... intensive reading of Michelet in the sanatorium. It is tracked through his euphoric discovery of structuralism to his teaching at the École pratique des hautes études, and his idiosyncratic aspirations for a ‘peripatetic’ chair of literary semiology at the Collège de France. Barthes was interested...

... not as an academic discipline, but as a mode of thought which prioritises an art of living. This chapter will focus on Barthes’s posthumously published Collège de France lecture notes (1977–80) and on other posthumous diary material, arguing that this work can be seen as part of a tradition of thought which has its...