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In his latest statements, Roland Barthes imagines a becoming-art of his thinking. But rather than switching from a theoretical to a literary form he reflects his desire of a new writing as the beginning of a new thinking, which leads him to another knowledge. His intended new form is ambivalent. It results from indecision between essay and novel, critique and narration and thereby detects a hidden dynamic of thinking: Its phantasmatic sources and emotional conditions reveal an affective knowledge, in which the pathos leads to the truth and gains the significance of a philosophem. I consider Roland Barthes an author who does artistic research. He occupies a threshold between art and science, which he opens up in his last lectures at the Collège de France with astonishing precision and honesty and—in the very last lecture—turns it into the object of his research.1 Unreservedly he offers his listeners insight into what one can call the process of theory becoming art. He explains how he does his research—in the knowledge that this ethnology of his own process of writing and thinking brings something to light that obviously deviates from the image that is usually created of the way that a scientist works. His descriptions are valuable because they portray how thought unfolds in the aesthetic and thus create access to the processes, issues, and fundamentals of artistic research. Crucially, the process of theory becoming art delineated in the late texts does not mean that Barthes becomes a littérateur. His process of ‘becoming’ remains unfinished, not only because his death abruptly put an end to his enterprise. He thought it was important to linger in this interim space. He sets up a 1 Besides his “Lecture in Inauguration of the Chair of Literary Semiology” (1977), mention must be made of his three lecture courses at the Collège de France, which were published posthumously in 2002 and 2003: How to Live Together: Novelistic Simulations of Some Everyday Spaces (1976–1977), The Neutral (1977–1978), and The Preparation of the Novel (1978–1979 and 1979–1980).

Phantasmagorical Research: How Theory Becomes Art in the Work of Roland Barthes