Abstract
This essay aims to reread The Empire of Signs, in which Barthes develops, in his own way, a kind of ethnography of Eastern culture, especially the art of Japanese life. This which, for him, was a revelation of a highly personal aesthetics, which he seems to have intuited since Writing Degree Zero: the aesthetics of emptiness. This aesthetics presumably found a conclusion in The Neutral, that utopia of language that suspends all signification. Halfway between Writing Degree Zero and The Neutral, The Empire of Signs will be the focus of this research.
Keywords:
emptiness; degree zero; neutral; utopian novel; Roland Barthes