An Epoch of Rest: Roland Barthes’s “Neutral― and theUtopia of Weariness

Rudolphus Teeuwen

Cultural Critique, Number 80, Winter 2012, pp. 1-26 (Article)

Published by University of Minnesota PressDOI: 10.1353/cul.2012.0001

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Cultural Critique 80—Winter 2012—Copyright 2012 Regents of the University of Minnesota

AN EPOCH OF RESTROLAND BARTHES’S “NEUTRAL” AND THE UTOPIA OF WEARINESS

Rudolphus Teeuwen

Le neutre, le neutre, comme cela sonne

étrangement pour moi.

—Maurice Blanchot, L’Entretien inWni

The structuralism of the 1970s exalted the importance of lan-guage. It made meaning a matter not of reference to nonlinguisticreality but of difference within language, and thus gave language theconXictual shape of a battleground for assertive possibilities. Fromwithin structuralism, however, emerged its unexpressed alternative,a rich, dark seam of weariness with language, a desire to sidestep it,to be exempt from its demand for meaning. This sort of weariness,this desire for exemption from the structuralist force of language,enriched structuralism’s analytical bent with utopian desiring. Someof the subtlest literary theorists of the time, such as Maurice Blanchot(who never considered himself a structuralist) and Roland Barthes(who continued to identify himself as one), fostered this move awayfrom structuralism’s linguistic turn.

It is the use of the speciWc structuralist notion of the “Neutral”that I will consider in the following pages. I will do so mainly in twoways: (1) by looking at how some inXuential structuralists of the 1970suncovered and deWned the afWnity between the Neutral and utopia;and (2) by concentrating on the speciWc utopian forms that RolandBarthes sees emerging from the Neutral, especially as he deals withthem in The Neutral, the notes for his Spring 1978 lecture course at theCollège de France. Those utopian forms are remarkably low-key andremarkably private: to Barthes, utopia becomes a private retreat inwhich the world cannot exercise its designs upon one, and the Neu-tral is the arsenal of strategies that allows one to absent oneself from

the world’s designs. The spring of Barthes’s utopia is weariness; theshape of it tends toward mysticism. William James’s characterizationof mysticism remains instructive: mystical states are “states of insightinto depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect. They areilluminations, revelations, full of signiWcance and importance, all in -articulate though they remain” (329). With mysticism for its shape,Barthes’s utopia, by deWnition, is not very clearly deWned. One promi-nent form in which Barthes sees it manifested, though, is in that ofJapan. A third part of this article, therefore, is a look at Barthes’s Japanand the way it contrasts with the Japan of Edward G. Seidensticker,scholar and translator of Japanese literature and a man whose impulsesare antineutral and antiutopian.

In their analyses of the oppositional structure of language, struc-turalists brought out intriguing complexities and asymmetries. Onesuch is the “Neutral,” the structuralist term that carried the seed ofthe counterstructuralist ideal of an escape from meaning as a categor-ical choice from possibilities offered by a linguistic paradigm. Explain-ing Greimas and Rastier’s semiotic square, Louis Hébert writes that itis “a means of reWning oppositional analyses. It allows us to reWne ananalysis by increasing the number of analytical classes stemming froma given opposition from two (e.g. life/death) to four—(1) life, (2) death,(3) life and death (the living death), (4) neither life nor death (angels)—to eight or even ten” (27). In this schema, the term that connects thetwo positives, “life and death,” is the “complex term” whereas thetwo negatives, “neither life nor death,” form the “neutral term.”

The neutral term was and continues to be productive of muchinsight. Fredric Jameson, for instance, routinely uses Greimas’s rectan-gles as a device to uncover unexpected logical and ideological entan-glements in terms we tend to use upon false assumptions of simplicity.He works out the square, in one example, for the terms “for” and“against” (2005, 178–81). They are each other’s opposites, but eachterm also has a less logically absolute counterpart in contradiction:“for” contradicts “not for,” while “against” contradicts “not against.”The terms “for” and “not against” also have a relationship of kinship,as do the terms “against” and “not for.”

It is possible to hold both the positions “for” and “against”: theythen combine in the “complex term” that needs the help of irony to

RUDOLPHUS TEEUWEN2

keep them both in play. As such, it is the template of “bad Utopian -ism,” the utopianism of modernism in its “speciWcally aesthetic andaestheticizing fashion, valorizing art as the space in which the incom-patibles can reach a positive kind of fullness” (2005, 179). It is alsopossible to hold the two negations at the same time, to be neither“for” nor “against.” This is the “neutral term.” “This neutral positiondoes not seek to hold two substantive features, two positivities, to -gether in the mind at once, but rather attempts to retain two negativesor privative ones, along with their mutual negation of each other”(180). This is hard to do, so hard that it is a truly utopian exercise: thetwo negatives “must neither be combined in some humanist organicsynthesis, nor effaced and abandoned altogether: but retained andsharpened, made more virulent, their incompatibility and indeedtheir incommensurability a scandal for the mind, but a scandal thatremains vivid and alive, and that cannot be thought away, either byresolving it or eliminating it: the biblical stumbling block, which givesUtopia its savor and its bitter freshness, when the thought of Utopiasis still possible” (2005, 180). For Jameson, the Neutral is a call to uto -p ian arms, a refusal of the compromise, humanism, transcendence, andirony (irony being a form of the “both/and” of the complex term) thatmakes utopia a caricature of Hegelian synthesis.

Maurice Blanchot Wrst rendered weariness fertile ground and gaveit a name: le Neutre. In the opening reverie to his book L’Entretien inWni(The InWnite Conversation), Blanchot presents the Neutral as somethingthat brings on an enormous fatigue, a weariness, a sort of trance.Weariness, Blanchot admits, “renders speech less exact, thought lessXuent, and communication more difWcult, but doesn’t the lack of exact-ness that comes with this state reach, through all these signs, a kindof precision that would also ultimately serve exact speech by offeringsomething to uncommunicate?”1 Lack of exactness may be something

AN EPOCH OF REST 3

For Against

Not “Against” Not “For”

that can only be rendered exactly in the form of “uncommunication,”but Blanchot hastens to discount the suggestion that “uncommunica-tion” may be formally achieved. Discursive truth is not attainable byway of a negative approach. To Blanchot, such an instrumental use ofweariness belies the very character of weariness, a state in which theweary subject does not reXect, strive to solve problems, or demon-strate any interest beyond weariness.2

In comparison with Blanchot, Barthes gives the Neutral a lightercomplexion. In The Neutral, the notes for the lecture course he taughtat the Collège de France from February to June 1978, Barthes presentsa nonsystematic, nonexhaustive inventory of “twinklings” of the Neu-tral.3 One of those “twinklings” is tact, a neutral state because it is aform of such discretion that it is hardly there. Tact, Barthes explains,is a minimal and elegant taking of action based on the principle ofsweetness: “I would suggest calling the nonviolent refusal of reduc-tion, the parrying of generality by inventive, unexpected, nonpara-digmatizable behavior, the elegant and discreet Xight in the face ofdogmatism, in short, the principle of tact, I would call it, all beingsaid: sweetness” (2005, 36). An earlier lecture course of Barthes’s hadfor its topic “Comment vivre ensemble,” and the course on the Neu-tral continues that topic with the suggestion that an infusion of sweet-ness in human interaction is a prime requirement for living together.It is as bringers of sweetness that, in The Neutral, Barthes treats suchstates and attitudes as sleep, weariness, abstention, retreat, tact, apa-thy, androgyny, tolerance, and skepticism; such inducers of states as“H” (which stands for hashish, rather than heroine, and also for homo -sexuality), Zen, Tao, and mysticism; such contrasts to the Neutral asarrogance, conXict, and anger; such deXections and dodges of theanti-Neutral as silence, beside-the-point answers, side-stepping the“terrorism of the question” (107), pretended deafness, and precipitateleave-taking (the Xippant “Ciao”); and such heroes of the Neutral asPyrrho, Jakob Boehme, André Gide, Lao-Tzu, and all of Japan.

This enumeration of states and attitudes brings out both the pri-vacy of Barthes’s utopia and its mystical nature. Utopia is always a prescription for happiness, but usually for a communal happi-ness. Barthes’s happiness, though, as it Xies the power of language,also Xies community for privacy. The Neutral is a form of retreat for Barthes, not necessarily (as typically for Blanchot) a retreat into

RUDOLPHUS TEEUWEN4

“uncommunication” but rather one into communion, that turn away from discursive to intuitive intellect.4 Part of that turn to communionhas an autobiographical cause and a clear date of inception: Barthesmentions obliquely to his listeners how, as he prepared his course onthe Neutral, “there entered my life, some of you know it, a seriousevent, a mourning” (2005, 13). Barthes refers to the death of his mother,on October 25, 1977, and tells his audience how this event made thathis course on the Neutral is now no longer only “a matter of speak-ing of the suspension of conXicts” but that “underneath this discourse. . . it seems to me that today I myself hear, in Xeeting moments,another music” (13). This other music Barthes thinks of as “a secondNeutral,” the Wrst being the planned subject of the course, namely,“the difference that separates the will-to-live from the will-to-possess”(14). The “second Neutral,” inXected by mourning, takes a furtherstep away from life’s fellness: it is “the difference that separates thisalready decanted will-to-live from vitality” (14; “vitality,” to Barthes,is a merely and purely being alive, a state that springs not from desirebut from a hatred of death). The publication, in 2009, of what Barthesreferred to as his Journal de deuil, his mourning diary—kept for almosttwo years from the day after his mother’s death—brings out the extra -ordinary devastation he felt upon this loss. The entry for February 18,1978, the day he mentions the “serious event, a mourning” in his lec-ture, characterizes mourning as something that doesn’t wear itself outbecause it isn’t a continuous process, but one that interrupts one’s lifesporadically. Barthes then writes, “If the interruptions, the unwittingleaps toward something else, come from a worldly agitation, from animportunity, then the depression grows. But if these ‘changes’ (thatmake up the sporadic) move toward silence and inwardness, then thewound of mourning moves toward a higher thought.”5 This repug-nance against worldliness, this readiness to give up communicationfor the sporadic chance of communion, is a constant theme through-out the diary, which is to say for much of Barthes’s remaining life-time. In this move from worldliness to retirement after the death ofone’s mother, Barthes also thinks of Proust: he reproduces a chart froma high school literature textbook showing Proust’s retirement fromthe world with his mother’s death as turning point and declares him-self “nurtured by this image” of the Proustian retreat (2005, 142). And

AN EPOCH OF REST 5

indeed, Barthes refers to this retreat as the key to Proust’s authorshipin many of his essays on him (e.g., 1978, 1979).

In The Neutral, Barthes writes (as he had done before in A Lover’sDiscourse) about the sort of awakening one sometimes enjoys, “thewhite, neutral awakening: for a few seconds, whatever Care {Souci}one felt when one went to sleep, forgetfulness of evil, [life]6 in its pureststate, kind of clear joy in C major; then the earlier Care falls upon youlike a great black bird: the day begins” (37). This “neutral awaken-ing,” Barthes writes, “precious, rare, fragile, brief,” is still part of therealm of sleep. This awakening in sleep, this momentary availabilityof sleep as a perceptible suspension from care, is “utopian sleep”;“Indeed, the aporia of sleep = anticipated, fantasized as a happy state,but one we can only report about in a nonsleeping state: implies adivided consciousness cut off from speech. In that, we will call it uto -pian sleep, or utopia of sleep, since we can’t speak of it as a fantasy:sleep that can only be inferred from some privileged awakenings, sofragile that they are heart-rending” (2005, 37). This awareness, ininstances of “neutral awakening,” of a condition of utopian joy justbefore, inevitably, it escapes one is, Barthes elaborates, akin to a vision:“what the neutral awakening allows me to retain from it is a kind ofslack time (between the tides of worry and of excitement), where I see(I sip) life, aliveness, in its purity, which is to say outside the will-to-live” (38). In another lecture given at the Collège de France at aroundthe time of The Neutral, Barthes speaks of the “half-waking” of whichProust writes in the opening of his In Search of Lost Time. This is partof the “good kind” of sleep, a sleep in which “the logical carapace ofTime is attacked” and that “establishes another logic, a logic of Vacil-lation, of Decompartmentalization” (1978, 281). This other logic “willspontaneously produce the third form, neither Essay nor Novel,” basedon “a provocative principle: the disorganization of Time” (ibid.).

“Slack time,” life “sipped” rather than devoured, “aliveness” expe-rienced outside the desire that is the will-to-live, a logic of vacillation:the sort of substance that the Neutral, clandestinely as it were, man-ages to smuggle out of the utopia of sleep into the light of day is farremoved from more traditional utopian imaginings that take the formof dreams rather than sleep, and dreams of hope as well as efforts ofrational planning rather than slackness. William Morris, that mostresponsible and humane of utopian designers, for instance, wants to

RUDOLPHUS TEEUWEN6

abolish “useless toil” and replace it with “useful work.” The elimina-tion of toil will dramatically reduce the amount of physical strain onthe citizens of the new world and will leave only room for the workthat is Wt to be done. Such work embodies a triple hope: a hope of rest(work will not be too much and not too long), a hope of product (workshould be useful, not senseless), and a hope of pleasure (work shouldengage muscle, memory, and imagination).7 Barthes’s Neutral and its utopian bliss are a deliberate departure from hope, planning, anddreaming. The “Epoch of Rest” that is the dreamed reward for strug-gle in Morris’s utopia News from Nowhere receives a very different col-oring in Barthes’s utopia of sleep. The “Epoch of Rest” Barthes is afterwith the Neutral is an exemption from struggle, a time-out from mean-ing. To Barthes, one way of spoiling a neutral awakening is by remem-bering a dream: dreaming turns sleep into a period of “dream-work,”grist to the psychoanalytic mill that declares that “not only does [sleep]restore, ‘regain,’ ‘recuperate,’ it also transforms, labors: it is produc-tive, rescued from the disgrace of the ‘good for nothing’” (2005, 39).

Barthes’s Neutral is a celebration of the “good for nothing” andhis utopia, as he points out himself, is really an “atopia,” which hedeWnes (in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes) as an “internal doctrine”that resists pigeonholing by being “of a drifting habitation” (49). WhatBarthes is after with the Neutral is not a good place that is a no place,but a being unplaceable, a being in hiding from the grasp of assertion.Recalcitrant rather than heroic, a matter of sabotage rather than rev-olution, Barthes’s atopia, by its deliberate unresponsiveness still is,like Morris’s imagined postrevolutionary England, a strike againstthe doxa.

In another meditation on utopia, one with a less brusquely defen-sive stress, Barthes points to how “there always remains too much mean-ing for language to fulWll a delectation appropriate to its substance”(1975b, 77). Language spoils the pleasure it can bring by meaning toomuch, and too aggressively. Utopian language would simply rustle,like a happy machine, “without a sign ever becoming detached fromit . . . but also—and this is what is difWcult—without meaning beingbrutally dismissed, dogmatically foreclosed, in short castrated” (ibid.).The rustle of language “would be that meaning which reveals an ex -emption of meaning or—the same thing—that non-meaning whichproduces in the distance a meaning henceforth liberated from all

AN EPOCH OF REST 7

aggressions of which the sign, formed in the ‘sad and Werce history ofmen,’ is the Pandora’s box” (78).

“We have deWned as pertaining to the Neutral every inXectionthat, dodging or bafXing the paradigmatic, oppositional structures ofmeaning, aims at the suspension of the conXictual basis of discourse”(Barthes 2005, 211). Barthes gives this helpful explanation in his coursesummary, a document written (as per French academic custom) forinclusion in his university’s academic yearbook. The summary is justabout the only part of Barthes’s book that does not itself display thebafXing qualities of the Neutral it seeks to intimate. Much in The Neu-tral is bafXing and yet, as a reader one gets the feeling that one isexpected to understand more than one does. This quality of Barthes’sdisplay of the Neutral makes his text akin to a Zen koan: unsettlingbut nonthreatening at the same time. This is what makes up the mys-tery of Barthes’s The Neutral, a mystery of writing that—as one easilyforgets, holding a book—is, or was at Wrst (the summary excepted),really a mystery of speaking. The Neutral is a mystery in the originalGreek sense that makes the word musterion closely related to the wordmyesis, “initiation” (Armstrong, 54). Thus, as a reader, one feels drawninto complicity with the Neutral as displayed in Barthes’s writing,one feels oneself turning into one of its mystai (“initiates”), the feelingthat must have animated the many rapt attendants of Barthes’s lec-tures back in 1978. Although not designed as a genre of writing, TheNeutral’s present and future mode of existence is that of writing: atruly utopian writing, a “third form,” neither creative nor academic,neither nonsense nor entirely clear, always investing language withmore nuances than easily Wt a goal simply of communication, alwaysdeferring Wnality by means of the neither-nor. Jameson wrote of the“biblical stumbling block” that the double negative of neither-northrew in the way of the mind’s efWcient falling back upon known cat-egories so as to keep the possibility of utopia in play (2005, 180);Barthes’s Neutral is designed to be such a biblical stumbling block: apassage so contradictory and puzzling that it invites a prolonged, med-itative attentiveness.

Bernard Comment characterizes Barthes’s writing as “truly a writ-ing with both hands: extolling here what he rejects there, and rejectingonly in order to extol higher” (15).8 Barthes actually embodies the Neu-tral: Comment recounts how, before he read Barthes as a teenager at

RUDOLPHUS TEEUWEN8

his lycée, he had heard his name mentioned on television. The name,as he caught it, disappointed: “Barth,” like the protestant theologian(Parisian pronunciation leaving the -es mute). To Comment, the dis-covery of the additional -es to Barthes’s name, of Barthes’s hiddenplurality, not only distinguished him from the theologian but also madehim as strange and mysterious as the Neutral itself, the -es “both writ-ten and silenced, pronounced and not pronounced.” One Wnds inBarthes’s very name “the contortions of a double-handed writing”(294).9 Comment’s success in making the unvoiced sufWx in Barthes’sname meaningful as emblematic of Barthes’s refusal of singular mean-ing shows up a truth that he does not here entertain: that the Neutral’sshedding of meaning has the strong tendency of ending up carryingmeaning after all.10

Not all readers of Barthes will rejoice with Comment in Barthes’swriterly prestidigitation, and not all students in Barthes’s audience atthe Collège de France were complicit with him in bafXing the para-digm. The session of May 13, 1978, begins with a “Supplement,” oneof a number of occasional reXections at the beginning of a session inwhich Barthes reacts to letters students sent him in between sessionswith questions, remarks, or additions to matters previously discussed.In the May 13 supplement, Barthes mentions an anonymous note con-taining just one sentence: “. . . and <sic> well, if that’s how it is, whydon’t you retire and ‘stop bugging us’ you too” (2005, 136).11 BarthesreXects on how the aggression of this letter lies chieXy in its ano -nymity: it is a letter that cannot be replied to just like old-fashionedfathers or despots cannot be replied to. Barthes then recuperates thisaggression and takes his masterly revenge on the letter writer by cor-recting his or her illiterate usage (from which he earlier distancedhimself with that supercilious “<sic>”) and by earning peals of laugh-ter from his audience: “Oh well {Eh bien}, since this anonymous per-son enjoins me to retire, I am going to deal right now with the WgureRetreat” (137).12

Barthes is alert to how, in a universe of signs, no semiotic vacuumis tolerated. Even the spurning of signs creates meaning. Silence, forinstance, seems a sure way of sidestepping the demand for meaning.But such shedding of meaning through silence very quickly becomesmeaningful as a statement all its own. How to avoid this, but throughspeaking? Barthes quotes Blanchot in L’Entretien inWni on Kafka’s

AN EPOCH OF REST 9

dilemma: “Kafka wondered at what moment and how many times,when eight people are seated within the horizon of a conversation, itis appropriate to speak if one does not wish to be considered silent”(2005, 27). The Neutral requires tact and ruses to manifest itself in asufWciently discreet manner.

The Kafka dilemma is an example of the Neutral’s joining a familiarutopian double bind, one that started with the very name of ThomasMore’s island, Utopia being the “good place” that is also a “no place”or “nonplace.” If a reader takes More’s neologism literally, the word“utopia” declares that utopias are destined to fail, which is to say thatMore is ironic when you take him literally. When you take him ironi-cally, convinced from the outset of Utopia’s impracticability, More’sUtopia becomes a failure of a lesser order, a mere fable of the desire(which a reader might not share and which More might not actuallyfeel) of amending recognized imperfections of the world brought onby faults of human nature, or politics, or some other incorrigible traitof the worldly condition. Utopia becomes, if not the shrug, then thesigh of worldliness.

Perhaps More shrugged (or sighed). But something that utopia canmake us aware of is lost in the sigh of irony, and is only available bytaking utopia at its word and facing its “necessary failure.”13 FredricJameson calls failure utopia’s “vocation,” and deWnes the “epistemo-logical value” of that failure as lying “in the walls it allows us to feelaround our minds, the invisible limits it gives us to detect by sheerestinduction” (1994, 75). Crediting Louis Marin with this crucial, non-ironic appreciation of utopia’s negative incisiveness, Jameson pointsout that utopia’s contradictions, the holes in its text, make us awareof “our own incapacity to see beyond the epoch and its ideologicalclosures” (ibid.).

This literal, nonironic reading of utopia, one without a transcen-dental escape hatch, is very much in the spirit of thinkers of the Neu-tral such as Derrida, Barthes, and Marin.14 Derrida, for instance, chidesLévi-Strauss for his “bricolage,” for using whatever conceptual ap -paratus comes to hand. Lévi-Strauss’s work is concerned with mythsand because of that, Derrida argues, “structural discourse on myths—mythological discourse—must itself be mythomorphic. It must have theform of that of which it speaks” (1967, 286). According to this same

RUDOLPHUS TEEUWEN10

requirement, an essay on utopia must be “utopomorphic” (and it caneasily be argued that “Structure, Sign, Play” is itself, indeed, a “utopo -morphic” essay).15

The Neutral is an attempt to live by that severe rule forbiddingtranscendence. Transcendence is a way of foiling the urgent demandthat language makes on its users to choose between different mean-ings by referring the differences in meaning to a level of abstractionon which they can become merely objects of reXection. The NeutraldeXects that same linguistic urgency by resisting to choose or by show-ing up the demand for deWnitive meaning as offensive or misguidedin one way or another: the Neutral is a repertoire of such ways of show-ing up the “‘fascism’ of language” (Barthes 2005, 42).

Louis Marin recognizes the Neutral (and names it thus) in More’sdescriptions of the island of Utopia. As a nonplace, it is neither Englandnor the New World, neither Portugal nor America, neither Ceylon nor Calcutta. It is neither precapitalist, nor capitalist, nor communist.Money is neither useful nor useless. Utopia is an island that is notquite an island. In these and other ways, Utopia is a “neutral” space,a collection of negatives.

Marin derives his conception of the Neutral from Kant rather thanfrom Greimas or Blanchot. In the dense “Second Preface” and Wrstchapter of Marin’s Utopiques, Kant’s transcendental logic features as“striking indication at the end of the eighteenth century of the complexcritical movement of which utopic discourse has been the symptomsince the Renaissance” (1973, 19). Marin sees the Neutral expressed,for instance, in Kant’s careful subdivision (in the “Analytic of Con-cepts” of his Critique of Pure Reason) of the quality of judgments inafWrmative, negative, and inWnite judgments. There are mortal beings(afWrmative), immortal beings (negative), but also nonmortal beings(inWnite). In his elaboration on Kant’s third category, the inWnite, andits relation to the negative one, Marin remarks: “In fact Kant presentsa third neutral term. Between afWrmation and negation, between the-sis (‘the soul is mortal’) and antithesis (‘the soul is immortal’), comesthe afWrmed non-mortality of the soul. The logical inWnite is thus artic-ulated as a transcendental limit, the reverse or ‘other’ of the meta-physical stance. ‘The soul is non-mortal’—the logical inWnite is theabstraction made from all contents in the predicate. It points out thepure limit for the concept of the soul as the line excluding the group

AN EPOCH OF REST 11

of possible mortal beings” (20). So the advance Marin sees in Kant’sthird, neutral term is that it neither asserts a material nor a metaphys-ical nature for human souls, but rather the logical possibility (“artic-ulated as a transcendental limit”) that our souls are of a nature entirelydifferent and not yet conceptualized.

Marin makes use of this Kantian extension in his work on utopia.There are also other Kantian concepts that Marin marshals to this end.The notion Wction is an important one. In Section V of “ The Antinomyof Pure Reason” (itself part of the “ Transcendental Dialectic” divisionof the Critique of Pure Reason), Kant deals with the problem that in thedialectical play of the cosmological ideas (the Wrst one famously being:the world has a beginning/the world has no beginning) “no possibleexperience can present us with an object adequate to them. . . . And yetthey [cosmological ideas] are not arbitrary Wctions of thought” (341;A462/B490).16 Kant goes on to say a few pages later:17 “ The reason isthis. Possible experience can alone give reality to our concepts; with-out it a concept is merely an idea, without truth or relation to an object.Hence a possible empirical concept must be the standard by whichwe are to judge whether an idea is anything more than an idea andWction of thought, or whether it relates to an object in the world” (355;A489/B517). Kant’s Wction is an idea or concept that cannot be mooredto an object in the world. Cosmological ideas are undecidable; they“have no self-subsistent existence apart from our thought” (356; A491/B519) and we “are thus led to the well-founded suspicion, that thecosmological ideas . . . are based upon an empty and Wctitious con-cept of the mode in which the object of these ideas is presented to us”(355; A489/B517).

To Marin, this notion of an unmoored idea, untouched by “pos-sible experience,” is an attractive Wgure for utopia. So, in “Disneyland:A Degenerate Utopia” (a 1977 article that reWnes a chapter in his 1973book Utopiques), Marin writes: “I try to discern in the utopian textsthe traces of contradiction as its Wction, opposed to concept or image.Being such a Wction, utopia transforms contradiction into a represen-tation and, in its turn, my own discourse about utopia transformed it [i.e., contradiction] into theory” (1977, 285). Marin here formulateshis emblematic ambition of turning what he calls utopia’s “Wction” (itscontradictions if measured against “possible experience”; its depar-tures from “concepts” of reality; its internal inconsistencies if held

RUDOLPHUS TEEUWEN12

responsible for representing objects in the world) into a theory thatfavors this Wction over “concept” and “image.” “Concept” and “image”are the categories that apply in current, pre-utopian conditions, thecondition from which a utopian writer could not free himself. Utopia’sWction, picked up in theoretical discourse, should ensure utopia’s Neu-tral, that resistance to theoretical recuperation by existing concepts.

Marin, like Derrida, Blanchot, and Barthes, attempts to keep histheoretical discourse about utopia utopomorphic. Marin also identi-Wes the greatest danger for utopia as that of turning into myth, and thegreatest danger for writing about utopia as that of becoming mytho-morphic. There should not, in other words, be any Lévi-Strausses com-ing to Utopia.18 How to write about utopia and not be Lévi-Strauss?By trying “to discern in the utopian texts the traces of contradictionas its Wction, opposed to concept or image” (1977, 285). But why is itthat contradictions should not be reconciled? Or, in other words, whyshould we care about the Neutral? Marin has a double answer. First,utopian contradictions, if kept alive, keep alive an awareness of utopiaas a critical discourse that attempts to negate aspects of its presenthistorical moment. The power of utopia is “not the fact of the modelitself, but the differences between model and reality” (286). Second,an emphasis on contradiction brings out a utopia’s main feature ofstaging escapes from existing categories of thought. Forgetting the “Wc -tion” leaves one with what Marin calls a “degenerate utopia,” in whicha utopian representation is “entirely caught up in a dominant systemof ideas and values” and is thus “changed into a myth or a collectivefantasy” (ibid.). Whereas utopia is “an ideological locus where ideol-ogy is put into play and called into question,” a myth is “a narrationwhich fantastically ‘resolves’ a fundamental contradiction in a givensociety” (294).19

Roland Barthes does not directly refer to Marin in Le Neutre or, forthat matter, to Greimas or Derrida (except for a single mention). Thisis possibly because the thought of these theoreticians has the famil-iarity of consanguinity for him;20 or perhaps it is because Barthes pre-pared his course on the Neutral in his vacation home in Urt, “whichis to say, a place-time where the loss in methodological rigor is com-pensated for by the intensity and the pleasure of free reading” (2005, 9).Greimas and Marin, most deWnitely, apply great methodological rigorto their investigations of the Neutral, Marin showing the Neutral the

AN EPOCH OF REST 13

logical result of the prodigious mental powers of a German transcen-dental idealist and Greimas showing how binary oppositions in lan-guage produce logical classes in multiples of two. Barthes is a moreintuitive thinker and also one who, whether on vacation or not, prefersto keep things light. In the introduction to the 2002 republication ofhis 1991 book Roland Barthes, vers le neutre, Bernard Comment repeatsa question Jean-Claude Milner posed in a book of his: “why [Barthes’s]choice—explicit, endorsed—for surface or extension as opposed todepth, to Abgrund?” (8).21 And indeed, Abgrund Barthes never seeks inhimself: Blanchot is his abyss. Barthes’s mood in The Neutral, howeverlight, is also pensive and even, occasionally, elegiac. His will-to-livehas, in the wake of his mother’s death, become—and Barthes borrowsthe title of a Pasolini poem here—“‘a desperate vitality’→ desperatevitality is the hatred of death” (2005, 14). And his library in Urt, fromthe “free reading” of which he selects his course materials, is “a libraryof dead authors” and “I am always saddened by the death of an author.”Closer to Buddha than to Marin, Barthes concludes: “to mourn is tobe alive” (10).

In explaining his own nonmethod in presenting an arbitrary num-ber of “Wgures” of the Neutral in an arbitrary order, Barthes writesthat each Wgure is “as if one were establishing a bridgehead: after thateveryone is free to scatter in the countryside: his own countryside”(2005, 10). This idea of the Neutral as a passage to unscripted privacyreturns regularly throughout The Neutral. For instance, consideringwhat it means to give a “course” on the Neutral, Barthes deWnes acourse not as a “magisterial” account but as “the shimmering of anindividuation” (47). And “shimmer” Barthes deWnes as “that whoseaspect, perhaps whose meaning, is subtly modiWed according to theangle of the subject’s gaze” (51). A student in his course points outthat when Barthes says, “I desire the Neutral” and “ The strength ofliterature [is] to bafXe [the] place of mastery,” his students will infer“One must desire the neutral” exactly because Barthes, famous pro-fessor, occupies the place of mastery (67). Barthes acknowledges thisas yet another instance of the Neutral’s double bind, but he also says,“ The Neutral is not an objective, a target: it’s a passage. In a famousapologue, Zen makes fun of people who mistake the pointing Wngerfor the moon it points to → I am interested in the Wnger, not in themoon” (68).

RUDOLPHUS TEEUWEN14

Going for the Wnger rather than the moon, for the desire ratherthan its object, Barthes gives his utopia of the Neutral a gestural andyearning indeterminacy. Diana Knight, in Barthes and Utopia, stressesthe constancy of Barthes’s utopian imagination throughout his careeras well as how he thinks of utopia as a form of slipperiness ratherthan an achieved ideal. Knight suggests that Barthes’s “celebration ofJapan in Empire of Signs” “comes closest to being a generic utopia” (1).Her fascinating chapter on Empire of Signs shows Barthes’s “Japan” asa place both eroticized and empty of meaning (and thus free for eroticencounters). The Neutral (which only appeared after Knight’s book waspublished) conWrms her observation: in his course on the Neutral,Barthes still looks to Japan, savoring the oriental genius for empti-ness (but—a reluctant pedagogue here—toning down the erotics).

Elements of Barthes’s construction of the East surely are Orien-talist in Edward Said’s sense. Still, Barthes hardly conceptualizes theEast in the interest of Western domination. Rather, he wants to extracthimself from that domination. Lisa Lowe links Barthes’s participationin French orientalism, like Kristeva’s, to a concern “with criticizingthe power of the French state and its ideology, an ideology that hadjustiWed, among other things, imperialist policies in North Africa andIndochina.” China especially could be represented not as a colonizedspace but as a “desired position outside western politics, ideology, andsigniWcation.” As such, it is still framed as the Other, but “no longeras colonized but as utopian” Other (188). But actually China, the em -bodiment of non-European communism, never realized its utopianpotential for Barthes, impatient as he was whenever politics becameideologically inXexible. Japan, by contrast, is that bridgehead into thehappiness of Barthes’s own private countryside. That countryside is“Japan” rather than Japan, a countryside of erotic possibilities.

Empire of Signs is an account of Barthes’s coming home in a “Wc -tive nation,” a utopian “Faraway” that allows an escape from familiarconcepts (1970, 3). China, however, yielded “rien.”22 Barthes visitedChina in April and May 1974 as part of a delegation from the journalTel Quel, which invited him to see Maoism in action. He kept a note-book on his experiences, recently published as Carnets du voyage enChine. These notes are a variation on those on Japan in a key of comicdistress. Visiting factories, naval yards, museums, and schools—herdedthere by minders—Barthes gets to hear speech after speech built from

AN EPOCH OF REST 15

the same ideological “bricks.” He takes dutiful notes, but his mindand eye start to wander, hoping to penetrate China’s apparent asexu-ality by catching someone’s eye, noticing the shape of someone’s Wn -gernails, or a shy smile, or an individual element in hairdo or uniform.The only revenge Barthes can take after yet another display of gym-nastics is privately to mock the ofWcial line of healthy mind in healthybody: “Je préférerai: mens fada in corpore salop” (“I’d prefer: stupid mindin Wlthy body”; 2009a, 114). One time Barthes manages to escape,with the China correspondent of Le Monde, to spend an evening inBeijing on his own and to walk through its lanes and streets; Wnally“un érotisme possible” (196). Still, Barthes has not been able to see “lekiki d’un seul Chinois” (“the willy of a single Chinese”) and how toget to know a people if you don’t get to know their sex? (117). “Japan”does not resist Barthes’s advances.

Inspired by Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki’s Essays in Zen Buddhism,Barthes, in The Neutral, works out a Zen dialectics, an alternative towhat he considers the more strained and straining forms of Westerndialectics, be they Hegelian, Husserlian, or Kantian. The three stagesof this Zen dialectics are: “(1) mountains are mountains and watersare waters → then (2) (following a good Zen teaching): mountains areno longer mountains, waters are no longer waters → (3) (abode of rest),once again mountains are mountains and waters waters, etc.” (2005,125). Currently, Barthes believes, we live in a historical period in themiddle of phase 2: “every object is converted, by some analysis, inter-pretation, into the contrary of its name . . . : we live in a world wheremountains are truly no longer mountains, etc.” Barthes blames “thesecular path of science (eighteenth century)” for this predicament ofanalytical complexity. He translates the three phases in three sets ofcatchwords:

(1) Stupidity, tautology, narrow scientism(2) Intelligence, paranoia(3) Innocence (mystic), wisdom, “method” (= Tao) (125)

This Zen dialectics provides Barthes with a vantage point outsideWestern communicative rationality from which to invalidate it. In hisdiscussion of “apathy,” one of the Wgures of the Neutral, Barthes ap -plies Zen dialectics to matters of politics and statecraft. Barthes drawsa diagram, the Wrst phase of which is the terror of burning subjectivity

RUDOLPHUS TEEUWEN16

(in an activist’s absolute conviction of being right); the second phase is a scientiWc working out of a theory into a “Fake Neutral,” beforereaching (if we are so lucky to arrive in that abode of rest) the thirdphase of irenic subjectivity of the Neutral (184; 252 n.13). And in theWgure of “drift” (deWned as “to dismiss opposition—or gently to takeleave of” [203]), Barthes discusses the strategy of being dilatory anddelaying an answer “with the hope (often satisWed) that the questionwill be lost, that the demand will shift, and that there will no longerbe any reason to reply” (205). Here, too, Zen dialectics is at work.Barthes takes the example (a more pressing one in his Parisian circlethan in Tokyo) of debating whether or not to enter psychoanalysis.One can ask the question “Why?” and then the question “Why not?”and then, again, the question “Why?” But the second “Why?” is notidentical to the Wrst one: “ The back-and-forth makes one pass throughan experience of wising-up; . . . people closed to psychoanalysis in asimplistic way: unbearable arrogance (arrogance of reason); but thereis an arrogance of psychoanalysis itself → one tacks between the twoarrogances” (206).

Barthes reads his “Japan” with that “intensity and the pleasure offree reading” that makes it holiday reading, that is to say, reading withthe serious design to Wnd in it a break from the “methodological rigor”(9) that turns intelligence that could be sweet, tactful, and discreet intoarrogance. Barthes appreciates Zen for its mysticism: no better wayto frustrate H. P. Grices’s conversational maxims than by being mys-tic. In his appreciation for mysticism, Barthes’s tastes are catholic,however, and also include Western mystics such as Jakob Boehme andEmanuel Swedenborg. Wondering about the question, “What are con -Xicts useful for?” (2005, 228), for instance, Barthes delights in turningto Boehme, whose meditations on evil suggest that conXict createsmeaning and has even created God. Lucifer’s rebellion, which Goddid not foresee and could not prevent, introduced evil into the worldand called forth God’s goodness. “Lucifer’s rebellion creates opposi-tion, conXict, meaning → God becomes able to signify himself (to man-ifest himself)” (128). But whereas, to Barthes, Boehme’s mysticism isthe joyous face of Western reason, Oriental reaching toward empti-ness deepens mystery with unfamiliarity and turns into the bridge-head out of the paranoia of meaning, into an abode of rest.

AN EPOCH OF REST 17

Barthes’s borrowings from Zen and Tao in order to unnerve the arro-gance of Western intelligence and paranoia may look dilettantish inthe eyes of especially Western scholars of China and Japan. The con-trast between Barthes in “Japan” and an eminent scholar of Japanesesuch as Edward G. Seidensticker in Japan is an instructive example ofthis. Seidensticker, celebrated translator of Murasaki Shikibu’s TheTale of Genji and lover of Tokyo, spent much of his time in the 1970s inTokyo (and all of it after his retirement from Columbia University).Genji Days is a series of extracts from his diaries for the years 1970–75,when he worked tirelessly on his translation, roughly half the year atthe University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and half the year in Tokyo, viaHawaii. To Seidensticker, Alan Watts’s book on Zen (Barthes’s chiefguide along with Suzuki’s Essays in Zen Buddhism) is “infantile Zen”and his call is “Back to Confucius! Maybe I, even I, shall be the one towrite a Confucian book—we need one far more than we need AlanWatts and his infantile Zen” (10). One of the Genji chapters, “Yoko -bue,” is splendid in spite of “all the Buddhist mooning and sighing”(187–88), and Seidensticker feels that the Japanese “do not themselvesinvite being taken very seriously when they make it appear that theirchief contributions to the culture of the world have been the tea cer-emony [which Barthes invests with the deepest Zen emptiness] andpaper-folding” (27). Seidensticker’s desire for Confucian order is in -spired by his distaste for the United States of the 1970s: Vietnamprotests, Manson trials (with “the three she-defendants” chanting aSokagakkai-Buddhist chant), scruffy, long-haired, leftist students, therising “Naziism” (41) of the New Left rabble-rousers who don’t evenunderstand the art of rabble-rousing anymore: “Even Hitler, I wouldimagine, did it with considerably more grace” (14). Seidensticker alsohates French movies (31–32), the ugly peace sign (35), “intellies” andtheir “random musings on life, beauty, and death” (189), and theBokhara rug he bought at an auction because it is pink, which “makesme think of the intellies” (146).

Barthes and Seidensticker share a predilection for the same Tokyoneighborhoods: Ueno, Asakusa, Sanya, can easily have walked themat the same time, and like them for some of the same reasons. We seeBarthes, in Empire of Signs, relaxed and socially adept, his mother stillalive, turning his inability to speak Japanese into an opportunity toforgo language and to experience the Japanese body, which “exists,

RUDOLPHUS TEEUWEN18

acts, shows itself, gives itself, without hysteria, without narcissism, butaccording to a pure—though subtle discontinuous—erotic project”(10). Diana Knight points out how Barthes “gradually assumes, self-consciously if discreetly, the status of a homosexual writer” (15), and“Japan” is certainly the empire that boosts that erotic project. Seiden-sticker, Wve years Barthes’s junior, is less happy, relaxed, and much lesssure in his erotic project. Whereas Barthes looks for the punctum of eroti-cism in all he contemplates (“for me, there is no punctum in the porno-graphic image” [1981, 59]) and manages to embody it, Seidenstickerseeks the pricks of pornography and experiences their letdowns. Bothin Japan and in Ann Arbor a regular visitor of “pornography mills”(“Why must our [American] pornography be so utterly wanting ingrace?” [43]), Seidensticker feels himself drawn to one of Asakusa’spornographic movie houses, but he reacts to what he Wnds there withan exclusive virtuous horror: “ The cruelty was perhaps more strikingthan the lubricity. The sadism was of an extreme sort that I was literallyunable to watch. No one seemed to suffer from this disability; everyonewas enthralled” (120). And whereas Barthes, charming and handsome,seems to turn his Japanese encounters into a “happy sexuality” (1977,156), Seidensticker (a Wtful dreamer, drinker of Metrecal for his weightand alcohol for his solitude) tells of an ambiguous Tokyo adventure. Aman who calls out to him, smiling and with “a rather pleasant face,”turns out to be stark naked and “emphatically tumescent.” “As I stoodexpressing silent wonder at this prospect,” a policeman appeared onthe scene and Seidensticker “turned in headlong Xight” (19). Seiden-sticker ends his narration of this episode with a headlong Xight intoirony, that is, into the complex rather than the neutral term: “Can it bethat the good ofWcer had proclivities, which made the pursuit of meunimportant? / Oh what an exciting city is ours” (20). “Proclivities”(and policemen) make another, more oblique irruption in Genji Days, adiary edited down to a level of privacy that the author could live with.One evening Seidensticker takes a stroll with a friend of his, Fukuda.They come across a large, striking building and Seidensticker “triedto get Fukuda to make inquiry as to whether it might be for rent, buthe demurred, saying he did not wish to attract the attention of thepolice. That seemed a curiously old-fashioned excuse” (137).

If my excerpts from Seidensticker’s catalogue of American hatreds(tendentious because there is also much he loves: all sorts of Xowers,

AN EPOCH OF REST 19

scents, weathers, and quite a number of people, many of whom nearlyas lonely as he himself) make him sound arrogant and paranoid, thenthat is mostly because his hatreds have the intensity of concretenessand the bitterness of disappointment. Also, allowances are due thediary writer. Barthes hates in a much more abstract and subtle way:he does not hate France, but rather Western rationality; he loves lan-guage, but only rarely assertion; disdainful of doxa, he embraces para -dox. Nothing in The Neutral suggests that Barthes is out of step withhis own culture anywhere to the extent that Seidensticker is with his.For Seidensticker, Western Civ does not have to go and yet inexorablyit goes, in part because of the modish infusion of half-digested East-ern ideas that promotes an infuriating slackness of thinking. ForBarthes, slackness is a twinkling of the Neutral: Barthes’s ethics of theNeutral are a celebration of the “heteroclite” (130), of the irregularverb in the grammar of life.

Had Seidensticker cared to mention Barthes, he undoubtedlywould have classiWed him as one of the “intellies.” There is nothing ofthe Neutral in Seidensticker: all is deWnite opinion, considered opin-ion in his scholarship, resentful bitterness in his life as an American.In Seidensticker’s eyes, Barthes’s refusal to declare himself deWnitively“for” or “against” something would be an instance of liberal wishy-washiness. Barthes does indeed recognize the danger of the Neutraldwindling into limp “neither-norism” and he worries about his ownvulnerability to this. A student’s letter prompts him to consider thematter and, for once, “I will not drift but ‘reply,’ that is, take sidesconcerning the connection of neither-norism and the Neutral” (2005,79). He writes: “In my discourse, there probably are ‘neither-norish’[niniques] features: sometimes, collapse of the Neutral into an even-handed refusal, an easy refuge in the context of a certain liberal dis-course such as ours, and that is often due to weariness (truly to assumethe I don’t know position requires energy, freshness)” (79–80). In con-sidering the relation between the Neutral and neither-norism, Barthesinvokes Marx’s idea of the farcical return of great events in history:neither-norism (a “reactive-afWrmative” force) is the farcical copy ofthe Neutral (an “active-negative” force) (80).

Barthes’s mountains, too, sometimes are no longer mountains. Thedistinction between the Neutral and its farcical remake comes whenBarthes steps out of the Neutral’s “drift” into the anti-Neutral “reply,”

RUDOLPHUS TEEUWEN20

and the very usefulness of the distinction makes one glad that he did.Philosophically, the Neutral is a form of skepticism and the “Skepticis free to renounce his Skepticism at every moment, without his doingso contradicting what he used to say when he was speaking ‘Skepti-cally’” (169). True, but a useful skeptic does not renounce his skepticism“at every moment,” but only at the right moment. The right moment,ho kairos, is “useful to signal the asystemic character of the Neutral:→ its relation to occasion, contingency, conjuncture, extemporizing”(ibid.). That Barthes concedes that he sometimes fails to catch ho kairos,that in his hands the Neutral sometimes collapses into neither-norism,takes the glibness out of his invocation of skepticism. Skepticism alertto ho kairos requires “energy, freshness” and is subject to “weariness.”Barthes claims not the Neutral but the desire for it, and he acceptsthat for much of his life he must live in desire tinged with weariness.

Seidensticker’s Japan is a concrete, available, and welcome alter-native to the everyday horrors of 1970s America. Japan is both a refugeand a scholarly domain for him. Resident in Japan, he basks in sooth-ingly familiar meaning; scholar of Japanese, he struggles to unlock thesubtleties of the Japanese language and culture. Seidensticker wantsto communicate—with the culture of the eleventh-century Heian court,with Murasaki Shikibu, with his imagined future readers, with ArthurWaley, his famous predecessor as translator of the Tale of Genji—andhe wants to prove, with all careful translators, that it is precisely thedifWculty of communication that elicits subtlety and tact. Barthes, bycontrast, wants to commune, and happily does. To Barthes, visitor toJapan, “Japan” is the Neutral: a guide for living, a suggestive ethicsfor foiling Western aggressiveness, a realm that sets meaning adrift.

And yet, the sly power of the Neutral is such that, in the end, the opposition between neutral Barthes and antineutral Seidenstickerloses its robustness. On December 20, 1973, in Honolulu, Seidenstickerhears from Charles Hamilton, to whom he regularly sends drafts ofhis completed chapters. Hamilton writes of Seidensticker’s Wrst threechapters that they are “in a ‘throwaway’ style, and, with a very lowspeciWc gravity, tend to get away from the reader unless he keeps aclose watch” (153). Seidensticker is puzzled and “unsettled” by thisappraisal. Hamilton arrives for a visit with Seidensticker on January7, 1974, and explains what he meant by “throwaway.” “He means astyle which seeks to be colorless and unassertive—the antithesis of

AN EPOCH OF REST 21

the Waley style. It is true, I suppose, that I have so sought. How verydifWcult it is. The very effort to be unmannered produces mannerism”(157). It is an act of kindness on Hamilton’s part to present Seiden-sticker’s style as a robust antithesis to Waley’s. Still, with the realizationthat, unwittingly, he sought the colorless and unassertive as an idealof style, Seidensticker, as he faces his version of Kafka’s dilemma—how unmannered can you be if you do not want to be consideredmannered?—stumbles into the Neutral.

Notes

Parts of this essay have been read at various conferences. I thank the National Sci-ence Council (Taiwan) for a travel grant to the 9th Hawaii International Conferenceon Arts and Humanities in January 2011. Thomas Wall of National Taipei Univer-sity of Technology, co-organizer of his university’s 2010 conference “Silent and Inef-fable,” asked a question and followed it up with an e-mail that really helped me.I thank anonymous readers, at this journal and elsewhere, for their genuinely help-ful comments. One such reader waived his right to anonymity, so I can thank PhilipWatts of Columbia University by name for his encouragement and suggestions.

1. “Admettons que la fatigue rende la parole moins exacte, la pensée moinsparlante, la communication plus difWcile, est-ce que, par tous ces signes, l’inexacti-tude propre à cet état n’atteint pas une sorte de précision qui servirait Wnalementaussi l’exacte parole en proposant quelque chose à incommuniquer?” (1969, xxi).

2. This sentence is my reconstruction of various reXections (quite resistantin nature to such reconstruction) on the character of weariness on pages xxi–xxiiof Blanchot’s L’Entretien inWni.

3. The lecture series on the Neutral was not published until 2002. The pub-lication of Barthes’s notes for this as well as three other courses was held up byvarious copyright disputes after Barthes’s death in 1980. See Knight, 16–19.

4. About the somewhat uneasy relation between Maurice Blanchot and hisyounger compatriot Barthes, and the way each developed their notions of the Neu-tral, see Bident. One of Bident’s telling characterizations of how R[oland Barthes]differs from M[aurice Blanchot]: “Blanchot was a man of the absolute, Barthes aman of plurality” (68).

5. “Si les interruptions, les sauts étourdis vers autre chose viennent d’uneagitation mondaine, d’une importunité, la dépression s’accroît. Mais si ces ‘change-ments’ (qui font le sporadique) vont vers le silence, l’intériorité, la blessure dedeuil passe à une pensée plus haute” (2009b, 105).

6. Life in “life in its purest state” is my amendation: the text of The Neutralhas vice, as has the French edition of Le Neutre: “vice à l’état pur” (67). “Vice in itspurest state,” however, does not make much sense. It can be an elaboration of“forgetfulness of evil” and warn us that to forget evil is the deepest possible vice,

RUDOLPHUS TEEUWEN22

but who needs such warning and why would Barthes sound that here? Or, takingon an opposite meaning, the phrase can be considered in apposition to “kind ofclear joy in C major,” and declare vice, when pure, to be such a joy. That, too, doesnot make sense: Barthes is, after all, discussing the rare joy of a particular kind ofawakening. I suspect a mistake in transcription here: Barthes’s lectures were tapedwhen he delivered them and Le Neutre is a transcription of those tapes in combi-nation with Barthes’s own extensive lecture notes. The sound recording of Barthes’slectures is available on the Web and Barthes clearly says, not vice, but “vie à l’étatpur” (UbuWeb: Sound, at 41’ 58”–42’ 00” of Lecture 3). This would make the whiteor neutral awakening a moment of pure life, a statement plausibly enlarged upon by“a clear joy in C major,” before care descends on the just awakened consciousness.(Even though vice is not a translation mistake, there still are a few. Two examples. Onpage 97 the translation has the English drug derive from the nonexistent Dutch droolrather than droog [“dry”] as Barthes has it, correctly, for the French drogue; and in hisretelling of Diogenes Laertes’s story about Epimenides, Barthes (2002, 69) has the lat-ter fall asleep for Wfty-seven years, the translators (2005, 39) for Wfty-seven hours. Thepoint of the story—the aged body with the fresh memory—is lost as a consequence.)

7. Here I am summarizing pages 288–89 of William Morris’s “Useful Workversus Useless Toil.”

8. “. . . une véritable écriture à deux mains: exaltant ici ce qu’il rejette là, nerejetant que pour mieux exalter” (15).

9. “. . . ce Neutre à la fois écrit et tu, dit et non dit. . . . Où l’on retrouve lescontorsions d’une écriture à deux mains” (294).

10. Like Bernard Comment, many others also think of Roland Barthes as aplural being. Bident calls him “a man of plurality” (68; see endnote 4). And uponBarthes’s death on March 26, 1980, Derrida wrote a remembrance entitled “Lesmorts de Roland Barthes” (“ The Deaths of Roland Barthes”), a title that in one ofits senses refers to Barthes’s multiplicity.

11. The letter writer wrongly writes “et bien” instead of “eh bien”: “et bien<sic>, si c’est comme ça, vous n’avez qu’à vous retirer et nous ‘foutre la paix’aussi” (Barthes 2002, 177).

12. The sound recording of his lectures reveals Barthes’s rather monotonousdelivery and how this achieves a deadpan quality whenever it leads up to jokes orironic asides.

13. This phrase is Horkheimer and Adorno’s in their chapter on the CultureIndustry, and their argument is that it is in its “necessary failure” (“im notwendi-gen Scheitern”) to conform to the style of its period and the tradition embodiedin it that art can embrace its task to express suffering (1228).

14. Thomas Clerc, editor of Le Neutre, is right to refer Barthes’s readers toMarin’s Utopiques: jeux d’espaces (2005, 214 n.16; 2002, 32 n.15). I will turn toMarin’s version of the Neutral below.

15. “Structure, Sign, and Play” announces the unstructured future and dra-matizes Derrida’s faltering, Mosaic, witnessing of it, faced as he is “by the as yetunnamable which is proclaiming itself and which can do so . . . only under the

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species of a nonspecies, in the formless, mute, infant, and terrifying form of mon-strosity” (293).

16. Page numbers are to the Everyman edition of the Critique of Pure Reason,followed by page indications as provided by Vasilis Politis, editor of that edition,to the twenty-nine-volume German standard edition of the Wrst (A) and second(B) editions of Kant’s Kritik.

17. Kant does not actually use the term Fiktion in his Kritik: it is not a word cur-rent in eighteenth-century German. He says of cosmological ideas that they “gleich-wohl doch nicht willkürlich erdacht sein” (“nevertheless have not been arbitrarilyconceived”). Meiklejohn-Politis’s rendition of willkürlich erdacht as “arbitrary Wctionsof thought” seems an apt modernization. According to the OED and Le Robert his-torique, in English and French, too, Wction in the sense of arbitrary invention onlyentered usage in the eighteenth century. French translations of the Kritik generallystay close to Kant’s German, and ideas that are “willkürlich erdacht” thus oftenbecome “imaginées arbitrairement.” Marin was fond of the word Wction; he refers toKant in a German edition but is more likely to paraphrase than to quote him, allow-ing him to use the word Wction to put his intended contrast with concept into clear relief.

18. One can wonder if a Lévi-Strauss has not been present in Utopia from thevery start in the form of Hythloday, Thomas More’s returning visitor from thatgood place that is nowhere, and progenitor of a whole slew of utopian delineators.

19. Marin could have credited Althusser here as the source of his deWnition.20. In a three-paragraph article, “L’Utopie,” for the Italian L’Almanacco Bom-

piani, Barthes contrasts utopia with politics: utopia is the Weld of desire, politicsthat of need. Utopia ruins the present with its images of happiness that do nothave the least chance of being implemented as a complete political system. Still,pockets of utopia redound to our world as lightning Xashes of desire and possi-bility: “if we captured these better, they would prevent Politics from hardeningitself into a totalitarian, bureaucratic, and moralistic system” (“si nous les captionsmieux, ils empêcheraient le Politique de se Wger en système totalitaire, bureau-cratique, moralisateur”; 1994, 44). Barthes’s point here is very much a less theo-rized and concise version of Marin’s.

21. “. . . pourquoi le choix, explicite, revendiqué, de la surface ou de lasuperWcie contre la profondeur, contre l’Abgrund?” The book by Jean-Claude Mil-ner from which Comment cites here is Le périple structural [The Structural Voyage](Paris: Seuil, 2002).

22. “Rien” is the short answer to the question Barthes asked in an account ofhis Chinese tour in Le Monde, “Alors, la Chine?”: “Well, how about China?” (1974a).

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