In his semiotic critique of culture, Roland Barthes was dealing with signs, but also with images. This paper discusses two different aspects of image in his work, the visual and the “invisible,” the latter producing the category of the imaginary. The paper argues that the image is highly ambivalent for Barthes: not simply a field to explore, it is also a danger to escape, an adversary against which to fight, and a beloved object to preserve.

Sergey Zenkin is a research professor at the Russian State University for the Humanities (RGGU) in Moscow. A specialist in French literature, theory of literature and the history of ideas, he has written several monographs including, most recently, The Experience of Relativity: French Romanticism and the Idea of Culture (in French, 2011), The Non-Divine Sacred (in Russian, 2012), and Writings on Theory (in Russian, 2012).

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