THE CONTEMPORAY CONDITION. COLLATERAL CONCEPTS

From Diderot's Encyclopedia to the current form of online lexicons and vocabularies, alphabetical order has long been a conventional mode of organizing knowledge. Barthes, however, shifted the mode entirely when he started to arrange his texts alphabetically based on concepts that emerged while rewriting them. Alphabetical order then functions as a non-chronologizing anti-structure that prevents the different fragments from sliding into a single linear narrative. The twenty concepts developed here adopt a similar, essayistic approach ...[Read more]