Having proclaimed the death of the author, Roland Barthes, in Sade, Fourier, Loyola (1971), turns to the lives and writings of three individuals who are unrelated to each other, either biographically or in terms of the conventional histories of literature and philosophy. Combining in a single triptych the accursed libertine philosopher de Sade, the great utopian Charles Fourier, and the Jesuit saint Ignatius de Loyola, Barthes presents them as the "founders" of languages—logothets—who interest him not as the authors of "utterances" but as the creators of grammars—writing machines that embody the performative power of language. For all three, the act of speech does not express the interior but creates the exterior: space, the body, a regime. In a castle, a monastery, a phalanstery, the reader is invited to experience the pleasure of the text—to perceive and appropriate not its content, but the discursive formulas embedded in it, the phantasmatic order projected onto everyday life—to live together with Sade, Fourier, Loyola.