Press copy, stamped as such (no deluxe-paper copies were issued).
Presentation copy inscribed by Barthes to Luc Estang:
“à M. Luc Estang, en hommage de sympathie. R. Barthes.”
Developed from reflections first published in the columns of Combat, Le Degré zéro de l’écriture establishes a distinction that would become essential: between language — a collective inheritance —, style — specific to the writer —, and writing (écriture), through which the writer chooses his relationship to society and to history.
From Flaubert to Mallarmé and Camus, Barthes examines modern literature’s attempts to free itself from the conventions that designate it as literature. The “white” writing of L’Étranger provides him with one of his examples of this zero degree, a search for language freed from the conventional signs of the literary.
Poet and novelist Luc Estang (1911–1992) was then editor of the literary pages of La Croix. In 1956 he joined the editorial board of Seuil, the house that published this first essay.