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Listening has negative connotations in Roland Barthes's writings on music. The most pronounced is the idea of listening as a passive and receptive att itude towards music within the context of an average bourgeois culture, to which the activity of (his own) amateur playing is opposed. However, the notion of listening in Barthes's writings can assume different meanings in relation to topics like text, life, love, etc. These various, sometimes also contradictory meanings are often intertwined inside the same text. In this paper the author discusses the question as to why Barthes appears to have such a negative att itude towards listening and why the reader often fails to notice different concepts of listening in his writings. Finally, the author shows that it is possible to think about Barthes as someone who also listens and not only someone who plays. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]