"In the sentence 'She's no longer suffering,' to what, to whom does 'she' refer? What does that present tense mean?" —Roland Barthes, from his diaryThe day after his mother's death in October 1977, Roland Barthes began a d...

What is astrology? Fiction for the bourgeoisie. The Tour de France? An epic. The brain of Einstein? Knowledge reduced to a formula. Like iconic images of movie stars or the rhetoric of politicians, they are fabricated. Once isolated f...