Early in La Chambre claire, Barthes explains that in his writing he has always hovered between two sorts of discourse; he feels the ‘inconfort’ of a subject ‘ballotté entre deux langages, l'un expressif, l'autre critique’. His only sense of certainty, within the network of discourses in which he finds himself, is that he feels an ineradicable ‘résistance […] à tout système réducteur’ (CC, 794). His own subjectivity, ‘“l'antique souveraineté du moi” (Nietzsche)’, must be used as a methodological starting-point. Selecting the photographs he would use for the book, Barthes had the ‘bizarre’ thought that perhaps, after all, it is by examining contingent individuality that a general validity can be reached – a ‘mathesis’ or knowledge which would respect particularity, and yet ultimately lead to the attainment of general truths:

Here we see the culmination of a method which Barthes had been setting out with increasing confidence over the course of the Collège de France teaching: the ‘idée bizarre’ of a mathesis singularis was in gestation during this time.

This chapter will trace the paradoxical combination of the personal and the general – or ‘scientifique’, connoting both science and knowledge – in Barthes's inaugural lecture at the Collège de France, and the lecture given in Paris and New York the following year, ‘Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure…’ These are the only two texts from Barthes's Collège de France teaching which were published before 2002, and in them we discover not only the manifestos for the form and preoccupations of Barthes's lecture courses, but also an important articulation of the contradictions inherent in the status and mindset of this ‘consecrated heretic’.