Roland Barthes (1915-1980) studied French literature and classics at the University of Paris. After teaching French at universities in Rumania and Egypt, he did research in sociology and lexicology at the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique and taught sociology at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris. He was a professor at the College de France until his death.

Barthes points out in this new series of studies that it is not out of some perverse desire to provoke the reader that he has collected in one and the same book Sade, Fourier, and Loyola: the forbidden writer, the utopian philosopher, and the Jesuit saint . It is because all three have been classifiers, founders of language of erotic pleasure, a language of social happiness, a language of divine address- and because each of them has expended , in the construction of this secondary language, all the energy of a passion . The object of this book, for Barthes is not to hover over the propositions of content ordinary credited to these three men --ie, a philosophy of evil ,a utopian socialism, a mystique of obedience--but rather to consider Sade, Fourier , and Loyola as formulators, inventors of writing, wielders of a text: operator, as Barthes calls them. Whereby Barthes pursues a operators, as Bathes calls them. Whereby Barthes pursues a project, suggested in all his other books, whose theoretical intention can be discernment in far can one go with a text by speaking only of its writing? How is what it signifies suspended (historically, psychologically aesthetically ) in order to released what it reveals materially? Is not the social action which a text achieves, Barthes asks in the commitment of its content? What Barthes seeks here is to unite the old readily (ie .."cultural" ) text and eventual text that would be infinite , infinitely recommenced. /BEST VALUE ON THIS RARE BOOK/FAST SHIPPING /OUTSTANDING CUSTOMER SERVICE/