(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
How to live together? This is one of the arguably most important and ever more relevant questions of our time. It is important on an individual as well as on a collective level. How to align with other people's way of life while safeguarding their own needs for both engagement and isolation, sociality and seclusion? How to create a community in harmony, with room for individual peculiarities, habits and preferences? Literature has always been concerned with such issues – there is probably no novel that does not in any way affect this. The theme is also the subject of a research initiative that seeks to shed light on this complex problem in a genuinely interdisciplinary way. The starting point is a work by the French essayist and theorist Roland Barthes (1915 – 1980). Few days after Roland Barthes the 5. January 1977 solemnly inaugurates his position as professor at the Collège de France in Paris, he begins his first seminar at this prestigious Parisian institution. The seminar was about this very prosaic, perhaps less academic, question: How to live together? Posthumous manuscripts. The lecture manuscripts left for this seminar were published in 2002 under the title How to live together: Literary simulations of some everyday living spaces (Comment vivre ensemble. Simulations romanesques de quelques espaces quotidiens). The text came in English translation in 2013, and alongside the parallel releases of lectures on "the neutral" and "the preparation of the novel" has been the subject of increasing attention. IN How to live together Barthes develops a peculiar conceptual apparatus for studying "idiomatic rhythm". Among other things, idiomatic rhythm can be defined as the individual's alternating and distinctive life experiences within a community. Barthes moves from texts on early hermitic societies and medieval monasticism to novels of the last three centuries. However, as a backdrop to the reflections on idiotic life, there is a remarkable book on the expression of romantic love. Love. Fragments of the language of love, also from 1977 (in Norwegian from 2000), is undoubtedly Barthes' most famous and best-selling work next to mythologies. The book is dramatized, translated into many languages and still comes in large editions. The book of love consists of 88 "figures" – small chapters that thematically collect fragments of what Barthes calls the language of the lover. The fragments are heterogeneous and consist of everything from quotes from philosophy, literature and opera to fragments of private conversations. The most important reference is Goethe's influential novel The suffering of the young Werther from 1774. The novel character Werther is known to take some life in unrequited love. He expresses his deep longing for the unattainable Lotte in letters and diary notes. The novel seems to be a natural choice – it gives Barthes' book a fantastic energy – but for Barthes it must have had competition in Plato symposium and Freuds Gradiva as the most important literary fine. Dis-crocheting. The infatuated with Barthes is trapped in an eternal despair, an undialectically in love discourse, where the word discourse is just dissolved in dis-crocheting: running to and from. He who loves without retaliation feels like in a war. He or she is driven from bulwark to bulwark, and is so incredibly alone. It is a mystery to the lonely subject in love that it is not loved back. "I want to understand!" exclaims the lover at Barthes, but no one comes to the rescue. On the other hand: When Barthes' book on the language of love became so popular, it is not least because it plays on one of the strongest forces in literature, namely recognition. In love with all countries has felt united in Fragments of the language of love. The text is thus an expression of Barthes' ethos. With his love of the short literary forms, he is part of a French moralistic tradition, which cultivated the aphorisms and maxims – as in Pascal, Vauvenarges, Montaigne and La Rochefoucauld. The short shapes give their mark event opportunity to carve out clear messages. I would go so far as to say that Fragments of the language of love with a slightly old-fashioned twist expresses Barthes' care for the human soul. He unfolds this by highlighting forms of language that are ignored and suppressed – parts of our reality that are often overlooked and forgotten in favor of, among other things, the new, the modern and the trendy. What is toothy and sentimental has almost become obscene, while sex is the opposite. Sex is trivial. What a loss!
What is tanned and sentimental has almost become obscene, while sex is the opposite. Sex is trivial. What a loss!
Attitude. The interest in often forgotten, neglected and translating idiorhythmic life forms makes that How to live together gets a lot in common with Fragments of the language of love. In both of these texts (and the seminars they sprang from) it is about highlighting a language related to interpersonal relationships and the utopia of a life in uninterrupted harmonious community: love and idiorhythm. It is interesting to see how Barthes connects both states to something extremely prosaic and everyday: the lover's preoccupation with elusive details, the event-free rhythm of everyday life. But How to live together is, according to Barthes, no continuation of the speech of love and affection: It is not the case that now the lovers have found each other, and then find out how to live together. Rather, it is a “fantasy of a life, a regime, a lifestyle, diatheia, diet". The situation in How to Live Together is not as dramatic as in the love book, but nonetheless unfolds a similar utopia about bringing opposites together indiscriminately. The 30 concepts. I How to live together Barthes lists 30 Greek and French terms. From AKÈDIA (indifference) and ANACHÔRÈSIS (retreat) over ÉVÉNEMENT (event) and FLEURS (flowers) to SALETÉ (filth) and XÉNITEIA (remoteness). For these concepts, he brings in literature and theory that illuminates problems related to the notions of a common and individual world of life. Themes such as tolerance, habits, social and cultural relations and differences are linked to various life forms discussed in the literature and culture in general. Several of the concepts he unfolds show how we relate to foreign idiorhythms, as in the concept of ANIMAUX (animal). Klosterfjellet ATHOS, on the other hand, is both a concept and a place, the very imaginative "setting" for How to live together, which thus acquires an important starting point in religious, monastic life.
When Barthes' book on the language of love became so popular, it was not least because it played on one of the strongest forces in literature, namely recognition.
The five main texts. Barthes uses five texts as the main material for his research. The first is Lausiac's account, which is the story of the Desert Fathers, written by Bishop Palladius in the year 422, Daniel Defoe's novel Robinson Crusoe (1719), Emile Zola's Pot-Bouille (1882), Thomas Mann's The Magic mountain (1924) and a dense little text by André Gide: The Sequestrée of Poitiers, a scandalous story about a woman who was locked up in her home for 25 years. Palladius traveled around the deserts of Egypt and Syria, visiting religious hermits and hermits, to write down their history. It is very fascinating reading. The hermits not only lived in their caves and on their pillars, but regularly sought out a community, only to return to their single life (much like life in modern cities, where half the inhabitants are single). Set against the rules and regulations of the monastic order, the life of the hermits is the origin of a number of interesting discussions with Barthes. From "monosis" (a life alone) and "anacoresis" (secluded life far away, the beginning of idiorhythm) to koinobiosis (collectively systematized monastic life), Barthes is preoccupied with two energies that permeate these three states: asceticism (organization of space, time, objects) and pathos (affect colored by the imaginary). Barthes is not alone in his interest in these ancient religious forms of hermit and monastic life. The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has long been interested in monastic rules and ways of life, including in the book The highest poverty from 2011. What is a person's life, asks Agamben, if all its possibilities of expression are identical to a set of rules? What happens if the rule is confused with life? Barthes has a different and more literary perspective, where he is repeatedly concerned with forms of rule-governed organization of life, as described in the literature – as in the development of the concepts NOURRITURE (food), BANC (shoal) and precisely RULE (rule). IN Robinson Crusoe he is concerned with how Robinson organizes his everyday life, not the dramatic events that are experienced by him. Emile Zola's novel takes place in a diametrically opposed environment, namely in the metropolis of Paris, with the whole plot added to a fashionable tenement where the residents live out their hypocritical, bourgeois life. It is a costly novel, translated into English under the title Pot Luck. Sanatorium Berghof and Thomas Manns The Magic mountain gives rise to reflections on how patients there interact with each other in everyday life, on epidemics as a metaphor, disease identity and not least on death, which Barthes suggests is the real telos, the fundamental Cause of the sanatorium purpose. Interesting here is the novel's temporal coincidence with some of Freud's texts, among them Beyond the principle of desire (1920), with the idea of the death drive. Barthes says he has selected the texts at random, and that it has by no means been a goal to reach a clear conclusion. All the 30 concepts he uses as a kind of pool of concepts along the way, mobilize a large number of questions about how living together is staged in diverse ways in literature – and in the world. These are concepts that can be thought of further, taken into new disciplines and let them roam the way concepts want to do. This is something that will be sought to be realized in a forthcoming anthology, where 30 researchers contribute new interpretations of the 30 terms Barthes uses in How to live together. Further thinking. The five main references Barthes operates with can also give rise to further thinking. A research project under establishment will work interdisciplinary and study idiorhythmia within five relevant and limited areas, five perspectives or "places" with problem areas that call for further investigation: "The Desert" (Lausiac's account): religion, margins, poverty, environmental crisis; "Island" (Robinson Crusoe): isolation, humanity, independence, individuality; "Sanatorium" (The Magic mountain): health care, epidemic, institutional life; «By» (Pot Bouille): urbanity, media, houses – and finally «Home» (The sequel of Poitiers): family, law, routine, everyday life.
Stene-Johansen is a professor of general literary studies at UiO. knut.stene-johansen@ilos.uio.no.
