Le contretemps ~ The contretemps

His (admissible?) dream would be to transport into a socialist society certain charms (not values) of the bourgeois art of living (such a thing exists, indeed there once existed several): this is what he calls the contretemps. What rises up against this dream is the specter of Totality, which demands that the bourgeois phenomenon be condemned entire, and that any leak of the Signifier be punished.

(Might it not be possible to take one's pleasure in bourgeois [deformed] culture as a kind of exoticism?)

-- Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes