L'esenzione del senso

Per Barthes il Giappone è l'impero dei segni vuoti, cioè senza (poiché privati di) significato. Barthes riconosce nello zen una risposta possibile, la più efficace, al "disgusto per la semiocrazia occidentale" e all'ossessione per la semantica. Il viaggio in Giappone diventa quindi per l'autore un itinerario fuori dalla semiologia.

Stop Making Sense, come direbbe David Byrne.

Come sempre le osservazioni di Barthes sono acute, originali e profonde, anche su argomenti triti come gli haiku, e a cominciare dalle considerazioni iniziali sulla lingua aliena: "com'è illusorio voler contestare la nostra società senza mai pensare i limiti stessi della lingua con cui (rapporto strumentale) noi pretendiamo di contestarla [...] Questi esercizi di una grammatica aberrante avrebbero almeno il vantaggio di suscitare il sospetto nei confronti dell'ideologia stessa del nostro parlare" (p. 13).
In particolare l'interpretazione barthesiana dell'haiku sembra essere la chiave di lettura dell'intera opera & del punto di vista dell'autore, v. il capitolo L'esenzione del senso: "la via buddhista è esattamente quella del senso ostruito: l'arcano stesso del significare, cioè il paradigma, è reso impossibile" (p. 85).

Intéressante plongée dans la culture japonaise.
Toutefois, c'est du Roland Barthes, ce qui signifie, à mon sens, quelque chose qui se rapproche dangereusement de la masturbation intellectuelle. Je le savais en commençant, je n'ai donc même pas cherché à comprendre en détail les analyses de l'auteur.
Mais parfois, une description, une idée, une comparaison m'ont touchée, me faisaient un peu sentir le Japon : Roland Barthes survolé, c'est pas si mal...

This book is excellent in its description and its balance between Barthes' experience in Japan with his own theory. As he says, it would be ethically problematic for him to call this "Japan" the actual Japan. Rather this is his experiences in it situated in his prior work.

There are chapters in this work that couldn't be written better. They explain exactly how one might think of food, for example, in a semiotic way that might at first seem alien, but later become clearly a way in which one could methodologically evaluate the differences of various cultures as we approach them.

There are also, as in most of Barthes' work, some unnecessary bits. There are parts of this book that are entirely stylistic and don't seem to add much to the book. This book probably could have only had 3/4ths of the work here and still gotten the entirety of the analytical point across.

Imagine a world where instead of Fodor's guides to cities and countries, we read Barthes and prepared only for the rendezvous of our travels!

Barthes looks at everyday life in Japan, dissecting and analysing the signs and signifiers in everyday activities and interactions. It's an interesting exploration of the peace and minimalism in Japanese culture and a book I recommend for anyone fascinated with Japan, everyday life or Barthes's work on signs and semantics.

so beautiful, a book I'll read every year and savor, like a very expensive tea. Barthes just writes so well.

Does so much with thinking about gesture, about the role that social signs have. Cant' wait to read Barthes book on sports

What may seem outdated in our post-Said, Orientalism-savvy climate is in fact still relevant, though easily susceptible to fetishistic and (ironically) essentialist readings. Barthes's travel-book is personal; the hand-written language notes, photographs, poems, newspaper clippings, and sketch-like chapters create the impression that you are travelling through Japan with him, jotting down impressions rather than lingering on profound contemplations of difference. Nonetheless, the impressions all show angles of the same essay thesis, each fragment serves as an example of an imagined Japan that consists of a proliferation of "empty" signs - form without content. It would be easy, in fact, to accuse Barthes of showing anti-essentialism as an essential attribute of Japan, if he didn't elaborate on his reasons for writing as he does.

His method (which today I think we could call both structuralist and post-structuralist) is to articulate an elaborate system embodied in quotidian artefacts and impressions (chopsticks, food, train stations, landscapes, even the shape of East Asian eyes) in order to prise apart the idea of systems-as-representations, or the Empire of Meaning that he sees as dominating in the West. In fact, Barthes is writing about what it is like for the West (as a human body, a culture, a hegemony) to come into contact with Japan: the true object of the book is not Japan, but the experience of Japan within a Western framework – an experience that disrupts, unsettles, and even liberates that framework towards new forms. Importantly, Barthes achieves this without becoming didactic in any way: he is not interested in "other symbols" or "another wisdom", but "the possibility of a difference, a mutation".