Barthes and the Arab World: A Misunderstanding?

Abstract

Roland Barthes maintained paradoxical relations with the Arab world,
do both distance and proximity. Tourist in the Maghreb, resident at
Morocco where he teaches for a year, Barthes has sometimes been accused
indifference or condescension. It is necessary to forget the very particular care
when he started designing his courses for a foreign audience; it is to forget
especially the place that he grants to literature as a means of founding the
freedom of the subject and to bring cultures closer.