SOURCE: Knight, Diana. “Roland Barthes in Harmony: The Writing of Utopia.” Paragraph 11, no. 2 (July 1988): 127-42.

In the following essay, Knight discusses Barthes's notion of Utopia as presented in several of his works, stressing that it “is a central—and highly conscious—preoccupation” for him.

Civilization/Harmony: thus did Charles Fourier, archetypal Utopian socialist, polarize wretched contemporary society and unutterably blissful new world. The binary works well for Barthes's part-political, part-ethical, part-aesthetic analyses of his own society and culture; indeed I wish to explore Utopia as the meeting point of his lifelong concern with the problems of history, language, literature, criticism and power. Apart from such obviously relevant texts as his essay on Fourier and Empire of Signs, a surprising proportion of Barthes's writings make their points through a vocabulary of Utopia as both adjective and proper noun. The scope of Barthes's preoccupation with Utopia is indicated in his...