From Writing to the Letter: Barthes and Alphabetese

Abstract

Roland Barthes’s career as a critic can be measured by the various definitions and functions which he has given to writing. While his earliest works emphasized its social and institutional dimensions, he has more recently sought to develop a revised version of Saussurian semiology into a social critique which he terms semioclastics. In his 1970 preface to the alphabet of the fashion designer Erté, Barthes finds a semiotic system which allows him to combine these interests in an extended commentary of the alphabetical letter and on alphabetism as an autonomous semiotic entity.