Albert Ostermaier

Roland Barthes holds a seminar. He talks to selected students about Goethe's Werther and the language of love. It is a complicated web of relationships that shapes the discourse; the students hang on the lips of their famous teacher and depend on his words. And of course, jealousies and flirtations turn the seminar room into a place of competition: who is seen, who belongs. The discourse becomes physical, the thought becomes a touch. As Barthes says: Desire circulates. And in doing so, it fluidly crosses boundaries between literary and sexual experimentation, between admiration and dependence. Above all this, another discourse continues and enters the seminar: that between Roland Barthes and his beloved mother, who is seriously ill and will soon die.

Together, the seminar spells out an alphabet of love. The collective as a remedy against the sad reality "that the discourse of love today is of extreme loneliness".