How to Live Together

«How to Live Together» — the first of three lecture courses given by Roland Barthes (1915–1980) at the Paris Collège de France in the late 1970s. This edition collects the posthumously published author’s notes of the lectures, in which Barthes, relying on data from various sciences (history, philosophy, sociology, semiology, psychology, psychoanalysis, etc.) and on works of fiction, explores the relationships of people living together, as well as the behavior and understanding models that arise in such circumstances. An important, though not the only source of factual material, is the history of monasticism in Western Europe, the Middle East, and Asia.

In this new edition, the outline of the seminar «What Does It Mean to „Hold a Speech“?», which Barthes conducted in parallel with the lecture course, is published in Russian for the first time. The classes discussed 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 Sweet Side of the Guermantes».