@article{Colucci_2017, title={Roland Barthes, Japan and l’utopie de l’écriture}, volume={21}, url={https://ejournals.bc.edu/index.php/romance/article/view/9982}, abstractNote={<p>In the meaningful combination of words and photographs which constitutes Barthes’s most fascinating essay, <em>L’Empire des</em><em> signes </em>(1970), the act of writing plays a central role. Associated – through Zen philosophy – with a cancellation of subjectivity that leads to a <em>déprise du sens </em>(«abandonment of meaning»), it revives the dream of the <em>écriture blanche</em>: an empty language fractioned and stripped of any predetermined significance, conceived as a non-functional game of free, although strong signifiers, opposed to Western mythologies.</p><p>Through the original reading of Barthes’s Japanese experience, this work aims at reconstructing this very tension to <em>l’utopie de l’écriture</em>. The author argues that Japan is discussed by Barthes like an ideal Text, the indefinable contours of which comply with the theoretical characteristics of writing – understood in its discontinuous materiality and its dimension of enjoyment – qualifying the foreign country as an object of love and desire. Japan itself appears, in this perspective, as a magic book of dreams and fears, able to respond to a painful intellectual inquiry urged by the increasingly suffocating relationship between Language and Power.</p><p> </p><p> </p>}, journal={Romance eReview}, author={Colucci, Dalila}, year={2017}, month={May} }