The semiotician and writer Roland Barthes (1915-80) embodies like no other intellectual the developments of French thought between structuralism and post-structuralism, Marxism and deconstruction, narrative theory and the art of writing. As the enfant terrible of cultural and literary theory, Barthes has transformed our view of the world by turning it into a "realm of signs," encompassing everything from everyday objects to haute couture, from literature and philosophy to mass culture and photography. At the heart of it all are the signs of life: in the discourse of love, in the adventure of knowledge, in the "pleasure of the text." Barthes' signs of life outline a science of life that this introduction makes comprehensible in all its dynamism.