Roland Barthes at the Collège de France by Lucy O’Meara (review)

From his accession to the Collège de France in 1977 to his death in 1980, Roland Barthes gave a series of public lectures at that institution, notes and recordings of which were published in 2002 and 2003 (Paris: Seuil). Lucy O’Meara’s book is among the first monographs on this important addition to Barthes’s corpus, after Kris Pint’s The Perverse Art of Reading: On the Phantasmatic Semiology in Roland Barthes’ ‘Cours au Collège de France’ (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010; see French Studies, 66 (2012), 111–12) and Guillaume Bellon’s comparative work Une parole inquiète: Barthes et Foucault au Collège de France (Grenoble: ELLUG, 2012; see FS, 67 (2013), 277–78). O’Meara integrates her analysis of the lectures with a consideration of other texts Barthes wrote during this period. A convincing chronological reading emerges, beginning with the 1976–77 and 1977–78 lectures (published separately as Comment vivre ensemble and Le Neutre (2002)), which employ ‘literary semiology’ in their use of material derived from Barthes’s reading of a variety of discourses, followed by those of 1978–79 and 1979–80, where Barthes focuses primarily on the discourse of the novel (La Préparation du roman I et II (2003)). O’Meara explores Barthes’s term ‘mathesis singularis’ to establish an Adornian ethos whereby Barthes’s individual aesthetic responses are envisaged as building towards a more universal system of knowledge. Her book is excellent on the importance of thought-objects in the Cours, using Kant to consider the relationship between Barthes’s aesthetic senses and the objects encountered in his reading. The ‘scientifique’ of Barthes’s former semiology returns ‘because of its recognition of the subjective investment that occurs in the investigation of any apparently objective phenomenon’ (p. 67). The combination of literature and semiology will prevent semiology from becoming dogmatic, ‘while at the same time “le regard sémiotique” will mean that the use he makes of literature will not fall back into indulgent stereotypes such as “le mythe de la créativité pure”’ (p. 59). Barthes thus safeguards his work from a stereotype that some criticism of his late work, in its discussion of the creative force of his subjectivity, has not always known how to avoid, and it is in this regard that O’Meara’s book is particularly welcome. She outlines the instrumentality of Barthes’s subjectivity as, alternately, a tool against ideological power, a means to accede to a general knowledge system, and a desire to express affect in the wake of his mother’s death, with the effect that the notion of subjectivity comes to have as complex a range of connotations within Barthes’s work as other key terms such as écriture. O’Meara explores the institutional framework of the Collège and contextualizes this period of Barthes’s work with reference to political thought of the post-1968 era, Asian thought, and the influence of Mallarmé and the Jena Romantics. As a researcher concerned with establishing continuities across Barthes’s corpus, it strikes me that O’Meara’s argument could usefully have been extended, in places, to texts written by Barthes prior to 1970. However, this does not detract from what is an important and insightful contribution to the study of Barthes’s late period.