"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 College 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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