Greco, Nicolas. “Roland Barthes’ Album: Unpublished Correspondence and Texts.” ASAP Journal, 19 July 2018

Writing for The Los Angeles Review of Books, Andrew Gallix points out the distinction Roland Barthes makes between a book and an album in his lectures on The Preparation of the Novel (from that late 1970s): the book can be considered a “complete work,” a monument which will ultimately be destroyed, whereas an album is “what lives in us.” Describing his visit to the BnF (Bibliothèque nationale de France) exhibition on Barthes in 2015 — called “Panorama” — Gallix suggests that it “provides us with a panoramic view of the polymath’s multifaceted career. This dizzying, kaleidoscopic portrait of Roland Barthes — dissolved in the constructive secretions of his web — highlights his engagement with the world.”