Indirect Discourse: Barthes and Antonioni's Chung Kuo

The reservations about Mao's China Barthes expressed in his famous 1974 article "So, what about China ?" used to generate a lot of discussions and criticism. But what if he expressed most of his reservations about Mao's regime in this text, in a clever and indirect way ? This article examines Barthes's posthumously published notebooks Travels in China, along with some notes from his 1974 course, in order to question the(im)possible conditions of his stand on China.