Press copy, stamped as such (no deluxe-paper copies were issued).
Inscribed and signed: “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, through which the writer chooses his relation to society and to history.
From Flaubert to Mallarmé and Camus, Barthes examines modern literature’s attempts to free itself from the conventions that mark it out as literature. The “white” writing of L’Étranger provides him with one of his examples of this degree zero, a search for a language freed from the accepted 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, where this first essay was published.