An Unexpected Return: Barthes's Lectures at the Collège de France

Abstract

‘I undertake therefore to let myself be borne on by the force of any living life, forgetfulness. (. . .) Now comes perhaps the age of another experience: that of unlearning, of yielding to the unforeseeable change which forgetting imposes on the sedimentation of the knowledges, cultures, and beliefs we have traversed.’ (IL, 478)1 With this promise to deliver himself to the forces of forgetfulness, Roland Barthes concluded his inaugural lecture on 7 January 1977, when he joined the College de France as professor of literary semiology. He would teach there for three years, until he was hit by a laundry van while crossing the street— a traffic accident that would lead to his death a month later, on 26 March 1980. It is rather ironic that while Barthes’s writings continue to be read and taught as the work of one of the pioneers of more than one critical school in modern literary theory, this teaching of ‘unlearning’, this exploration of the forces of amnesia in his lecture courses at the College de France, was almost forgotten for more than two decades. Although his inaugural lecture was already published in 1978, it was not until 2002 that Barthes’s notes of the first two Cours appeared, entitled Comment vivre ensemble (1976–1977) (how to live together) and Le Neutre (1977–1978) (the neutral). The series was completed with the publication in 2003 of La Preparation du roman (1978–1980) (the preparation of the novel), consisting of the notes of the last years Barthes lectured at the College.2 In 2005 the first English translation of the courses appeared: The Neutral, translated by Rosalind Krauss and Denis Hollier; translations of the other two lecture courses, by Richard Howard, are on their way. For Barthes-aficionados, these lecture courses may be somewhat disappointing, at least at a first reading. In terms of content, the notes are surely not the most exciting part of Barthes’s work. They were never intended to be published, and therefore they often lack the intensity of books like S/Z and A Lover’s Discourse, two books that were based on lecture notes Barthes rewrote before publication.