SOURCE: Roger, Phillippe. “Barthes with Marx.” In Writing the Image after Roland Barthes, edited by Jean-Michel Rabaté, pp. 174-86. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997.

In the following essay, Roger examines Barthes' involvement with theater and Marxism in the 1950s.

For a long time, French grade crossings have greeted road travelers with this warning: Attention! Un train peut en cacher un autre. (Caution! One train can hide another approaching train.) It is no less true of titles, and mine might well hide another. In fact, the first draft of this chapter announced “Barthes and Marx.” No matter how slight, the distortion had me worried; somehow, it sounded too much like David and Goliath. Thanks to Jean-Michael Rabaté's diligence, the original with has been restored, only to elicit new concerns that the chosen conjunction might be misleading. It is not my intention here to examine Marx's work as a...