L’envergure et l’avenir de l’idiorrythmie

Abstract

Idiorrythmy, term that Barthes borrows from the religious vocabulary of the monasteries and which meets his « fantasy of collective loneliness », of a compromise between retreat and involvement, is, in our view, in embryonic form from the first essays and underlies all Barthes’ writings. Indeed, amongst the profusion of literary and philosophical metaphors recalled to fight against myth, arrogance, alibi and doxa, idiorrythmy plays a special part. As a critical instrument it spurs to writing, against and together with the tendency to take refuge in the neutral or the haiku, and underlines the urgency of praxis: « to battle, to invest, to plant » (Barthes, 2003: 30), even and especially at the edge of idiomaticity, singularity, madness: as an assumption of a style and a thought by a Barthes as a hermit, an idiot, an epicure, a philosopher.

Keywords

• metaphor
• idiorrythmy
• writing
• neutrality
• haiku