Given Roland Barthes' deep distrust of bourgeois myths and their attendant orthodoxies, as well as his committed belief that the ostensible author of a given work is merely the contingent effect of a braid of separate texts, any attempt to systematically define his writings on film as a coherent body of work is inevitably doomed to failure. For better or worse, Barthes was an intellectual flâneur who persistently “wrote” (and “rewrote”) his often “erotic” passion for literature, theatre, music, advertising, pop culture and photography into a unique phenomenonology of both textual and somatic excess whereby he reversed the syntagmatic order of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's famous dictum in Phenomenology of Perception, “The theory of perception is already the theory of the body” (1989: 181).