In Chapter One, we used a dog-leg structure in the analysis to suggest that Barthes's conception of love is remarkably consistent, from one end of his career to the other, in its use of dialectics. In this chapter, we concentrate on a shorter period of his career, 1954–57, to consider an ‘amorous dialectic’ that is politicised in a different way.

In an early ‘monthly mythology’ called ‘Phenomenon or myth?’ (2002, V, 1022–23), not included in Mythologies, Barthes sets out the only strategy that he can see for analysing contemporary myths. Remarkably candid, and neither ironic nor playful, Barthes, here in 1954 at least, describes the political mission of his monthly column. Whenever he sees a new myth (that of Martians or Marlon Brando's wedding) he feels the need to counter the attempts to maintain ‘Order’ that myth enacts by denouncing and explaining. But here, he concedes, was the dilemma of this political act. Denunciation could only ever be an explanation whose inadequacy and limits he recognizes. Given the nature of human alienation, his explanations of myth must have a dialectical but ‘loving’ relationship with these myths, the mythologist must be ‘engaged with [their] historical moment’ in ‘a truly amorous dialectic [véritable dialectique d’amour]’:

Though there is no mention of the ‘amorous dialectic’ in Mythologies three years later, there is, at the end of ‘Myth Today’, an echo:

The difference is that, by 1957, the ‘amorous dialectic’ has become the ‘order of sar-casm’, indicative of the mythologist's exclusion from those ‘having nothing’, of the intellectual such as Barthes living only a ‘theoretical sociality’ (2009, 185).