Sarlo and Barthes: a meeting in Buenos Aires

Abstract

Roland Barthes’ writings had and continue to play a fundamental role in the thinking of many intellectuals and writers around the world. In Latin America it has not been different. In Argentina, one of her first readers was the writer and critic Beatriz Sarlo, who has been writing about Barthes and “with” Barthes since the 1960s, that is, she develops her thoughts on Argentine literature and culture with the writer as one of her references. In this sense, A Cidade vista. Mercadorias e cultura urbana (2009), by Sarlo, presents itself as a wandering of the writer through Buenos Aires where the incident, a central notion in the conception of Barthesian writing, imposes itself without saying its name and enables the co-presence of a “seen city” with a “written city”. This happens, in many moments, from the observation of elements of everyday life that are, little by little, “denaturalized” by Sarlo, in the execution of a movement that is very much indebted to the Mythologies, in fact, evoked in the book. Sarlo and Barthes come together at the moment of writing and promote not only the circulation of texts, but their interweaving in a seen and written Buenos Aires, located between France and Latin America.