Empire of Signs by Roland Barthes

In Empire of Signs, Barthes goal is to "isolate somewhere in the world (faraway) a certain number of features... and out of these features deliberately form a system.” He calls this system Japan.

I'm not sure exactly where this book fits in Barthes' oeuvre and his intentions, but as the excerpt of a review on the back cover points out, "in this fictive Japan, there is no terrible innerness as in the West... For Barthes Japan is a test, a challenge to think the unthinkable, a place where meaning is finally banished."

It is interesting how Japan is described as a system that is in opposition to the West, this was also the case in Levi-Strauss' lectures on Japan and Junichiro Tanizaki's essay about Japanese aesthetics, In Praise of Shadows. Perhaps it id due to the legacy of Orientalism.

Barthes' powers of observation are exemplary; tactile sense makes way into his analysis like in this chapter, "Chopsticks":

... Another function of the two chopsticks together, that of pinching the fragment of food (and no longer of piercing it, as our forks do); to pinch, moreover, is too strong of a word... 

... Here we have a whole demeanor with regard to food; this is seen clearly in the cook's long chopsticks, which serve not for eating but for preparing foodstuffs: the instrument never pierces, cuts, or slits, never wounds but only selects, turns, shifts...

... In all these functions, in all the gestures they imply, chopsticks are the converse of our knife... they are the alimentary instrument which refuses to cut, to pierce, to mutilate, to trip... by chopsticks, food becomes no longer a prey to which one does violence...

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