The Haiku of Urt': Migrations of Roland Barthes

In the meaningful combination of words and photographs which constitutes Barthes’s most fascinating essay, "L’Empire des signes" (1970), the act of writing plays a central role. Associated – through Zen philosophy – with a cancellation of subjectivity that leads to a déprise du sens («abandonment of meaning»), it revives the dream of the écriture blanche: an empty language fractioned and stripped of any predetermined significance, conceived as a non-functional game of free, although strong signifiers, opposed to Western mythologies. Through the original reading of Barthes’s Japanese experience, this work aims at reconstructing this very tension to l’utopie de l’écriture. The author argues that Japan is discussed by Barthes like an ideal Text, the indefinable contours of which comply with the theoretical characteristics of writing – understood in its discontinuous materiality and its dimension of enjoyment – qualifying the foreign country as an object of love and desire. Japan itself appears, in this perspective, as a magic book of dreams and fears, able to respond to a painful intellectual inquiry urged by the increasingly suffocating relationship between Language and Power.

Exchanges and Parallels between Italy and East Asia, edited by G. Zhang and M. Mignone, Cambridge Scholars Publishing , 2020

This paper aims to suggest a reading of Igort’s graphic novel Japanese Notebooks, a two-part travel journal (Un viaggio nell’impero dei segni / A Journey to the Empire of Signs, 2015 and Il vagabondo dei manga / The Wanderer of Manga, 2017), which illustrates the author’s lifelong experience across Japan. Drawing on the work of the French philosopher and sinologist François Jullien (Traité de l’efficacité, 1996; Les Transformations silencieuses, 2009) as well as Roland Barthes’ thought as expressed in L’Empire des signes (1970), the article examines Italian-Japanese theoretical exchanges converging in this graphic novel. Igort’s operation, like the ones by Barthes and Jullien, through a deep mimesis with the debated matter, manages, with in absentia contrasts, to show Western thought from a different “sideways” perspective, highlighting – passing elsewhere – even the most obscure and contradictory aspects of it.

IAFOR Journal of Literature & Librarianship

Roland Barthes visited Japan and China in the 1970s. He recorded his travel experiences in two contrasting books, Empire of Signs (1982) and Travels in China (2012). The second book is written in notebook form, which, as such, was not prepared by the author for publication. The first book can be seen as a highly polished 'fictional' or aestheticized rendering of Japan and Japanese culture; the latter, on the other hand, is largely unmediated by the same aesthetic and aestheticizing concerns. This essay reads the two texts through the perspective of another of Barthes' texts, The Neutral (2005), which deals with the subject of conflict-free or nonjudgemental modes of discourse in linguistic and cultural theory. I aim to show how a Neutral take on a region or people can offer a fairer or less prejudicial view than has happened hitherto in travel writing and travel narratives.

Deleted Journal, 2009

The aim of my paper is to introduce a few "Japanese" writers as representatives of a different "Japaneseness," one in which Europe is not only a cultural referent but also a relevant part of their identity. In doing so, I hope to contribute to a possible answer to the unsettled question of what makes a writer a Japanese writer: I shall consider it from the perspective of whether it is someone born in Japan, someone who writes in Japanese, someone who shares in the Japanese cultural and emotional world, and other such issues. The first Japanese author writing in a European language who would probably leap to eve1yone's mind is Kazuo Ishiguro. It is difficult to consider him representative, however: if not an English writer, he is more a migrant than a Japanese.' His links with Japan have faded, and his imaginative world is far more European than Japanese. I intend to start my discussion, then, with a writer who sums up all of the above distinctive features: Tawada Yoko (born in Tokyo, 1960). She is now well-known all over the world, as her work reaches Japanese-speaking and German-speaking readers; and she herself has visited various universities in North America, lecturing in Montreal and at Columbia, Tufts, Brown, and Amherst in 2006, and at Penn State in 2007. As a book about her work has also been published, I need not introduce her in any detai1. 2 Among the many writings she has produced, she herself suggested that three of them might be of interest for the purpose of this paper 3 : Where Europe Begins (2002), a collection of stories for the most part originally written in German, Yogisha no yakO ressha (Suspects on Board a Night Train, 2002) and Ekusofonf: bogo no solo e deru tabi (Exophonie: Leaving My Mother Tongue, 2003). 4 Yogisha no yako ressha consists of 13 chapters, each narrating a trip to a different town in a different count1y, as well as the emotions and thoughts of the narrator. The theme of different languages and cultures underlies the whole work: nevertheless, it is difficult to extract any one passage which specifically focuses on the issue. One of the more significant is to be found in the last chapter, "Bound to a Nowhere Town" (Dokodemonai machi e): "Here, we are on board. There are people talking in variety of ways. Those who cannot [bear to] listen to the talk of others had better get off." 5 More than illustrating a personal choice of 1 Such writers also include Fujimori Asuka (born in Tokyo, 1978), who writes in French, although her novels are much more "Japanese" in theme and atmosphere.

European Scientific Journal, 2013

The present study calls into focus the poetic art promoted by the "new poetry" which appeared during the second half of the 20 th century, known as concrete poetry or visual poetry. While globalising the possibilities of expression and communication of poetry, the "verbivocovisual" poetic formula offers itself as a theoretical model which redefines already established methods of producing and receiving the lyric text. It propounds an experiential-expressive model which broadens information on the materiality of language. Several examples of visual poems (in Portuguese, French and Japanese), which are subject to analysis in this study, attempt to certify that two apparently extremely different cultural universes, that use arbitrary signs in their script (the West) or pictorially meaningful signs (the Far East), might meet somewhere beyond their linguistic borders in the form of visual poetry. Its poetics may finally give birth to "common universal poetry", semantically governed by innovative rules. The result of this analysis, undergone from an interdisciplinary perspective that joins the linguistic-semantic method with those given by cultural semiotics and art history, may materialise through the recovery, within the perimeter of the modeled world proposed by visual poetry, of the recurring motif which could be called "the moving line".

2017

This research project is concerned with 'the untranslatable', which I identify as that which, in art, resists translation into everyday language yet touches me lovingly and truthfully. Through a manner of 'poetic translation' that is experiential and reflective as well as semantic and material, and by questioning how an artwork can embody the untranslatable, the project develops concepts to think about the untranslatable and to articulate its presence within an installation artwork that allows for new meanings to enter through audiences' engagement with the work. Informed by philosophical, theoretical and artistic works that share concerns with the oppositional and draw our awareness towards neutral, subtle and nuanced appearances and understandings of the world, the research investigates the poetic works of art that liberate and provoke our perception and sense of being in this life-world. The research is undertaken through my experiencing and reflecting on these elements: my grandmother's poetic enunciation about Mt. Aso, shifting shadows of an acrylic cube (a remnant), and Jacques Derrida's interpretation of chora and ma as a place for translation/transference, which is untranslatable. This process, which in turn draws resonant voices from various disciplines, not limited to either Western or Eastern knowledge, to ancient or contemporary time, to one side or one sex, is manifested in my art-making and thesis writing; my artworks inspire and test my thesis, together investigating these five key concepts: 'Pure Language', the 'Poetic', 'Shadow', 'Transference' and 'Embodiment'. Chapter One explores philosophies of translation with a focus on Walter Benjamin's concept of 'pure language' considered untranslatable. My first installation work Understanding of misunderstanding, joins images of different landscapes in a manner akin to literal translation of my grandmother's enunciation. Chapter Two discuses 'poetic use of language' as articulative of the ineffable (untranslatable), through elaboration on Friedrich Hölderlin's theory of poetry, Toshihiko Izutsu's philosophy of Zen articulation, and Luce Irigaray's philosophy of linguistic and psychoanalytic practice. My video work, Topologies between the Three, poetically translates conversations about Mt. Aso by opening silent and metaphoric spatiality between expression and perception. Informed by intersecting studies on elusive appearance and perceptual ambiguity in philosophies of translation and perception, Chapter Three examines shifting 'shadow' (image) as an artistic medium, exemplified and discussed in art, including works by Agnes Martin and Junichiro Tanizaki. In my installation works, Distancing for Opening, Watakushi ame and Mokudoku, 'shadow light/light shadow' visually and spatially transfers across images faintly printed or surfaces embossed with the acrylic (a remnant). Chapter Four articulates the 'transfer' process as the embodiment of the untranslatable, inspired by the Greek-Latin and the Japanese derivations, illustrating the 'transfer' (utsuru). In this process, the positive is engendered from the negative, which is aligned with art historical and philosophical views that images metamorphose and knowledges transform in 'distance' or O'Dea, my mentor artists and committee members for my candidature, Takemi Azumaya, Neil Malone, Dr. Kiron Robinson, my editor and artist, Samantha Semmens, my friend and academic, Dr. Yoko Akama, my mother with the most receptive heart, Masako Shindo, and my beloved husband and artist, Dr. Manabu Kanai.

The translocal poetics retains cognitive obscurity of the familiar, but also preserves fascinating mystery of unexpected and successful transmissions of the familiar into other places and spaces. Literature then reveals the ability to transfer one locality into the world of another, generating confusion and excitement, misunderstandings and discoveries, by means of which a creative transnational and translocal literary and cultural community is ceaselessly being built. E d w a r d B a l c e r z a n M a c i e j D u d a S ł a w o m i r I w a s i ó w V e r i t a S r i r a t a n a fall 2015 J a h a n R a m a z a n i and translocal fall 2015

Romanic Review

​ ​ This Research Proposal deals with the beginning of reflections about the Japanese aesthetic concept called ​ Ma ​ (間). Through perceptual and imagistic means we investigate if it might be experienced in literature. To develop this challenge we will focus on the essays of the book ​ Empire of Signs​ (1970), written by Roland Barthes.

0.Barthes and the Tool-kit: Organic Body vs. Organon; 1. Body as Ostension of Inner Truth or as One Pole of Caressing: A Noh-Play Scene; 2. Selfhood: The Soulful Individual, God, Teleology, Devil; 3. Traps and Amiabilities: Bodily Anthropology and Politics; 4. Illuminations: Body as Esthetics;