Special Feature

This issue features an interview, published for the first time in English, between cultural theorist Roland Barthes and Japanese academic Shigehiko Hasumi. The 1972 interview includes discussions of Le plaisir du texte (1973) and of a restlessness that kept Barthes moving from one critical language to another “as soon as meanings . . . solidified and acquired the status of stereotype,” translator Chris Turner writes.

The issue also includes a special section about Friedrich Kittler’s work on war. The section contains four previously untranslated essays on the martial background and deployment of searchlights, freeways, animals, and literary texts. The introductory essay by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young sketches the various aspects of war in Kittler’s oeuvre and attempts to tackle the problematic ways in which the Third Reich—a state that could exist only in and through war—appears in his texts.