The Strange Clarity of Roland Barthes by Tiphaine Samoyault

‘From where did the singular clarity of Roland Barthes come from? From where did it come to him, since he had to receive it? Without simplifying anything, without doing violence to either the fold or the reserve, it always emanated from a certain point that was not yet a point, remaining invisible it its own way.’ *


This dimension of clarification appears explicitly in the course on ‘The Neutral’ in 1978. Here, Barthes deploys the power and career of the  notion that, having been a theoretical proposition (the neutral as ‘zero degree’) became a veritable ethic (against arrogance), leading to an aesthetic (of the jotting, the incident). Although he was, like any white western male, trapped in the rigidity of binarisms and the oppositional paradigms of rationality, his fantasy had always consisted in envisioning forces capable of outplaying them. In writing, in ways of reading, and also in forms of moral behavior, he had found ways of doing or saying things that would prevent meaning from being caught up in categories, language in the definitive. Being in stable  identities. In grammar neither masculine or feminine, neither active nor passive. In politics, not to decide between two conflicting parties  . .  . The neutral was mainly a utopia, and it defines Barthes at the deepest level; it was away of dealing with language, the body, the gesture so as to deprive them of their authoritarianism of essence and fixed definitions. Hence his predilection for thresholds, vestibules, the in-between, all those intermediary places where you are not really anywhere, through which you pass without stopping. There are, of course, negative images of the neutral, both on the political level and on the ethical level; but if we were decide to turn it into a utopia, we will highlight the movement by which it destabilizes everything, refuses all that is done-and- dusted, given, obvious. The moral values promoted by the neutral, such as benevolence, delicacy and gentleness, may sometimes be mocked as effeminate, and  yet they are the values that are embodied, without authority, by the maternal feminine as Barthes receives and conceives it. It is also the principle of respect for the singular pleasure extolled by Sade in a letter to his wife, quoted in Sade, Fourier, Loyola; the enjoyment of all that is small, trivial, marginal, through which individualities express their truth, in other words, their fragile moments.

“I will happily call the non-violent refusal of reduction, the evasion of generality by means of invented, unexpected, non- paradigmatizable forms of behavior, the elegant and discrete flight from dogmatism, in short the principle of delicacy – in the final analysis, I will happily call it gentleness.’**

 

Unlike Blanchot, the neutral in Barthes is neither negative, nor the unspeakable, nor the night. Its positive force lies in the way it reduces intimidation of every kind: arrogance, totality, virility, the definitive judgment. It attenuates without abolishing, calms without lulling completely to sleep, renders expression more subtle and less vain. Herein resides its stranger power of clarification. Instead of displaying thought in the harsh light of an illusory intelligibility, the neutral makes it glitter for a while while as it scatters it in fragments, creating gaps and pauses, times and places that elude meaning,.

* Jacques Derrida, ‘The deaths of Roland Barthes’, in Psyche, vol. 1, p. 265

 ** The Neutral: Lecture Course at the College de France, 1977-1978, Columbia University Press. 2005




Humankind’s common desire is for a stable center, and for assurance of mastery –through knowing or possessing. And a book, with its ponderible shape and its beginning, middle and end, stands to satisfy that desire. But what sovereign subject is the origin of the book? ‘I was not one man only’ says Proust’s narrator, ‘but the steady advance hour after hour of an army in close formation, in which there appeared, according to the moment, impassioned men, indifferent men, jealous men . . . In a composite mass, these elements may, one by one, without our noticing it, be replaced by others, which others again eliminate or reinforce, until in the end a change has been brought about which it would be impossible to conceive if it were single person.’

 

-Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
Translator’s Preface to Derrida’s ‘On Grammatology.’