lecture
The Deaths of Roland Barthes
Translator's Note: B/D

Lecture: Towards Utopias of Language

So moving means:
Going where people don't expect you, or, to put it more radically, officially abandoning what you've written before when the powers that be are using and subjugating it.
(p.
34)

"Lecture" is a lecture given by Roland Barthes on January 7, 1977, at the opening of his first semester as professor of literary semiotics at the Collège de France.
Barthes's appointment to the Collège de France attracted so much attention that the lecture hall was filled on the first day with scholars, students, the general public, and reporters, and the enthusiasm continued with the three lectures Barthes gave at the Collège de France until 1980: "How to Live Together," "Neutrality," and "Preparing the Novel."
In this lecture, which summarizes and organizes his academic journey and becomes a symbolic event that announces the beginning of his activities at the Collège de France, he argues that language is fundamentally “fascist” (p.
20) makes a controversial statement.
He argues that “our real struggle” lies in opposing the “powers” ​​that are inseparable from the inseparable relationship between language and power, which was a major issue in 20th-century French intellectual society, and he posits literature as a tactic to deceive language, as it cannot go outside of it.

Founded in 1530, the Collège de France has been committed to providing open education to all since its inception, and is considered a privileged place outside of power.
To stand on the podium here, one must be recommended by a professor from the Academy and the Collège de France, and Barthes was recommended by Michel Foucault, who had been teaching at the Collège de France since 1970.
However, this was controversial at the time.
Barthes's style, which was based on his writing outside of traditional institutions, crossing over various contemporary theories, including classical literature, rhetoric, linguistics, and semiotics, and his inability to "obtain a formal degree" due to tuberculosis, raised suspicions in institutional criticism circles and university lecture halls.
The "Lecture" submitted in this tension contains the small and soft resistance of the question mark that Barthes creates as a "writer who only writes essays," an ambiguous being, a subject who is subtly shaken in any place or system.

In this article, Barthes poses the question of how to create a utopia, a space of liberation for language.
If humans cannot completely go outside of language, then, on the contrary, we can dream of a utopia of language, a space of words that extends and moves infinitely according to the individuality and plurality of desires.
However, “the utopia of language is recovered as the language of utopia” (p.
32) As Barth points out, any attempt to resist power is bound to be co-opted by power.
That is precisely why authors are required to stubbornly move themselves, to abandon their attempts if they are exploited by those in power.
This is no exception even at the Collège de France, which is outside of power and institutions, and thus Barthes says:
“I truly believe that when I begin a lecture like this, I must always be willing to make room for fantasy.” (p.
52) The audience who attended Barthes' lectures at the Collège de France from 1977 to 1980 were thus involved in a scene that was constantly moving toward utopia.

"The Deaths of Roland Barthes": Sharing with a Friend Who Has Passed Away
The promise of endless conversation, condolences

The second text in this book, "The Deaths of Roland Barthes," is a eulogy published by Jacques Derrida in the magazine Poétique in 1981, the year after Roland Barthes passed away.
Beginning with his eulogy for Barthes, Derrida wrote farewells in various forms to his academic friends, including Michel Foucault, Emmanuel Levinas, Jean-François Lyotard, and Maurice Blanchot, whenever they passed away over the next 20 years.
These mourning essays illustrate the themes of friendship, mourning, and otherness in Derrida's philosophy, as the French title of the book that compiles these essays, "The End of the World, Each Time Unique," suggests: for Derrida, the death of a friend is always the end of the entire world, in that each and every one of them is an utterly unique and irreplaceable other.

“People say that grief is a gradual process of slowly erasing pain.
Resonating with the quote from The Bright Room, “I could not believe that and still do not believe it,” Derrida in this passage questions the ordinary mourning process that eliminates the otherness of the other through the subject’s memory.
In the work of mourning, the living cannot help but betray the dead.
The dead die once more, each one of them being organized into the one-sided memories of the living.
Derrida resists this conventional mourning work, but rather than remain silent, he chooses to write about Barthes.
“How else can I say it, without taking that risk?
“Without pluralizing the unique, without generalizing even the most irreplaceable thing he possesses, his own death.” (p.
119) To enable a friend who cannot answer when called to speak in a way other than vocalization, Derrida opens Barthes's books instead.


Derrida's perspective, which focuses on metonymy as the force that allows Barthes's body to be transformed and disseminated into Barthes's book, provides us with an opportunity to explore the possibility of other-centered mourning.
In "The Deaths of Roland Barthes," Derrida performs a faithful reading that seeks to prevent the tyranny of the living, who judge the dead as they please, and to return the right to speak to the words of a friend.
This allows us to discern the subtle interconnected principles of Barth's thought that we had not previously noticed, and to identify Barth's subtle tones.
When Barthes' words return to Derrida's thoughts, when the thoughts of the survivors and the quotations of the dead intersect like a conversation, the reading depicts a scene where a friendship that does not lean to either side connects and divides the thoughts of the two as a single line.