Two writers, Nietzsche and Gide, both of whom played a decisive role in Barthes's intellectual formation, once compared their mode of thinking as analogous to a 'dance'. The analogy could be aptly applied to Barthes's own work, not in the sense of a carefully choreographed execution, but rather as an experimental performance, forever changing positions, ceaselessly self-revising, above all always on the move….

[In] the simplest terms, what was Barthes—a literary critic, a cultural historian, an anthropologist of the modern world, a structuralist, a semiologist? What was his most important book—the structural study of French fashion (Système de la mode, 1967), the semiological travelogue on Japan (L'Empire des signes, 1970), the studies of Racine and Balzac (Sur Racine, 1963, S/Z, 1970), the 'anti-autobiography' (Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes, 1975), the study of the rhetoric of Love (Fragments d'un discours amoureux, 1977)? It is not just a question of the formidable...