How to Live Together

"How to Live Together" is the first of three lecture courses delivered by Roland Barthes (1915–1980) at the Collège de France in Paris at the end of the 1970s. This edition collects posthumously published author notes of the lectures, where Barthes, drawing on data from various sciences (history, philosophy, sociology, semiology, psychology, psychoanalysis, etc.) and on works of literature, explores the relationships of people living together, as well as the behavioral and interpretive models that arise in such circumstances. An important, although not the only, source of factual material is the history of monasticism in Western Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. The new edition features for the first time in Russian the notes from the seminar "What Does 'Holding Speech' Mean?" which Barthes conducted parallel to the lecture course. The classes raised the question of "factors of intimidation in language" and provided a detailed analysis of the speech of Baron de Charlus from Marcel Proust's novel "The Guermantes Way." The lecture notes are supplemented with accompanying articles, commentaries, and indices.