Abstract

In his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France, Barthes introduced the fantasy as an important epistemological tool for the reading strategy he would try to develop in his lecture courses. The notion of fantasy oscillates between two important, but apparently irreconcilable intertexts: Lacanian psychoanalysis and Nietzschean philosophy. True to his desire for the Neutral, Barthes refused to choose between them and instead searched for a third term which would outplay the opposition. I argue that Barthes finally found this term in a revaluation of the imaginary and a plea for a return of the repressed ‘ego’ in literary theory, a ‘romanesque’ ego, which ‘writes’ itself in the search for a readable oeuvre.