The Responsibility of Forms

Critical Essays on Music, Art, and Representation

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by Roland Barthes,

Translated by Richard Howard

University of California Press

Due/Published February 1991, 320 pages, paper

ISBN 0520072383

Reissued

"These late essays of Barthes's are concerned with the visible and the audible, and here the preoccupations are particularly intense and rewarding, in part because Barthes was himself, by predilection, an artist and a musician, and in part because he was of two minds about the very possibility of attaching to art and to music a written text, a criticism.

"The essays included in The Responsibility of Forms, written mainly during the 1970s, swoop repetitively on those stray material fragments which elude the embrace of the sign, those gestures or nuances which even the most elaborate semiology must fail to formalize. It is a move from text to textureÑfrom 'gloss' as annotation to 'gloss' as material sheen. Like Freud before him, the later Barthes seeks to install himself at the very juncture of sign and body, semiotic and somatic, meaning and materiality."--Terry Eagleton, Times Literary Supplement