1. They're not EnglishWhat's wrong with the French?
I'd be interested to know why it was France where Theory took off. Presumably I could find out if I lifted a finger?
Was it also the shame of collaborating with the Nazis?
Is Emmanuelle 2 the one with the threesome at the end?
I've watched that one a few times.
Derek the Frenchman. Is that why you stopped writing for them?My beef with him is he's a Frenchman.
I guess this is why I enjoyed Mythologies, but wasn't bowled over by it. It reminded me of the kind of thing we were taught to do in English and Film Studies long before I'd ever even heard of Barthes.It was striking how much of the Bartesian POV had been assimilated into the mainstream between then and now.
Reality is emptied and paralyzed by myth, but as in the most sophisticated methods of torture it is kept sufficiently alive to provide a "natural alibi" for the criminal insinuations of the mythical concept. Myth commits its "larceny of language," its "robbery by colonization," invisibly and insidiously by a subtle kind of germ warfare more threatening than any overt aggression.
Like a determined biologist, Barthes tags and pursues these parasitic myths, revealing to his readers the terrifying metamorphosis of self-sufficient meaning into "empty parasitical form". As it invades and transforms meaning the myth attacks and invades its audience, replacing the individual with a "motionless prototype which lives in his place, stifles him in the manner of a huge, internal parasite".