense of the word) the greatest possible quantity of Proustian language, exactly as a logical equation tests the validity of reasoning without taking sides as to the “truth” of the arguments it mobilizes.
 

…the critical task (and this is the sole guarantee of its universality) is purely formal…
 

…”by what miracle?Are we more perspicacious than our predecessors?
 

…critical discourse—like logical discourse, moreover—is never anything but tautological…
 

Racine is Racine, Proust is Proust; critical “proof,” if it exists, depends on an aptitude not to discover the work in uestion but on thec ontrary to cover it as completely as possible by its own language.
 

…formal activity, not int hesthetic but int helogical sense of theterm.
 

…moral goal not the decipherment of thework’s menaing but the reconstruction of the rules and contraints of that menaing’s elaboration…
 

…work is a very special semantic system…
 

…work which ordinarily accedes to critical scrutiny—and this is perhaps a definitin of “good” literature…
 

…a suspended meaning…
 

…(there is no great work which is “dogmatic”)…
 

…the critic is not responsible for reconstructing the work’s message but only its system, just as the linguist is not responsible for deciphering the sentence’s meaning but for establishing the formal structure which permits this meaning to be transmitted.
 

..the language each critic chooses to speak does not come down to him for Heaven; it is one of the various languages his age affords him, it is objectively the end product of a certain historical ripening of knowledge…
 

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…at the heart of the critical work, the dialogue of two histories and two subjectivities, the author’s and the critic’s. but this dialogue is egoistically shifted toward the present: criticism is not an “homage” to the truth of the past or to the truth of “others”—it is a construction of the intelligibility of our own time.