Sade, Fourier, Loyola

Proclaiming the death of the author, Roland Barthes in his book «Sade, Fourier, Loyola» (1971) turns to the lives and texts of three individuals, completely unrelated to each other either biographically or in terms of conventional literary and philosophical history. Binding together in one triptych the damned libertine philosopher Sade, the great utopian Charles Fourier, and the saintly Jesuit Ignatius of Loyola, Barthes presents them as «founders» of languages — logothetes, who interest him not as authors of «utterances», but as creators of grammars — machines of writing, embodying the performative power of language. For all three, the act of speech does not express the internal, but creates the external: space, body, regime. In the castle, monastery, phalanstery, the reader is offered to experience the pleasure of the text — to perceive and appropriate not its content, but the discursive formulas embedded within it, the phantasmatic order projected onto the everyday — to live together with Sade, Fourier, and Loyola.