Roland Barthes never placed his feet on Brazilian territory. Which is not to say that he has never been in Brazil: his writings, full of his ideas, his concepts, his paradoxes and his comings and goings, treated to ensure his presence in the history of Brazilian literary criticism of the twentieth century. The relations between Barthes and intellectuals are the subject of this work, which aims to find, describe and discuss the images of the French writer, products of his reception in Brazil, from 1953, the publication date of Barthes' first book, Le Degré zéro de l'écriture, until the present time. Effects of a refraction process, such images do not merely reproduce the dynamics of Barthesian thought, but also highlight the particularities of the context and intellectuals who have appropriated of them. As the periodization studied comprises a transition moment in the history of Brazilian criticism that the reception to the work of the writer becomes evident: the consolidation of the university institutions in the 50s and 60s opened a new space for literary debates, once limited to newspapers. Literary criticism and theoretical discussions, so far dominated by self-taught critical, began, gradually, a concern of academics. The proposition of this thesis is to examine how Barthes' thoughts were integrated in this context, having as a guiding thread, and the main corpus, the newspaper O Estado de São Paulo, complemented by the university journal Língua e Literatura. Having first been discussed by the journalistic critics and later becoming a subject of academic criticism, Barthesian thought emerges in the form of partial images that, at the end of the investigative path, composes a heterogeneous and complex mosaic. Misunderstood, struturalist master of nouvelle critique, semiotician and guru in universities, hedonistic, subversive: in each image pulsates a facet of Barthes in a steady movement, engendering new readings and the writing of new texts, and thus circulating, alive.