*How to Live Together* is the first of three lecture courses delivered by Roland Barthes (1915–1980) at the Collège de France in Paris during the late 1970s. This volume collects the posthumously published lecture notes in which Barthes—drawing on insights from various disciplines (history, philosophy, sociology, semiology, psychology, psychoanalysis, etc.) as well as works of fiction—explores the relationships between people living together, along with the patterns of behavior and ways of interpreting the world that emerge in such circumstances. The history of monasticism in Western Europe, the Middle East, and Asia serves as a significant, though not exclusive, source of factual material.
This new edition includes, for the first time in Russian, the notes from the seminar "What Does It Mean to 'Deliver a Speech'?" (*Que veut dire "tenir un discours"?*), which Barthes conducted alongside the lecture course. The sessions addressed the question of "factors of intimidation in language" and provided a detailed analysis of a speech by Baron de Charlus from Marcel Proust’s novel *The Guermantes Way*.
The lecture notes are supplemented by accompanying essays, commentaries, and indices.