Barthes and the teacher's voice: academic learning as a method of dispossession

Abstract

The texts in which Roland Barthes most questioned himself about the place he occupied within academic institutions open up, in the pedagogical field, the phantasmatic possibility of imagining a time we do not live in, one in which teachers and students would be able to coalesce, in the plurality of their respective voices, as a community of researchers to come. This article seeks to capture and problematize his reiterated conviction that the fundamental operation of academic work consists in experiencing what he himself called the method of dispossession, both in the field of research and teaching. We therefore propose to systematically examine the writings in which Barthes postulated the hypothesis of envisioning teaching as an eminently poetic act, submitting our research to four major categories: 1) Speech, 2) Writing, 3) Reading and 4) Living Together.