Barthes and ‘Subtle Forms of Living’

Abstract

A life cannot be dissociated from its forms (its ways, regimes, spaces, and rhythms) for these forms are also ideas of what life should be. This question is keenly felt today, especially in our ways of experiencing politics: we need ‘other sorts of life’, ‘other ways of living’, other rhythms and connections. Yet these phrases are often emptied of their meaning: they are the stock-in-trade of advertising, which allows us to dream of passing from one lifestyle to another without regard for the ethical complexity of what Pavese called ‘the business of living’. Roland Barthes helps us here. Right from his sanatorium years, and all that it cost him to become aware, so young, of the life made for us by daily routines, food, the weather, our ways of relating to others, and through to La Préparation du roman (which reflected on how everyday life must be organised to lead to a literary work), Barthes was always conscious of the seriousness of what the forms of living entail, in all their precision and detail. This chapter tracks the constancy of this conviction in Barthes’s trajectory, from the early sanatorium correspondence to Comment vivre ensemble and Journal de deuil.