“Music writing always needs to be seen”, says Roland Barthes to his audience at the College of France on 2 February 1980 during a seminar to explore a project he has just designed: writing a novel. Barthes proposes to live writing as a purely manual and body activity, similar to that of a pianist or singer. A quarter of a century earlier, in Le Degré Zero of writing, he already placed the body of the writer behind his writing (it was his definition of ‘style’); however, at that time, the formal imperatives of his language and the orders of his culture had made it possible to force the writer’s gesture and cancel it all the value of sensuality at an early stage. However, if one decides to follow Barthes in his thoughts on music and writing in the next twenty five years, we can see that towards the end of the 1970s everything changed: the author’s body will be able to reintroduce himself completely into his writing, to the point that the ‘novel’ envisaged by Barthes will become neither more nor less than the sensitive projection of his flesh. This will have required him to reinvent the writing and start to practise it in the style of music, in order to make the language alive by his body. And in order to be able to reproduce a full range of culture and experience in a book, Barthes’s idea will have been to “write a major piece of work”: thus, tones, which lends music to its characteristic perceptible uniformity, may also have acted as a unifying fluid with regard to his language, culture and life experiences, so that his body can keep them in the form of a single sensitive memory and reproduce them whole, like a familiar singing.