In Roland Barthes' eyes, Philippe Sollers embodied the figure of the contemporary writer forever seeking something new. Thirty-six years after Barthes produced his study Sollers Writer, Sollers has written a book on the man who was his friend and who shared with him a total faith in literature as a force of invention and discovery, as a resource and an encyclopaedia. They met regularly, exchanged many letters and fought many battles together, against every kind of academicism, every political and ideological regression. Barthes shed light on Sollers' work in a series of articles that are still of great relevance today. Sollers, in turn, assumed the role of Barthes' publisher at Le Seuil from the publication of his Critical Essays in 1964, and was left deeply shocked and saddened by Barthes' death in 1980. In short, they were very close to each other, despite their differences, and Sollers expresses here what this meant at the time and what it continues to represent, highlighting the themes that sustained their friendship. The book also contains some thirty letters from Barthes to Sollers, completing our image of one of the most extraordinary partnerships in French literary life.
Author
Philippe Sollers (born Philippe Joyaux) is a French writer and critic. In 1960 he founded the avant garde journal Tel Quel (along with the writer and art critic Marcelin Pleynet), published by Seuil, which ran until 1982. In 1982 Sollers then created the journal L'Infini published by Denoel which was later published under the same title by Gallimard for whom Sollers also directs the series. Sollers was at the heart of the intense period of intellectual unrest in the Paris of the 1960s and 1970s. Among others, he was a friend of Jacques Lacan, Louis Althusser and Roland Barthes. These three characters are described in his novel, Femmes (1983) alongside a number of other figures of the French intellectual movement before and after May 1968. From A Strange Solitude, The Park and Event, through "Logiques", Lois and Paradis, down to Watteau in Venice, Une vie divine and "La Guerre du goût", the writings of Sollers have often provided contestation, provocation and challenging. In his book Writer Sollers, Roland Barthes discusses the work of Phillippe Sollers and the meaning of language. Sollers married Julia Kristeva in 1967.
