French writer and philosopher Roland Barthes was BOTD in 1915. Born in Cherbourg, Normandy, he moved to Paris with his family when he was in his teens. He studied at the Sorbonne and pursued an academic career at the École Pratique des Hautes Études and later at the Collège de France, often struggling with ill health from tuberculosis. His first book, Le Degré zéro de l’écriture (Writing Degree Zero), published in 1953, examined the arbitrariness of the constructs of language. He applied his theories in a series of essays on popular culture, including advertising, fashion, the Eiffel Tower and competitive wrestling, collected in the 1957 book Mythologies. In the 1960s, he horrified traditional academics by arguing with critical studies of the writings of Jean Racine and Honoré de Balzac, arguing that texts were constructed via a system of signs, referred to as “semiotics”. He is best known for his 1967 essay La mort de l’auteur (The Death of the Author), challenging the idea of a fixed or ultimate meaning of a text and privileging the reader’s interpretation over the author’s intention, and 1975’s Le Plaisir du Texte (The Pleasure of the Text), describing the jouissance (joy) and the loss of the self in the act of reading. By the late 1970s, Barthes’ theories of semiotics dominated 20th century philosophy, particularly influential on the studies of literature and art, attracting disciples including Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. Discreetly gay, Barthes challenged concepts of male homosexuality as “inversion”, seeking to free homosexuality from associations with mental illness or social transgression. His 1977 memoir Fragments d’un discours amoureux (A Lover’s Discourse), an account of a painful love affair, became a surprise bestseller, selling more than 60,000 copies in France. He died in 1980, aged 64. Much of his unpublished writings were published after his death by Sontag, including 1987’s Incidents, an anthology of his private journals chronicling his erotic life in Paris and paying for sex with men and boys in Morocco.

Jacques Derrida and Susan Sontag. .