TLS describes Barthes:
"A culture critic turned into a cultural institution, an academic with little time for academia, a revealer of mythologies who became himself a myth – Roland Barthes was a rock star of the writing world when he died suddenly in 1980 and, as with all rock stars, his death only led to a new lease of life. ....
"Neil Badmington [wrote]....Afterlives of Roland Barthes (2016) ... a brief inspection of Barthes’s posthumously published texts, a look at “what they reveal and what they rewrite”.
.... A chapter on “the neglected history of boredom” in Barthes is the book’s most engaging and original contribution. Everyone, especially Barthes, agrees that he was an easily bored man. “As a child”, he wrote in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, “I was bored often and greatly . . . and it has continued my whole life, in gusts . . . . It is a panic boredom, to the point of distress”. For Badmington, this boredom is the defining theme of Travels in China, in which he showed that nothing in this vast country could hold his curiosity. But his boredom was something he felt with force, “the intensity of a lack of intensity”.
"....Barthes remarked on the inclination to “apply the brakes” at the final moment, as though “the timidity and banality of the hypothesis were proof of its validity”. There could have been an interesting inquiry, for example, into how Barthes’s boredom resulted not in chronic fatigue but rather the characteristic restlessness that saw him hop from one field of study to another, no sooner had he made a genre-defining contribution. He called this habit “cruising”: “the voyage of desire”, an “anti-repetition”. .....
"One of the few individuals to hold Barthes’s attention unconditionally was Philippe Sollers, a close friend twenty years his junior, an editor and a renowned writer in his own right. Sollers published L’Amitié de Roland Barthes as his contribution to the centenary and Andrew Brown has now translated it into English. ....
"Their friendship began in the 1960s, bounded by a shared vision of how literature should be written and read. They established themselves as an intellectual duo, defending each other in public whenever scandal struck. “Scandal”, that is, in French intellectual terms: the feuds that follow an unorthodox claim or subversive idea. After the “Picard Affair”, for example, when Barthes was accused of “fraud” for his unashamedly subjective reading of Racine, Sollers says Barthes realized he needed a publisher who “didn’t give a damn . . . and the publisher was me”.
"The pair also wrote in depth about the other’s work. In 1971, Sollers published R.B. in Tel Quel, the magazine he founded and that was responsible for bringing Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida to a wider readership. For Sollers, it was the search to discover, in Barthes’s own words, “how meaning is possible, at what price and by what means”, that defined his character. Boredom, it seems, really was one of Barthes’s defining traits. ....
"The death of Barthes’s mother and life companion in 1977 intensified his spasms of boredom significantly. Her loss, he confessed, “profoundly and obscurely altered my desire for the world”. His “panic boredom” hardened into something more deep-set; his friends found him harder to enthuse. Sollers was the exception, and they continued to meet once a month for dinner in Montparnasse. “The conversation was very animated”, Sollers recalls, “and then he’d take a cigar and off he went, down the streets in an increasingly melancholy frame of mind”. Almost forty years after his death the world shows no sign of being bored by Barthes. ...."
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