Roland Barthes Writing the Political: History, Dialectics, Self re-reads and re-purposes for the twenty-first century France¿s most important writer of the twentieth century. It argues that Barthes¿s wide-ranging analyses ¿ from Voltaire to Nietzsche, Marx to myth, gay love to Japan ¿ can be applied to debates and controversies in the contemporary world, in what he called the writer¿s ¿double grasp¿.