Living Together – Roland Barthes, the Individual and the Community

339 Pages·2018·1.531 MB·English

by  Knut Stene-Johansen, Christian Refsum, Johan Schimanski

Knut Stene-Johansen, Christian Refsum, Johan Schimanski (eds.)
Living Together – Roland Barthes, the Individual and the Community
Culture & Theory | Volume 179

Knut Stene-Johansen, Christian Refsum,
Johan Schimanski (eds.)
Living Together –
Roland Barthes, the Individual
and the Community
This publication was made possible by financial support from the Department
of Literature, European Languages and Area Studies at the University of Oslo.
Translations from Norwegian, Danish and Swedish by the authors, Knut Stene-
Johansen (Fechner-Smarsly) and Stig Oppedal. Translation from French (Mar-
ty) by Melissa McMahon. Contributions by Forty, Friedlander, Görling, Kuldova,
Pfaller, and Stan are given in their English originals.
Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek
The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Na-
tionalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at
http://dnb.d-nb.de
© 2018 transcript Verlag, Bielefeld
Cover layout: Kordula Röckenhaus, Bielefeld
Cover illustration: Original water color by Roland Barthes. © Eric Marty
Typeset by Mark-Sebastian Schneider, Bielefeld
Printed by Majuskel Medienproduktion GmbH, Wetzlar
Print-ISBN 978-3-8376-4431-9
PDF-ISBN 978-3-8394-4431-3
Contents
Introduction
“How to live together?”:
Roland Barthes and the phantasme of idiorrhythmic life | 9
AKÈDIA/Akedia
Kjersti Bale | 21
ANAKHÔRÈSIS/Anachoresis
Knut Ove Eliassen | 29
ANIMAUX/Animals
Peter J. Meedom | 43
ATHOS/Mount Athos
Rolv Nøtvik Jakobsen | 55
AUTARCIE/Autarky
Arne Melberg | 65
BANC/School (of fish)
Dag O. Hessen | 71
BEGUINAGES/Beguinages
Thomas Fechner-Smarsly | 79
BUREAUCRATIE/Bureaucracy
Robert Pfaller | 89
CAUSE/Cause
Hilde Bondevik | 103
CHAMBRE/Room
Mari Lending | 117
CHEF/Chief
Fredrik Engelstad | 125
CLÔTURE/Enclosure
Mette Birkedal Bruun | 135
COLONIE/Colony
Iver B. Neumann | 147
COUPLAGE/Pairing
Eivind Røssaak | 153
DISTANCE/Distance
Inga Bostad | 169
DOMESTIQUES/Servants
Corina Stan | 179
ÉCOUTE/Listen
Christian Refsum | 187
ÉPONGE/Sponge
Jennifer Friedlander | 197
ÉVÉNEMENT/Event
Hans Hauge | 207
FLEURS/Flowers
Kaja Schjerven Mollerin | 217
IDIORRHYTHMY/Idiorrhythmy
Frederik Tygstrup | 223
MARGINALITÉS/Marginalities
Eivind Tjønneland | 231
MONÔSIS/Monosis
Svein Haugsgjerd | 237
NOMS/Names
Karin Gundersen | 249
NOURRITURE/Food
Knut Stene-Johansen | 255
PROXÉMIE/Proxemics
Reinhold Görling | 267
RECTANGLE/Rectangle
Adrian Forty | 277
RÈGLE/Rule
Stian Grøgaard | 283
SALETÉ/Dirtiness
Thomas Hylland Eriksen | 291
UTOPIE/Utopia
Tereza Kuldova | 299
XÉNITEIA/Xeniteia
Johan Schimanski | 313
Vita nova versus bios philosophikos:
Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault
Éric Marty | 323
Contributors | 335

Introduction
“How to live together?”:
Roland Barthes and the phantasme of idiorrhythmic life
For Roland Barthes (1915-1980), writing was a way of exploring the most
essential aspects of life, such as love, death, mourning, and relationships. From
his first book Writing Degree Zero (1953) to the lecture manuscripts published
after his death, Barthes investigated different perspectives on writing. His
curiosity, the fact that he was always searching for new ways of experiencing
the world and new ways of writing, is particularly inspiring. Whether he wrote
about the novel, haiku poetry, the new Citroën DS 19, fashion, hermits from the
fifth century, or photography, he found original departure points and left food
for further reflection and space for more writing for those who came after him.
When celebrating the centennial of Barthes’s birth in Oslo in 2015, we
chose one of his more unknown works to discuss: the posthumously published
lecture manuscripts Comment vivre ensemble (How to Live Together). Note that
the title is without any question mark: Does it mean that it is a mode d’emploi, ‘a
user’s manual,’ as in Georges Perec’s novel?
This amazingly rich manuscript has a special background. On Wednesday,
January 5, 1977, Barthes was solemnly appointed to his position as a professor
of literary semiology at the prestigious French institution the Collège de France
in Paris. Exactly one week after this ceremony and his inaugural lecture, he
started his first teaching seminar by addressing a quite surprising subject:
‘How to Live Together.’ The seminars explored the possibility of creating a
community capable of including both collective rules and individual rhythms,
habits, and preferences. Barthes’s material was not sociological statistics,
interviews, and analysis, but literature.
Literature has always been engaged in the problems of ‘how to live together,’
as probably every novel in the world can be said to address this issue in one way
or another. The lecture manuscripts for the seminar in 1977 were published
in French in 2002 as Comment vivre ensemble: Simulations romanesques de
quelques espaces quotidiens, in Kate Briggs’s translation, How to Live Together: