ABSTRACT
In the work of his last years Roland Barthes faces the question of how to examine received opinion critically when, as he supposes, the languages o f criticism are appropriated by the powers in place. By way o f answering he traces paths from received opinion to what he
calls utopias o f language, whose description shows both what it is
desirable to change within the status quo and what reconceptions of it are possible. The strategy turns on discovering within the set of traditional beliefs the means for their criticism and using the dis-
covered possibilities to escape or evade or cheat the tradition. He correctly supposes that one cannot simply disavow received beliefs, for they have shaped one’s thought; at best one can work through them, where one way of working through is performing an experiment in imagination whose description is a utopia.
