Abstract

This essay explores the relation between Living-Together and Living-Alone by analysing the overlap between two figures sketched out in Comment vivre ensemble: Autarky and Enclosure. Barthes's ambivalence towards enclosure and self-sufficiency — ideologically negative, existentially and neurotically positive — is traced backwards through a number of 1950s essays to his 1947 proto-mythology Esquisse d’une société sanatoriale. On the basis of Barthes's analysis there of the excessive socialization that serves to repress the reality of illness and death, I move forward again to his own autobiographical return to the sanatorium in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, in interviews and — via Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain — in Comment vivre ensemble. Finally, some passages of The Magic Mountain are read through Barthes's figures Enclosure and Cause.