From Utopia to Ethics of the Image

Literature in Roland Barthes and Maurice Blanchot

Abstract

This work aims to present Roland Barthes’ and Maurice Blanchot’s views on literature and its relation to philosophy. The article presents Barthes’ position of literature which is related to utopia, mythology, style, and the death of the author. Barthes stated that literature is a world-forming force, functioning like an utopia, and it cannot be reduced to semiology. Literature, in Barthes’ sense, is a meaning producing power that functions in a mythological manner by creating never-ending interpretations. The death of the author allows literature to be freed from the context of the author. In a rather similar way to Barthes’, Blanchot stated that the third person is more important than “I” in literature. For Blanchot, literature has its own abstract space in which various transformations of the writer and the reader are possible. In Blanchot’s sense, the writer and the work are not identical to each other, and the writer has to give up her subjectivity in the process of writing literature. Blanchot also related literature to ethical dimension as ethics of the image which opens up the relation to the Other.