Displacements between Lesson and Research: Notes on a Barthes teacher of literature

Abstract

This article intends to provide a possible route on a group of texts by Roland Barthes and his ethical, didactic and theoretical postulates about participation in academic spaces of teaching and research. As a basis, the notions belonging to the seminar How to live together: Novelistic simulations of some everyday spaces are taken as a structuring axis that includes interviews, articles and other material related to the French semiotician. As a displacement, the reflections that Barthes proposes on the university incur in an elusive figure that puts in tension the conventional categories of the teacher and researcher as a place of power. On the contrary, his arguments tend to decentralize these categories in order to question the spaces of knowledge as doxa and law. Whether from the methodological use of arbitrariness to approach a text or even to give place to the dimension of desire to investigate or sustain a classroom, each of these practices involves a community of readers rather than the disciplining presence of institutions. This article is a reflection on the ways of inhabiting the university and the language and literature classrooms both at the secondary and university levels.