Introduction: The Voice of Someone

Abstract

It would be impossible to write this or any other book if God and the self were really dead; if the author were really absent from his work; if language were nothing but an alien circuit which each of us is condemned to repeat; if society were really irredeemable and man irreparably alienated from his world. In the absence of any human form of mind, in the absence of any possibility of truth, meaning or change, in the absence of all capacity to say what has not been said before and to add to the stock of our culture, there would be nothing worth saying, no one to say it, and no one to say it to. There would not even be any point in declaring that God and the self are dead, that language and culture are tiresomely repeated by every speaking and acting subject, and that man is alienated from himself, from his culture and from his social world.

‘It’s about the voice of no one — but it is, that’s just it: it is about, it is always about the voice of someone.’ Roland Barthes