Focusing on reading Degré zéro de l’écriture and comparing its theses with those of La Leçon, this study mentions to what extent Barthes‘s 1953 manifesto gives way to the Marxian-Hegelian idea of an historic Real, of a messianic, apocalypticturn, and has gone wild for a guilt of Literature summoned to self-sacrifice. Through the radical displacement of which his latest works testify, works which prevaricate, and finally overturn the terrorist theses of Degré zéro, Barthes will have in fact been able to salvage language through the exercise of a love for literature which La Leçon defines anew as the desire to present the inexpressible of the real, token of truth in touch with the delusion it is, of a literature then proving to be the aura of the vivid rather than the orison for nothingness.