The Theater of the Imaginary in Roland Barthes during the Seventies

Abstract

In the introduction to the Spanish edition of the seminar How to Live Together, Alan Pauls proposes a very seductive idea on the evolution of Barthes' relationship with theater: if in the fifties theater was—thanks to his discovery of Brecht—the spearhead of a diatribe against bourgeois art, in the seventies, after a period of distancing from the Parisian scene that lasted for more than a decade, theater will return as a theoretical antidote that will help Barthes to distance himself from the rigid and abstract protocols of linguistics and semiology. In this paper I am interested in exploring this return of the theatrical imaginary as an idée-force intimately linked to the emergence of a materialist sensibility in his work of the seventies. I wonder what functions—metaphorical, explanatory, narrative—theatricality fulfills in his reflections on teaching, on the relation of writing with orality, with corporeal life and with the presence of others as a condition of possibility of every enunciative act.