"B S"

Abstract

Contemporaneous with the composition of his book S/Z, Roland Barthes wrote Sade, Fourier, Loyola. Reducing this second book to three figures (SFL: the abbreviation used by Barthes and others to refer to this text), as Barthes reduces the Balzac story "Sarrasine" to three figures, S/Z, and following the example of what Barthes does with those figures as signifiers in the center of S/Z, we tease out a similar dynamic in the diacritical relation of SFL to other possible groups of letters, a dynamic resonant with what we find being played out on other levels of the book (semantic, thematic, ideological), so that the insistence of the letter marks our point of disruptive entry into Barthes’s well-defended system.