"I define the Neutral as that which outplays the paradigm, or
rather I call Neutral everything that baffles paradigm." With these
words, Roland Barthes describes a concept that profoundly shaped
his work and was the subject of a landmark series of lectures
delivered in 1978 at the Coll?ge de France, just two years before
his death. Not published in France until 2002, and appearing in
English for the first time, these creative and engaging lectures
deepen our understanding of Roland Barthes's intellectual itinerary
and reveal his distinctive style as thinker and teacher.
The Neutral ( "le neutre"), as Barthes describes it, escapes or
undoes the paradigmatic binary oppositions that structure and
produce meaning in Western thought and discourse. These binaries
are found in all aspects of human society ranging from language to
sexuality to politics. For Barthes, the attempt to deconstruct or
escape from these binaries has profound ethical, philosophical, and
linguistic implications.
"The Neutral" is comprised of the prewritten texts from which
Barthes lectured and centers around 23 "figures," also referred to
as "traits" or "twinklings," that are possible embodiments of the
Neutral (sleep, silence, tact, etc.) or of the anti-Neutral (anger,
arrogance, conflict, etc.). His lectures draw on a diverse set of
authors and intellectual traditions, including Lao-tzu, Tolstoy,
German mysticism, classical philosophy, Rousseau, Baudelaire,
Walter Benjamin, and John Cage. Barthes's idiosyncratic approach to
his subjects gives the lectures a playful, personal, and even
joyous quality that enhances his rich insights.
In addition to his reflections on a variety of literary and
scholarly works, Barthes's personal convictions and the events of
his life shaped the course and content of the lectures. Most
prominently, as Barthes admits, the recent death of his mother and
the idea of mourning shape several of his lectures.
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