Fragments d’un discours iconographique : Poétique de l’image dans L’Empire des signes de Roland Barthes
Fragments of an iconographic discourse: the poetics of image in Roland Barthes’ L’Empire des signes

Summary/Abstract: Roland Barthes was not only a literary theorist, a critic or a semiotician. Above all, he was concerned with signs, symbols and representations which shape the everyday life and nourish both identities of the individual subject and the social group. As the world celebrates in 2015 the centenary of his birth, the question of his intellectual and literary legacies has never been more relevant. In the large scope of his works, L’Empire des signes, published in 1970 following several trips to Japan, is rather a particular piece which hinges on a specific combination of text and images. By looking at the structure of Barthes’s work and the relationship between the author’s discourse and the meanings released through the images, this paper aims to highlight the poetics of the image as a founding element in L’Empire des signes. The study of three categories of images used in the volume and their confrontation with the author’s developments shed new light on the contribution of the iconographic element towards a valuable understanding of signs and significations.

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