Jörn ReinhardtFeb 25
On 25 February 1980, Roland Barthes was hit by a laundry truck on his way back from lunch to the Collège de France and seriously injured. He died a month later. François Dosse describes the incident in his book ‘The Saga of French Intellectuals’. The chapter on the ‘End of the Master Thinkers’ describes how the death of intellectual icons of that era (#Barthes, #Lacan, #Foucault, #Althusser) also marked the gradual end of a certain way of conducting scholarly research #FrenchTheory
Show threadJörn ReinhardtFeb 25

When I asked #ChatGPT about Barthes' death, I got a wild story: #Barthes had left the Collège after lunch with #Foucault and was run over by a Bulgarian laundry supplier. He died instantly. A manuscript he had with him disappeared. A whole series of myths surround this manuscript, the lunch and Foucault's role in it.

Very, very interesting indeed.

Show threadJörn Reinhardt
Turns out that #ChatGPT borrowed heavily from a novel by Laurent Binet (and probably some reviews) for the anecdote. Binet’s book is called ‘The Seventh Function of Language’. I had never heard of it and ordered it in a bookshop. Promises to be a good read. But it has very little to do with the actual events... Roland Barthes would probably have enjoyed this twist. And he would certainly have had a lot to say about it: The ‘death of the author’, the ‘mythologies of the everyday’. #semiotics
Feb 25 at 2:51pmWeb