“I Love You” (in Theory)

On Thursday, January 23, 1975, Roland Barthes lectured in Paris at the École pratique des hautes études on the theme of love, focusing on the phrase “I love you.”  Barthes was then at the summit of his career. From his beginnings as a literary and cultural critic of the “mythologies” of mass media in the years after World War II, he had become both a famous writer and (despite never finishing any of his three attempts at graduate study) one of the more influential figures in French academia. Known best for his pioneering application of structural linguistics to the analysis of texts ranging from the classics of literature to detergent packaging, Barthes seemed in the 1960s and early ’70s to have laid the basis for a new science, or semiotics, of culture.