Empire of Signs: From Japan towards Korea? Patrice Pavis (Paris) Often, during my two-year stay in Korea (2011 - 2012), I asked myself what book might best help me understand this new environment. Roland Barthes’ cult book, Empire of Signs, often came to mind. The book is not about Korea, but rather the Japan of the late 1960 s. Nevertheless, despite all the obvious differences, it seemed useful for elucidating the preoccupations of my stay, whenever I wanted to ‘read’ the signs of a culture that was ‘new to me’. After all, how can you speak of a theatre, a civilisation, a society, or a foreign nation when you do not know the language, the customs, or the politics? And so I chose Empire of Signs as vade mecum, nevertheless conscious of the difficulties and misunderstandings that this choice would surely engender. The book, published in French in 1970, was written by Barthes in 1969, following three short trips to Japan in 1966 and 1967. I reread the book at the start of my stay, with a particular lecture at the university in mind, more than forty years after having discovered it when it came out, long before the semiological wave of the 1970 s. In the teaching work I undertook there, my reflections once back ‘home’, and when accounting for my time in Korea to friends, readers, and myself, I never stopped questioning the Barthes ‘method’. It is a method that precisely is not one, since the author is “in no way claiming to represent or to analyze reality itself ”(3), seeking only to “isolate somewhere in the world (faraway) a certain number of features (a term employed in linguistics), and out of these features deliberately form a system. It is this system which I shall call: Japan.” 1 (3). How did Barthes manage to describe a “system” as complex as “Japan”? And, more to the point, how, from contemporary Korea, can one “deliberately form a [comparable] system” (3)? As a last resort, I called upon the protection of Roland Barthes; I attempted to find his point or points of view. But was this still possible, or, rather, still reasonable? To which Barthes should I devote myself? Barthes’ Point of View He himself identified, in his Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes (1974), three steps to his approach: 1) A demystification phase (in Mythologies); 2) A moment of semiological science; 3) An approach to textual theory. Empire of Signs belongs to this third and final phase, the point at which Barthes abandoned his condemnation of ‘bourgeois’ ideology, and came to be suspicious of the pseudoscience of semiology, becoming definitively open to The Pleasure of the Text, 2 to writing “in place of life” as much in the place of life as in life’s place. 3 1966 - 1970 marked in the academic world a break with structuralism and the earliest form of semiology, something thinkers like Derrida, Lacan, and Barthes all noted at the famous 1966 ‘poststructuralist’ conference at Johns Hopkins University. It was nevertheless still as a semiologist, and not as an anthropologist, sociologist or philosopher of ideas and mentalities that Barthes became interested in the “Japantext”. 4 He does not turn himself over to a socio-economic analysis of Japan in the 1960 s. Scrutinising a few traits of the “Japan-System”, he still locates himself in a Forum Modernes Theater, 27 (2012 [2016]), 7-15. Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen semiology of objects and cultural practices; he remains in search of what seem to him to be indexes, traces of the Nippon culture. Unsurprisingly, his gaze is drawn to everyday objects and sensations linked to the body. Food and cooking, sex and sexuality, are all “incidents of the body”. But his point of view changes with each observed object. His point of view is, however, never that of a self-assured Westerner: ironic, and bloated with superiority, imagining himself to know the functioning of another culture simply because he is able to see from a universal perspective, or at least believes as much. The symbolic systems he extracts are always arbitrarily chosen; the Orient, he admits, is “indifferent” to him: if he appreciates Japan, he does not accord it an inferior or superior worth, and seeks neither its essence nor its secrets. His interest in Japan is more egotistical and individualist: the country, he points out in no uncertain terms, would not have revealed anything to him if he had tried to photograph it, to gather some trace; but it did help him to write: “The author has never, in any sense, photographed Japan. Rather, he has done the opposite: Japan has starred him with any number of ‘flashes’; or, better still, Japan has afforded him a situation of writing” (4). Retrospectively, we actually realise that this “situation of writing” is that upon which the Japanese “empire of signs” is founded. But this empire is also the influence (the empire, in French) that writing exercised on the author Barthes, already in this work and throughout the ten remaining years of his life. This is certainly not the first time that an ethnologist has claimed that a foreign country has revealed to him his inner world. Barthes gives us permission to engage our subjectivity and our creativity in the study of a “foreign” human reality. Unfortunately, I dare not do the same here, for numerous reasons, and not just through timidity or an understandable inferiority complex. On the one hand, I am hesitant to place myself too fully in a “situation of writing,” since I am still seeking a somewhat objective truth as regards the objects I intend to interpret, and I still feel a bit constrained by academic and editorial institutions to distinguish poetic and theoretical writing. On the other hand, I am no longer, like Barthes with Japan, trying to sketch a “Korea-object.” The metaphor of a system seems rather problematic to me; it would not allow me to address the Korean examples I have chosen for this book. Finally, and here I concur with Barthes, I am not seeking “the very fissure of the symbolic” (4), the fissure that “cannot appear on the level of cultural products: what is presented here does not appertain (or so it is hoped) to art, to Japanese urbanism, to Japanese cooking.” (4) Apart from the chapter on ‘falling’ as a metaphor for a fragile Korea, my Korean examples are always cultural products, specifically artistic ones. These are thus conscious artistic constructions, and not practices of everyday life: a theatre production, a painting, an opera, a photograph, an installation, a choreography. Nevertheless, and here I do sign up to the Barthesian project, I realise that I cannot approach artistic works without re-situating them in their sociocultural context, without getting heavily involved in Korean everyday life, or immersed in a Korean atmosphere that is still unknown to me. Deep down, like Barthes fifty years ago already, I feel caught up in a still-poststructuralist conception of our era. This conception has taken its distance from an overly functionalist semiology, centred on the objective description of its object; but, at the same time, it is still in search of a method and of a system (a text, in the semiological sense) that is more precise and technical than the new metaphors of performance and performativity. Indeed, moving from the semiology of the 1960 s towards the “situation of writing”, 8 Patrice Pavis Barthes anticipates the performance studies of the 1980 s. He abandons a system of objects or relevant characteristics of a semiological whole, leaning towards a place in the “situation of writing,” a dynamics of writing that is now called performative writing. His performance of writing is certainly eminently probing, but at the cost of abandoning any objective point of view on reality, as if, in Barthes’ Japan as in my Korea, “the sign does away with itself before any particular signified has had the time to ‘take’” (108). The “fissure of the symbolic,” which Barthes sought between signified and signifier to protect the object from reduction to a fixed meaning, enables him to “live in the interstice, delivered from any fulfilled meaning” (9). It is thanks to this fissure that “in Japan the body exists, acts, shows itself, gives itself, without hysteria, without narcissism, but according to a pure - though subtly discontinuous - erotic project” (10). This body is all the more erotic because the words that accompany it do not create a screen for the contemplation or the expectation of the observer. This fissure is not simply contradiction, the bad faith of Barthes’ objects of ideology in the 1950 s, driven out by the mythologies of everyday life; it is perhaps a hairline crack in the certainties of a culture, illuminated by Brechtian distantiation, still the hiatus between the signifier and the signified, between the pre-symbolic and the symbolic. Hence the dream: “to know a foreign (alien) language and yet not to understand it: to perceive the difference in it without that difference ever being recuperated by the superficial sociality of discourse, communication or vulgarity” (6). This attitude of the observer is uncomfortable. On the one hand, the Western essayist hopes to understand the world he is discovering; on the other, he knows only too well that such an understanding is more intuitive than objective, that it will seem debatable to some (the locals) and to others (foreigners). The will to remain in the interstice does not prevent awareness of deceiving everyone, including oneself. Such witnessing seems useful to me: an understanding from inside as much as a vision from outside. These points of view have in any case only moved closer together with the progress of globalization, specifically since the 1960 s. The confrontation and mixing of different points of view ends in perspectives being confused, rather than converging. Often my Korean colleagues would express interest in my perspective, as a Western scholar, on “their” theatre, their pansori, or their literature; but I often felt a certain reticence, an understandable one at that, to distance their cultural objects with the Hegelian telescope, dissect them with the Cartesian scalpel, or critique with Marxist or Brechtian jargon, without having some idea of their Buddhist philosophy, their Confucian education, and their rules of everyday life. Since I was working on artworks, and not on objects from everyday life like Barthes, I felt somewhat excused, and almost forgiven. The Objects Analysed by Barthes The strength of Barthes’ analysis precisely lies in not settling for interpreting artistic products from an aesthetic and subjective point of view, but instead analyzing everyday practices drawn from his own experience of wandering Japan. Food is at the top of the list for any tourist, even a leading semiologist! Because, “Japanese food also takes the least immediately visual quality, the quality most deeply engaged in the body. . .” (12). Rice, for the French semiologist (and we should not be surprised! ), is a textual, fragmentable object: “Cooked rice [. . .] can be defined only by a contradiction of substance; it is at once cohesive and detachable; its substantial destination is the fragment, the clump, the volatile conglomerate . . .” (12). Should these 9 Empire of Signs: From Japan towards Korea? reflections on the fragmentary character of rice be taken seriously? From a culinary or metaphysical perspective, perhaps; from a poetic perspective, probably, since one dreams of a poetry to describe objects, like that of Francis Ponge in his The Voice of Things. 5 But this poetic culinary vision always leads to very affirmative anthropological conclusions, to the umpteenth comparison of Occident and Orient: “Occidental food, heaped up, dignified, swollen to the majestic, linked to a certain operation of prestige, always tends toward the heavy, the grand, the abundant, the copious; the Oriental follows the converse movement, and tends toward the infinitesimal” (15). The opposition of the bulky and the delicate, a common site of the rivalry between the Occident and the Orient, endlessly repeats itself, as if it were a historical and eternal truth, throughout the book. Thus the knife and fork, Western aggressive, predatory (or even paternal) tools, are contrasted with chopsticks: “maternal, they tirelessly perform the gesture which creates the mouthful, leaving to our alimentary manners, armed with pikes and knives, that of predation” (18). Barthes' observations are not wrong, even when applied to Korea, whose food is nevertheless very different from that of Japan or China. If, as according to the German expression “der Mensch ist was er isst”, (‘you are what you eat’), homo koreanus is impregnated by the essence and the taste of kimchi: fermented and spiced cabbage, served with every single meal, like bread in France. Is kimchi the key to the Korean psyche? No doubt, but it would require the talent and imagination of Roland Barthes to know how to describe the texture and the configuration. A fan and practitioner of kimchi before the Lord, I can but confirm the virtue of kimchi as accompaniment and metatext in all its forms and all its meals. Its very spicy character, which is striking to any Westerner, prepares the Western eater to pass the entrance examination for Korean cooking. He must first of all accept that a spiced vegetable might take the place of bread and be allied with rice, the other must of any Korean meal, and be served as both a condiment and a main course (at least often in the past). Kimchi is a link, a universal shifter between people, classes, genders, and observances. For a western visitor, it also marks a required liminal passage towards a very ‘different’ gustatory structure, which ends either in enthusiastic acceptance or definitive rejection. Most of the objects that intrigue Barthes lead him to comparisons with Western practices, which are deemed rather masculine. For instance, coin-operated machines: our café pinball machine, Barthes assures us, “sustains a symbolism of penetration: the point is to possess, by a well-placed thrust, the pinup girl who, all lit up on the panel of the machine, allures and waits” (28). The Japanese pachinko is force-fed by the players: “from time to time the machine, filled to capacity, releases its diarrhea of marbles” (29). Barthes sees in this a confirmation of the opposition between a male and aggressive, imperialist and predatory Occident and a feminine, passive and conquered Orient. These simplifications actually capture practices and relations between genders illustrated in acting techniques. The opposition between activity and passivity is not merely sexual; it is transposed into the political dimension. It certainly corresponds to the historical reality of Western imperialism and its accompanying orientalism. But should we not today, fifty years after this visit to Japan, after the decolonisation of the whole world in the 1950 s, challenge such dichotomies bastardised into essentialist stereotypes? To re-evaluate Barthes’ sexologico-cultural position, a position very focused on the Japan and the bipolar world of the 1960 s, it is probably necessary to be attentive to another incidental remark concerning the difference of sexes and of sexuality: “in Japan - in that 10 Patrice Pavis country I am calling Japan - sexuality is in sex, not elsewhere; in the United States, it is the contrary; sex is everywhere, except in sexuality” (28 - 29). What does this tell us? Was this really the case then, and is it still today, in Japan or in Korea? In the United States, at that time, sex did indeed display itself everywhere, in all types of representation (advertising, the free press, the media). But sexuality, eroticism, and relations between the sexes were a great deal more timid, coloured even by prudishness or puritanism, and so sexual liberty seemed to have stopped at the couple’s door and assumed sexuality. Conversely, the Japanese society of that time did not represent sex so openly or publicly; the society was modest, even closing in on itself: it was necessary to search behind the masks a bit, for a less public, but thus a more concentrated, sexuality that did not need to exhibit itself openly or crudely (in the media or in everyday language, for example), or to be voluntarily limited in its individual or familial manifestations. Fifty years later, in Japan as in Korea, things have changed a great deal. And yet, Barthes’ comment remains relevant, if one continues to compare Japan or Korea with the USA or with the Americanised world. The media and the increasingly insidious forms of advertising and neoliberal ideology have certainly invaded Japanese or Korean culture, but the distinction between sex and sexuality and their usage in different contexts remains relevant and helps us reflect on the other - non-American or non-European - culture. What about sex in contemporary Korea? Big question! One must turn to the media and advertising: sex is highly present, but is not on display in any crude way. In public places, couples often will not even hold hands, and homosexual couples certainly do not. Dance and theatre shows and musicals, as well as the actors themselves, are dazzlingly beautiful, and certainly very sexy, but they are rarely vulgar or direct. The limits of the representation of sex seem to be rather clearly defined. The representation of sexual scenes is not controlled by any religion or ideology, but is implicitly regulated through a strict educational grounding that remains Confucian. In the mass media (advertising in public spaces and on television), in songs, K-pop, or musicals, sex is only suggested, and specially prepared for the gaze of middle-aged men. The woman in these arenas is very young - almost a Lolita - and there are few middleaged women to be seen. The media ideal, but also that of companies and large industries is a young woman who is beautiful but voiceless, childless, and with no future on the job market after the age of forty, ‘disposable’ once used, quickly ‘ejected’ from the company. A seductive appearance has become a categorical imperative, an obsession justifying all manner of plastic surgery, making Korea a haven for “surgery-tourism”. 6 Package, bouquet, box: in these seemingly trivial objects, Barthes perceives the trace of a writing of the void, which is also the key to politeness: “the Japanese bouquet has a volume; [. . .] you can move your body into the interstice of its branches, into the space of its stature, not in order to read it (to read its symbolism) but to follow the trajectory of the hand which has written it: a true writing, since it produces a volume and since, forbidding our reading to be the simple decoding of a message (however loftily symbolic), it permits this reading to repeat the course of the writing's labor.” (45) To appreciate the bouquet is to know how to read it, interpret it; “to follow the trajectory of the hand which has written it” (45). Thus, to write is to make a movement; to read is to repeat this movement, to retrace its steps. The body moves into the interstice between the branches: it positions them, and it creates the concrete experience of a journey through still-unformed material: the receiver of the bouquet, the reader, must repeat this journey and imagine her own. The bouquet/ the text 11 Empire of Signs: From Japan towards Korea? will effectively be travelled and rewritten by the user. For the bouquet as for the text, there are two kinds of reading: a passive reading for easily readable text; an active reading for writerly text, demanding that the reader perform an act just as creative as writing. The gift and the box that inevitably encloses it fascinate Barthes because of the emptiness they transport: “The gift is alone: / it is touched/ neither by generosity/ nor by gratitude,/ the soul does not contaminate it” (67). The Empire of Signs compares western impoliteness and Japanese politeness. Politeness is, in the West, “regarded with suspicion”, courtesy “pass[es] for a distance (if not an evasion, in fact) or a hypocrisy” (63). Whereas the other politeness, the Japanese kind (and we might add the Korean kind), “by the scrupulosity of its codes, the distinct graphism of its gestures, and even when it seems to us exaggeratedly respectful (i. e., to our eyes, 'humiliating') because we read it, in our manner, according to a metaphysics of the person - this politeness is a certain exercise of the void . . .” (65). Greeting takes forms and meanings that are very different according to the specific cultural region. It is not easy for a Westerner to understand that politeness, like writing or haïku, is an empty sign, “The Form is Empty, says - and repeats - a Buddhist aphorism” (68). Even more so, since the choice is not between a Japanese body that deeply bows and a Western body that refuses any bodily movement of submission. The choice, rather, is between different techniques of the body, between a deep inclination, repeated and rehearsed from earliest childhood, and a facial expression or a handshake, considered a sufficient symbolic movement and a neutral gesture. With this question of politeness, Barthes remains, half a century later, relevant, less as regards a philosophical difference between the West and the East, and more in terms of the difficulties of changing gestural habit, of transforming one technique of the body into another. In accordance with the theory of Mauss, there is actually nothing striking in the fact that a Westerner has trouble changing bodies when changing culture. Over the last five decades, the marked differences between different techniques of the body used in greetings have blurred, as a result of the process of homogenisation entailed by globalization. Interference has occurred between the two major systems of politeness. One can no longer contrast as mutually exclusive the empty formalism of Asia and the guilty conscience of America. Sometimes, faced with a Western interlocutor, the Korean simplifies or modifies the way of greeting. She extends her hand, to put you at ease. You respond offering your own, but with a bit of a delay and a certain reticence. She notices and “feels silly” for having wanted to play the Westerner instead of being herself. You thus realise that you have inadvertently caused her to make a faux-pas. If by chance you attempted a bowing of the head, or of the upper body, you too will find yourself in an awkward position. But this inversion of systems sometimes leads in the end to a moment of gestural relaxation and an ironic physical introduction to the other’s culture. This involuntary pas-de-deux is typical of the difficulties of intercultural communication. It is at the same time characteristic of the imbrication of cultures, of points of view, of subjectivities. It suggests that the great dichotomies, like those described by Barthes half a century ago, are on the verge of diminution, but not of extinction, despite global standardisation and the deployment of globish language, behaviour, and thought. In his observations on habits and customs, practices of everyday life, we see Barthes at his best. Applying his method to Korean contemporary life, we would most likely find details that would intrigue the Western visitor, beginning with the politeness and amia- 12 Patrice Pavis bility of the people we meet. I have chosen to reserve these observations for another kind of discourse, less everyday and more academic: discourse on performances. Beyond the objects and practices of everyday life, what counts are mentalities, the attitudes of people and specifically those of artists. In a world that is more and more globalized and mixed, I abandon the illusion of being able to distinguish the individual characters and the specific cultural characteristics. The challenge, for today’s observer, is perceiving differences despite the steamroller of globalization, not explaining Korean culture through European culture. Globalization erases differences; we lose any sense of specific local characteristics, as well as our criteria of distinction for profound differences or surface variations. What catches my attention, and confuses me, is thus not exotic scenery or practices of everyday life; it is mentalities, ideological presuppositions of social communication, the implicit principles that might be considered obvious and unquestionable for Koreans, but which stand out for me. These implicit principles are, for example, the way of working, of reading a text, of rehearsing, of obeying orders or authorities, and the resulting dramaturgical or aesthetic choices. I must note that it is difficult to separate cultural, political, aesthetic, and artistic factors. It is impossible to disentangle Korea, and to find myself: I am neither in this culture, nor completely outside it, but perhaps to the side, at its side. Was this not also Barthes’ position with Japan: facing the Empire while in its grip? More even than him, I lose myself, and I understand one thing at least: I can only speak of this country and its inhabitants from behind the mask of fiction. The Future of the Barthes Method The Empire of Signs remains in any case a major book that has opened the eyes of several generations of researchers, and has proposed a path for many: semiologists in search of a polymorphous object, theorists of the text and of writing, anthropologists of the everyday, analysts of cultural performances in their different incarnations. This model constitutes the book’s renewed modernity in semiology, ethnology, theories of text and culture, phenomenology, and ultimately in all the humanities disciplines benefitting from Barthes’ influence on their thought. We must nevertheless keep from mechanically transposing Barthes’ reflections on Japan, a Japan that is more textual and poetic than sociological and political. Are all these observations verifiable? Not readily, however subtle the discourse of the Barthes method. Should we ask the Japanese whether this hymn to their culture managed to capture their society and their soul? Not necessarily: they neither hold a monopoly on Japan nor do they enjoy the necessary distance from their culture. In any case, these Parisian subtleties are easily lost on anyone who has not carefully followed the author's journey around the Left Bank. Can we, then - returning to my initial question - apply the analysis of these Japanese signs to the South Korean peninsula? Nothing could be less certain! But you won't know until you try, and try while remaining critical of Barthes’ ‘imperial’ method and open to other possible approaches. Some of the claims in Barthes’ essay might trouble the reader if taken at face value, rather than as a poetic meditation on cultural difference. For example, the comparison between Asian and Caucasian eyelids: Barthes here sees a difference between the western eye and the Japanese face, a difference that is both physical (obviously) and metaphysical: The Western eye is subject to a whole mythology of the soul, central and secret, whose fire, sheltered in the orbital cavity, radiates toward 13 Empire of Signs: From Japan towards Korea? a fleshy, sensuous, passional exterior; but the Japanese face is without moral hierarchy; it is entirely alive, even vivid (contrary to the legend of Oriental hieratism), because its morphology cannot be read ‘in depth,’ i. e., according to the axis of an inwardness; its model is not sculptural but scriptural . . . (102). We clearly recognise the Barthesian notion of the soul as a profound instance that is exteriorised in a physical expression of the passions. On the other hand, we understand his vision of the Asian face as an impenetrable surface of writing that does not produce an interior and prior signified. But this polarised vision is hardly convincing, as we cannot really see the Japanese face as a pure exteriority, a writing without signifieds, a surface without psychic vibrations. This comparison might make us smile, or might anger an ethnologist, but only if we deny Barthes the poetic licence of a metaphor suggesting that expressiveness is more or less accepted depending on the culture. But is the form of the eyelids therefore a consequence of cultural and metaphysical differences, differences that translate into a different morphology of the face? We realise that supposedly objective observations of bodies and objects in the human environment are, in reality, merely the fantasy projections, poetic visions, or metaphysical conceptions of the author. Then why not, we might ask, simply call on poetry, instead using a pseudo-scientific discourse? Travel writers, like Victor Segalen, Blaise Cendrars, or Nicolas Bouvier also surrendered to a poetic account of their discoveries of distant peoples and cultures. Adopting the style of obsessional and ‘objective’ analysis, the poetry of Francis Ponge provides another possible model. Barthes keeps up the theoretical speculation: he never makes the leap; his writing does not present itself as poetry or the book as a novel. With the benefit of hindsight, however, we observe that after Empire of Signs, Barthes’ works - from Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes to A Lover’s Discourse and Camera Lucida - become autobiographical and/ or fictional. They achieve a fragile balance between elevated theoretical writing and an auto-fiction, a mixture of indirect personal confession and fictional inventiveness. It is as if Japan had placed him forever in a “situation of writing” (4), but of mixed writing, whose object became a photographic self-portrait taken by the unknown, “novelistic object” (3) that he had come to observe: Japan. As for me, having neither the audacity nor indeed the talent of Roland Barthes, I wondered how I might take him at his word and allow Korea to photograph me and, if also possible, to place me in a “situation of writing.” Each morning when walking to the University, I passed two mirrors situated at a curve in the street. I would first take a photograph of a cart and of two brightly coloured cones, arranged differently each time). Then, I would photograph myself and another slice of reality in one of the mirrors: a very tricky exercise, since the ideal angle was impossible to find. No passer-by seeing me taking photographs of parking cones and a mirror ever made any comment, nobody called the police, like they would in Germany, or the psychiatric hospital, as the would in France (I imagine). But, one day, a nun from the Buddhist temple opposite my place looked at me with a mixture of shock and pity, and murmured: “But why? ” Having thought that my daily act bore witness to the impermanence of the world, I was disarmed by her question. They say that we only see in the other (the other person or the other culture) that which we project of ourselves. I would test this adage on a daily basis, never managing to place in the same frame an original piece of the world, a fragment of my body, and my view of both. 14 Patrice Pavis Until, one day, after several months, when I discovered a little inscription chiselled into a corner of the mirror, a sentence in English, hard to read on the reflective material: “I flooded the world, to see the reflection of myself on its surface.” I never quite managed to photograph the sentence in its entirety, without truncating it. It was only when I abandoned the idea of including a part of my reflection in the mirror, of wanting to authenticate my discovery, that I managed to photograph the phrase without butchering it, and also managed to capture the reflection of a lady passing by, perhaps worried by my actions, but also a mute and kindly witness of this Korean world in which I was submerged, and which resisted my reading. From that point on, my attitude towards this faraway country, towards my research, and towards others started to change. I understood that there would be no point in flooding the world with my simplifications, with my theories, or with tears shed for the past. Translation: Joel Anderson Notes 1 Quotations by Barthes are from Empire of Signs, trans. Richard Howard, New York 1982. Passages in roman type are reflections on Empire of Signs; those in italics refer to my stay in Korea. 2 To borrow from the title of his 1973 book. 3 See the remarkable intellectual biography of Barthes by Marie Gil, Roland Barthes au lieu de la vie, Paris 2012. 4 A term - “texte-Japon” - that Maurice Pinguet takes up in his essay on Empire of Signs and his book, Le texte Japon, Paris 2009. 5 Francis Ponge, The Voice of Things, New York 1972. 6 Lili Barbery-Coulon, “La beauté fait son marché en Corée”, Le Magazine du Monde, 9 Novembre 2013, pp. 47 - 53. 15 Empire of Signs: From Japan towards Korea?