Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, as well as A Lover’s Discourse, are characterized both by the pleasure taken in the exhibition of Barthes’s ‘waste’ and the need of a reader with maternal benevolence. It is in fact a project fully aware of its own functioning : what I call a “poetics of complacency” which responds to a problem that Barthes explicitly identified in the first of these two works. This paper reconstructs how this poetics works, before showing that it is only a temporary solution, which confronts Barthes with a new aporia. In fact, complacency, implying both the pleasure taken in talking about oneself and the refusal of formal work, prevents the text from coming either under criticism or literature.