Abstract

The essay addresses the intertextual confluences between Sartre and Barthes, in light of the insights provided by the critical apparatus of the complete works of Barthes. Working with a corpus that highlights the response of Writing Degree Zero to What is Literature?, it conjectures fundamental affinities between Sartre’s inessential man launched into the gratuitousness of existence and Barthes’ discursive subject bound to the arbitrariness of the sign. The aim is to show that, in both cases, the “unhappy consciousness”, deprived of metaphysical shelter, recovers the meaning of experience in a struggle against words. It is the same contingency that leads to the acknowledgment, on both sides, of the possibility of an imaginary knowledge, linked to the action of an imaginative consciousness outside the orbit of signs.

Keywords:
Sartre; Barthes; Word and Image; Criticism; Unhappy Consciousness