"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
Collège 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.
