NOVEMBER 12 — ROLAND BARTHES
French Marxist theorist of the pleasure of the text.

“Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.” — A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, 1967.

NOVEMBER 12 HOLIDAYS AND FESTIVALS
OLD TEUTONIC YULE FEAST. BUSMAN’S HOLIDAY.

ALSO ON NOVEMBER 12 IN HISTORY…
1381 — Adolphus, Count of Cleves, founds “The Brotherhood of Fools.”
1660 — John Bunyan jailed for preaching without a license, Bedfordshire, England.
1815 — Women’s rights activist Elizabeth Cady Stanton born, Johnstown, NY.
1817 — Religious mystic Bahá’u’lláh born.
1845 — French progressive anarcho-communist Jules Guesde born, Paris, France.
1915 — French literary critic Roland Barthes born, Cherbourg, Manche, France.
1939 — Canadian-born Chinese revolutionist Norman Bethune dies, Heibei, China.
1990 — Iran gives Kuwaitis untilmatum to acquire Iraqi identity cards.

Excerpted from The 2009 Autonomedia Calendar of Jubilee Saints: Radical Heroes for the New Millennium by James Koehnline and the Autonomedia Collective