L’étude de la violence dans le Sur Racine de Roland Barthes

Roland Barthes’ Sur Racine met unprecedented success and no critical book in the twentieth century ever enjoyed such circulation. Barthes, in a famous controversy, described Racine as « the degree zero of the critical object », a metaphor that reflects his personal interrogations about the so-called « classical » authors of the seventeenth century. Despite all the controversies that Sur Racine may have generated, this study represents, in the words of the author, « a kind of structural and analytical anthropology ». This article aims to analyze violence as thought and depicted in Roland Barthes’ Sur Racine. The author assumes that the theatre of Racine is a theatre of violence, which is why Barthes based his study on theoretical assumptions that are based on violence. For Barthes, antagonism, injustice, anger, terror, indignation…, are closely linked to the notion of violence. We will try to demonstrate here that the analysis of these elements turns out to be relevant for Racine’s works as a whole