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Lecon: Testament and Prophecy

In Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes the author claims to have passed through four phases, which he names, respectively:“social mythology,” “semiology,” “textuality,” and “morality.” Between the publication of this book in  and his death in , he performed his Inaugural Lecture at the Collège de France, entitled Leçon (). At the time of the Lesson, was Barthes entering a fifth phase?1 If the answer were to be yes, what theoretical propositions would this fifth phase have to offer? Some statements made in the Lesson and in his last texts, as well as some answers he gave in his last interviews, lead us to believe that such a new displacement was taking place. In Barthes’s own schema, the Lesson belongs to the fourth phase (“morality”), but it announces some positions which differ from those expressed in two works also attributed to this phase (The Pleasure of the Text and Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes). Before pointing out in the Lesson the aspects which would have suffered a displacement, it is worth rereading some of Barthes’s affirmations which are contemporary to or immediately following this lecture. In an interview published in Art Press, in , he reaffirmed his “displacement tactic”:“the function of the intellectual is to go always elsewhere when the going gets sticky.”2 Two years later, in an interview published in the magazine Lire, he indicated the direction he was taking. After declaring his classical taste, as a reader, he expressed some ethical doubts in relation to the positions sustained by himself in the last two phases—particularly the phase he called “morality”—asking: “Should we fight to kill meaning, or to destroy it? [. . .] The answers can only be tactical and they depend upon the evaluation of the historical point we have reached and of the battle we have to defend.” And he explained his personal point of view: “I think perhaps the time has come to fight a little less, to strive less for the texts, to recede somewhat. Tactically, I have in mind a slight receding: to deconstruct less and to practice a greater readability [. . .] I’ve changed the tactical reach of my practice.”3 In the Lesson, this tactical displacement is performed. The lecture aroused strong objections, mainly due to the assertion that “language is fascist.” What was less observed was that this provocative assertion intended to prepare, in the discourse, the ascend-