At the end of his inaugural lecture, Barthes states that the time has come for him to teach in a particular way: ‘Vient peut-être maintenant l'âge d'une autre expérience: celle de désapprendre’. The first two lecture series at the Collège de France quite obviously stage this ‘désapprentissage’, forming a sprawling, deliberately unauthoritative constellation of areas of knowledge. Barthes's fantasies of the ideals of the ‘vivre-ensemble’ and the ‘neutre’ are sketched by recourse to a heterogeneous corpus of texts, and the exposition of his own views is intercut throughout by the aleatory method employed, and by exhortations to the listeners to consider everything Barthes is saying as merely a ‘dossier’ that is opened; it is up to them to take each idea further.

The methodology and ideals of Comment vivre ensembleand Le Neutre are very closely linked. In this chapter I shall examine Barthes's treatment and organisation of his material, and discuss how his ‘fantasmes’ can function as a teaching device. The lectures’ insistent theme of spatiality will also be examined as it relates to the listeners’ experience of and investment in the topics of the lectures. The ideals of the idiorrythmic community – which in fact is a solitude with benevolent interruptions – and of neutral discourse and behaviour, are examined for what they reveal of Barthes's distaste for intellectual and political discourse in the specific context of the late 1970s in France. As I shall show, Barthes's rejection of the narratives of Marxism and psychoanalysis overlaps to a certain extent with the preoccupations of other contemporary theorists, as does his thinking about community. Generally, however, these lectures show Barthes recoiling from the intellectual norms of his time: ‘On étudie ce que l'on craint’, as Barthes says in the course summary of Le Neutre (261). However, he also studies ‘ce que l'on désire’: in the final part of the chapter, I shall examine how the negativity evident throughout these two lecture series is at the root of Barthes's active, creative fantasy, whereby he imagines a type of writing and a way of being which would accomplish what he called in Roland Barthes ‘ l'exemption du sens’ (RB 664).