What would the philosopher and semiotician Roland Barthes make of the limited-edition Hermès scarf designed in his honor? Photograph by Ulf Andersen / Getty

Hermès, the French luxury brand, has paid homage to the philosopher and semiotician Roland Barthes on the centennial of his birth, this November, by crafting a limited-edition silk scarf printed with a motif inspired by his book “A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments” (1977). How would Barthes read this object? He read everything, after all—not just books. He taught us to see the whole world as a helix of readable signs, and even after his premature vehicular death, in 1980, his students retained a set of instructions for deciphering the cultural cosmos. How would he have read the choice to emblazon his memory across a silk carré? What would he have made of this bourgeoisification of his thought? And what would he have had to say about the scarf’s eight-hundred-and-ninety-five-euro price tag?

Typically remembered as a bridge figure between structuralism and poststructuralism and as a luminary in the field of semiotics (the science of signs), Barthes perforated the study of culture in all its forms—art, literature, film, design, fashion—with a series of sharp concepts: the scriptor, the death of the author, the readerly and writerly text, the photographic studium and punctum, literary pleasure and jouissance. On the occasion of the centennial of his birth, he would likely be pleased that the reading of culture and its endless coils of signs has become a favorite pastime throughout the West. Nearly everyone in the middle class, particularly those under forty or so, spends a significant amount of their waking hours consuming and critiquing television shows, commercials, apps, objects and their design, political performances, celebrity behavior, and brands on the Internet. Perhaps without ever having read him, they are imitating Barthes’s approach to culture. He always went much further, however, and for this reason, anyone invested in deciphering the ornaments and fundaments of the material world benefits from his theories.

Barthes has remained a polestar for me over the years, as I moved from my wobbly first steps in learning French to my position now, as an assistant professor of French literature and thought. I encountered him first in my sophomore or junior year of college, around 1997 or 1998. On a whim, I picked up a used edition of his book “Empire of Signs” (1970) for $4.50 (the pencil trace on the cover page reminds me). To say “it changed my life” sounds stale, but stale-sounding things are often true. The book is about Japan, whose signs are parsed into little lacquered boxes that resemble chapters. Calligraphy, chopsticks, bowing, tempura, pachinko, Tokyo, the rail system, sumo wrestlers, haiku: one by one, Barthes revisits the categories of Japanese-ness that have become frozen in the Western imagination and attempts to thaw them. The book’s slim prose and its intercalated photographs lend it the feel of a picture book, but a magical one that purports to change the way we see. I rushed back to the same bookstore and picked up a six-dollar copy of “Mythologies” (1957) and demolished it almost as quickly as I had “Empire of Signs.” This collection of vignettes on staples of French culture—Citroën, steak-frites, the Tour de France, name-brand detergents, striptease —shows that even the most secular of our cultural habits obey many of the same rules as myth-based rituals. Barthes wrote in the introduction that he aimed to demystify the “mystification which transforms petit-bourgeois culture into a universal nature.” If his enemy is the bourgeoisie, he casts himself as a semioclast, a pillager of their materialist sign system. His method and style allow him to pillage even-handedly, sometimes even playfully, and he makes it clear that culture, exhibitionist by nature, is begging to be seen, not just looked at. For a young Gen-Xer who’d begun to feel the products and spectacles pressing their way into her life, Barthes’s reading methods helped scatter them, opening bigger spaces for breathing. To read things means to gain a kind of control over them. The world was under my surveillance.

He was served up to me again in the fall of 2001, this time in an institutional context: a masters course on literary theory taught by a Frenchman with phenomenal eyebrows. The syllabus, which I have kept, indicates that a month after 9/11, I was assigned to read Barthes’s book with the alluring title “S/Z,” published in 1970. (On September 11, 2001, the syllabus shows we read excerpts from Gérard Genette’s “Figures III,” from 1972, about the use of time in narratives, but my memory of that session is blurred.) “S/Z” is a weird book. It proposes a codified theory of reading and then applies this code, line by line, to “Sarrasine,” one of Balzac’s short stories. I’d never seen such a pragmatic application of theory. Until that point, I’d considered theory to be an abstract improvisation that had little to do with things of interest to me—namely, life and literature. But Barthes shows that theory is not incompatible with what is interesting, with what is real. Gifted with a particular sensitivity and method, a theorist can pry open the world.

Barthes’s style is as much a part of his enchantment as his ideas. His best texts are those in which he gives himself permission to be an essayist. In these pieces, he abandons the tight logic of the scholarly article and admits that the world can be perceived only through a subjective consciousness, prone to nostalgia and wonderment. His arguments are not airtight. They are open and breezy, intended as readerly invitations, not as barricades against would-be detractors. These essays show how theory can be beautiful. Barthes’s essayism—the penchant for taking the world as pure contingency—is remarkably compatible with our time, because it allows for a trying out of various possibilities without commitment to a particular ideology. The trajectory of Barthes’s career and the pliability of his concepts reveal a man who wasn’t afraid to let his thoughts germinate and become autonomous from their grower.

In 2007, Jérôme Garcin published an edited volume titled “Nouvelles Mythologies,” a collection of essays imitating those in Barthes’ original “Mythologies,” in celebration of its fifty-year anniversary. With pieces by some of France’s most renowned writers and thinkers, including Philippe Sollers, Catherine Millet, Paul Virilio, Marc Augé, Alain Mabanckou, Claude Lanzmann, and Bernard Pivot, the collection proposes close readings of new mythological cultural artifacts and phenomena, including Nespresso pods, Botox, G.M.O.s, fair trade, the Islamic headscarf, and WiFi. While American media secretes a persistent discharge of similar readings, rarely do they divulge more than a compulsion to self-analyze in real time. Barthes’s talent was his slowness and patience in dealing with his objects of study and his will to contextualize them historically, to acknowledge that nothing just materializes from nowhere.

I teach Barthes often in my graduate and undergrad courses, always wanting students to see what he had seen so clearly: that every product and every ad contains a self-veiling mechanism within it. The aim of his entire project was to cure us of world blindness, a disease described superbly by Robert Harrison in his book “Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition”: “It is fair to say that there exists in our era a tragic discrepancy between the staggering richness of the visible world and the extreme poverty of our capacity to perceive it.” The cure, Barthes knew, can be found in the study of literature, photography, and other art forms, optimal training grounds for developing the kind of attention necessary to see what surrounds us. We should join Barthes in his vindication of literature and the arts, the study of which requires a deceleration, a dismissal of the necessity to produce, produce, produce. His books offer solutions and solace to those of us frustrated by the pace of the now, by the superficiality of our looking, by our lack of historical memory, and by the urge to commodify things that have no business being trapped under cellophane.

Barthes’s fans have begun to celebrate the centennial of his birth in many ways, including conferences, lectures, readings, radio programs, podcasts, and interviews, but maybe Hermès was on to something when they chose to design a scarf to commemorate his life. The Barthes scarf is a particularly readable and mythological object: fragile, expensive, and thus to be handled with care, as he handled all of his objects of study. Perhaps silk is the best material with which to honor Barthes. It is a natural fiber, exuded by a living thing and thus containing something of this life within it; its history represents the encounter between East and West; and its invitation to touch puts it in the same category as human skin. The scarf holds its own significance. As a tool for veiling, it floats somewhere between the necessary and the ornamental, and it might remind us of the forgotten link between “text” and “textile.” The author’s text becomes textile, now meant to adorn a throat, to cloak a woman’s hair, to waft in the wind—in short, to become unreadable. The irony of all of this would surely not have been lost on Barthes.