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

Utopia of Weariness
Rudolphus Teeuwen

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

Published by University of Minnesota Press

DOI: 10.1353/cul.2012.0001

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http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/cul/summary/v080/80.teeuwen.html

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AN EPOCH OF REST
ROLAND 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

T he structuralism of the 1970s exalted the importance of lan-

guage. It made meaning a matter not of reference to nonlinguistic
reality but of difference within language, and thus gave language the
conXictual shape of a battleground for assertive possibilities. From
within 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. Some
of 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 away
from 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 two
ways: (1) by looking at how some inXuential structuralists of the 1970s
uncovered and deWned the afWnity between the Neutral and utopia;
and (2) by concentrating on the speciWc utopian forms that Roland
Barthes sees emerging from the Neutral, especially as he deals with
them in The Neutral, the notes for his Spring 1978 lecture course at the
Collège de France. Those utopian forms are remarkably low-key and
remarkably private: to Barthes, utopia becomes a private retreat in
which the world cannot exercise its designs upon one, and the Neu-
tral is the arsenal of strategies that allows one to absent oneself from

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

2 RUDOLPHUS TEEUWEN

the world’s designs. The spring of Barthes’s utopia is weariness; the

shape of it tends toward mysticism. William James’s characterization
of mysticism remains instructive: mystical states are “states of insight
into depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect. They are
illuminations, 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 of
Japan. A third part of this article, therefore, is a look at Barthes’s Japan
and the way it contrasts with the Japan of Edward G. Seidensticker,
scholar and translator of Japanese literature and a man whose impulses
are antineutral and antiutopian.

In their analyses of the oppositional structure of language, struc-

turalists brought out intriguing complexities and asymmetries. One
such is the “Neutral,” the structuralist term that carried the seed of
the 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 it
is “a means of reWning oppositional analyses. It allows us to reWne an
analysis by increasing the number of analytical classes stemming from
a 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 the
two positives, “life and death,” is the “complex term” whereas the
two negatives, “neither life nor death,” form the “neutral term.”
The neutral term was and continues to be productive of much
insight. 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 each
term 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”: they
then combine in the “complex term” that needs the help of irony to
 AN EPOCH OF REST 3

For Against

Not “Against” Not “For”

keep them both in play. As such, it is the template of “bad Utopian-

ism,” the utopianism of modernism in its “speciWcally aesthetic and
aestheticizing fashion, valorizing art as the space in which the incom-
patibles can reach a positive kind of fullness” (2005, 179). It is also
possible to hold the two negations at the same time, to be neither
“for” nor “against.” This is the “neutral term.” “This neutral position
does not seek to hold two substantive features, two positivities, to-
gether in the mind at once, but rather attempts to retain two negatives
or 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: the
two negatives “must neither be combined in some humanist organic
synthesis, nor effaced and abandoned altogether: but retained and
sharpened, made more virulent, their incompatibility and indeed
their incommensurability a scandal for the mind, but a scandal that
remains vivid and alive, and that cannot be thought away, either by
resolving it or eliminating it: the biblical stumbling block, which gives
Utopia its savor and its bitter freshness, when the thought of Utopias
is still possible” (2005, 180). For Jameson, the Neutral is a call to uto-
pian arms, a refusal of the compromise, humanism, transcendence, and
irony (irony being a form of the “both/and” of the complex term) that
makes utopia a caricature of Hegelian synthesis.
Maurice Blanchot Wrst rendered weariness fertile ground and gave
it a name: le Neutre. In the opening reverie to his book L’Entretien inWni
(The InWnite Conversation), Blanchot presents the Neutral as something
that brings on an enormous fatigue, a weariness, a sort of trance.
Weariness, Blanchot admits, “renders speech less exact, thought less
Xuent, and communication more difWcult, but doesn’t the lack of exact-
ness that comes with this state reach, through all these signs, a kind
of precision that would also ultimately serve exact speech by offering
something to uncommunicate?”1 Lack of exactness may be something
4 RUDOLPHUS TEEUWEN

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 by
way of a negative approach. To Blanchot, such an instrumental use of
weariness belies the very character of weariness, a state in which the
weary 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 lighter
complexion. In The Neutral, the notes for the lecture course he taught
at the Collège de France from February to June 1978, Barthes presents
a nonsystematic, nonexhaustive inventory of “twinklings” of the Neu-
tral.3 One of those “twinklings” is tact, a neutral state because it is a
form of such discretion that it is hardly there. Tact, Barthes explains,
is a minimal and elegant taking of action based on the principle of
sweetness: “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 of
dogmatism, in short, the principle of tact, I would call it, all being
said: sweetness” (2005, 36). An earlier lecture course of Barthes’s had
for 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 such
states 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 as
arrogance, conXict, and anger; such deXections and dodges of the
anti-Neutral as silence, beside-the-point answers, side-stepping the
“terrorism of the question” (107), pretended deafness, and precipitate
leave-taking (the Xippant “Ciao”); and such heroes of the Neutral as
Pyrrho, 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
 AN EPOCH OF REST 5

“uncommunication” but rather one into communion, that turn away

from discursive to intuitive intellect.4 Part of that turn to communion
has an autobiographical cause and a clear date of inception: Barthes
mentions obliquely to his listeners how, as he prepared his course on
the Neutral, “there entered my life, some of you know it, a serious
event, a mourning” (2005, 13). Barthes refers to the death of his mother,
on October 25, 1977, and tells his audience how this event made that
his 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 second
Neutral,” 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 further
step away from life’s fellness: it is “the difference that separates this
already decanted will-to-live from vitality” (14; “vitality,” to Barthes,
is a merely and purely being alive, a state that springs not from desire
but from a hatred of death). The publication, in 2009, of what Barthes
referred to as his Journal de deuil, his mourning diary—kept for almost
two 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 out
because it isn’t a continuous process, but one that interrupts one’s life
sporadically. Barthes then writes, “If the interruptions, the unwitting
leaps toward something else, come from a worldly agitation, from an
importunity, then the depression grows. But if these ‘changes’ (that
make up the sporadic) move toward silence and inwardness, then the
wound of mourning moves toward a higher thought.”5 This repug-
nance against worldliness, this readiness to give up communication
for 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 of
one’s mother, Barthes also thinks of Proust: he reproduces a chart from
a high school literature textbook showing Proust’s retirement from
the world with his mother’s death as turning point and declares him-
self “nurtured by this image” of the Proustian retreat (2005, 142). And
6 RUDOLPHUS TEEUWEN

indeed, Barthes refers to this retreat as the key to Proust’s authorship

in many of his essays on him (e.g., 1978, 1979).
In The Neutral, Barthes writes (as he had done before in A Lover’s
Discourse) about the sort of awakening one sometimes enjoys, “the
white, neutral awakening: for a few seconds, whatever Care {Souci}
one felt when one went to sleep, forgetfulness of evil, [life]6 in its purest
state, kind of clear joy in C major; then the earlier Care falls upon you
like a great black bird: the day begins” (37). This “neutral awaken-
ing,” Barthes writes, “precious, rare, fragile, brief,” is still part of the
realm of sleep. This awakening in sleep, this momentary availability
of 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 a
divided 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, so
fragile that they are heart-rending” (2005, 37). This awareness, in
instances of “neutral awakening,” of a condition of utopian joy just
before, inevitably, it escapes one is, Barthes elaborates, akin to a vision:
“what the neutral awakening allows me to retain from it is a kind of
slack 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 around
the time of The Neutral, Barthes speaks of the “half-waking” of which
Proust writes in the opening of his In Search of Lost Time. This is part
of the “good kind” of sleep, a sleep in which “the logical carapace of
Time is attacked” and that “establishes another logic, a logic of Vacil-
lation, of Decompartmentalization” (1978, 281). This other logic “will
spontaneously produce the third form, neither Essay nor Novel,” based
on “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 far
removed from more traditional utopian imaginings that take the form
of dreams rather than sleep, and dreams of hope as well as efforts of
rational planning rather than slackness. William Morris, that most
responsible and humane of utopian designers, for instance, wants to
 AN EPOCH OF REST 7

abolish “useless toil” and replace it with “useful work.” The elimina-
tion of toil will dramatically reduce the amount of physical strain on
the citizens of the new world and will leave only room for the work
that 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 (work
should be useful, not senseless), and a hope of pleasure (work should
engage muscle, memory, and imagination).7 Barthes’s Neutral and
its utopian bliss are a deliberate departure from hope, planning, and
dreaming. 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 after
with 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” and
his utopia, as he points out himself, is really an “atopia,” which he
deWnes (in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes) as an “internal doctrine”
that resists pigeonholing by being “of a drifting habitation” (49). What
Barthes 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 against
the 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 too
much, and too aggressively. Utopian language would simply rustle,
like a happy machine, “without a sign ever becoming detached from
it . . . but also—and this is what is difWcult—without meaning being
brutally 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 which
produces in the distance a meaning henceforth liberated from all
8 RUDOLPHUS TEEUWEN

aggressions of which the sign, formed in the ‘sad and Werce history of
men,’ is the Pandora’s box” (78).
“We have deWned as pertaining to the Neutral every inXection
that, dodging or bafXing the paradigmatic, oppositional structures of
meaning, aims at the suspension of the conXictual basis of discourse”
(Barthes 2005, 211). Barthes gives this helpful explanation in his course
summary, a document written (as per French academic custom) for
inclusion in his university’s academic yearbook. The summary is just
about the only part of Barthes’s book that does not itself display the
bafXing 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 is
expected to understand more than one does. This quality of Barthes’s
display of the Neutral makes his text akin to a Zen koan: unsettling
but 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 easily
forgets, holding a book—is, or was at Wrst (the summary excepted),
really a mystery of speaking. The Neutral is a mystery in the original
Greek sense that makes the word musterion closely related to the word
myesis, “initiation” (Armstrong, 54). Thus, as a reader, one feels drawn
into complicity with the Neutral as displayed in Barthes’s writing,
one feels oneself turning into one of its mystai (“initiates”), the feeling
that must have animated the many rapt attendants of Barthes’s lec-
tures back in 1978. Although not designed as a genre of writing, The
Neutral’s present and future mode of existence is that of writing: a
truly utopian writing, a “third form,” neither creative nor academic,
neither nonsense nor entirely clear, always investing language with
more nuances than easily Wt a goal simply of communication, always
deferring Wnality by means of the neither-nor. Jameson wrote of the
“biblical stumbling block” that the double negative of neither-nor
threw 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: a
passage 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 rejecting
only in order to extol higher” (15).8 Barthes actually embodies the Neu-
tral: Comment recounts how, before he read Barthes as a teenager at
 AN EPOCH OF REST 9

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 hidden
plurality, not only distinguished him from the theologian but also made
him as strange and mysterious as the Neutral itself, the -es “both writ-
ten and silenced, pronounced and not pronounced.” One Wnds in
Barthes’s very name “the contortions of a double-handed writing”
(294).9 Comment’s success in making the unvoiced sufWx in Barthes’s
name meaningful as emblematic of Barthes’s refusal of singular mean-
ing shows up a truth that he does not here entertain: that the Neutral’s
shedding of meaning has the strong tendency of ending up carrying
meaning after all.10
Not all readers of Barthes will rejoice with Comment in Barthes’s
writerly prestidigitation, and not all students in Barthes’s audience at
the Collège de France were complicit with him in bafXing the para-
digm. The session of May 13, 1978, begins with a “Supplement,” one
of a number of occasional reXections at the beginning of a session in
which Barthes reacts to letters students sent him in between sessions
with 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, why
don’t you retire and ‘stop bugging us’ you too” (2005, 136).11 Barthes
reXects 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-fashioned
fathers or despots cannot be replied to. Barthes then recuperates this
aggression and takes his masterly revenge on the letter writer by cor-
recting his or her illiterate usage (from which he earlier distanced
himself 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 Wgure
Retreat” (137).12
Barthes is alert to how, in a universe of signs, no semiotic vacuum
is tolerated. Even the spurning of signs creates meaning. Silence, for
instance, seems a sure way of sidestepping the demand for meaning.
But such shedding of meaning through silence very quickly becomes
meaningful as a statement all its own. How to avoid this, but through
speaking? Barthes quotes Blanchot in L’Entretien inWni on Kafka’s
10 RUDOLPHUS TEEUWEN

dilemma: “Kafka wondered at what moment and how many times,

when eight people are seated within the horizon of a conversation, it
is appropriate to speak if one does not wish to be considered silent”
(2005, 27). The Neutral requires tact and ruses to manifest itself in a
sufWciently discreet manner.

The Kafka dilemma is an example of the Neutral’s joining a familiar

utopian double bind, one that started with the very name of Thomas
More’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 that
More is ironic when you take him literally. When you take him ironi-
cally, convinced from the outset of Utopia’s impracticability, More’s
Utopia becomes a failure of a lesser order, a mere fable of the desire
(which a reader might not share and which More might not actually
feel) of amending recognized imperfections of the world brought on
by faults of human nature, or politics, or some other incorrigible trait
of the worldly condition. Utopia becomes, if not the shrug, then the
sigh of worldliness.
Perhaps More shrugged (or sighed). But something that utopia can
make us aware of is lost in the sigh of irony, and is only available by
taking utopia at its word and facing its “necessary failure.”13 Fredric
Jameson calls failure utopia’s “vocation,” and deWnes the “epistemo-
logical value” of that failure as lying “in the walls it allows us to feel
around our minds, the invisible limits it gives us to detect by sheerest
induction” (1994, 75). Crediting Louis Marin with this crucial, non-
ironic appreciation of utopia’s negative incisiveness, Jameson points
out that utopia’s contradictions, the holes in its text, make us aware
of “our own incapacity to see beyond the epoch and its ideological
closures” (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, chides
Lévi-Strauss for his “bricolage,” for using whatever conceptual ap-
paratus comes to hand. Lévi-Strauss’s work is concerned with myths
and because of that, Derrida argues, “structural discourse on myths—
mythological discourse—must itself be mythomorphic. It must have the
form of that of which it speaks” (1967, 286). According to this same
 AN EPOCH OF REST 11

requirement, an essay on utopia must be “utopomorphic” (and it can

easily 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 forbidding
transcendence. Transcendence is a way of foiling the urgent demand
that language makes on its users to choose between different mean-
ings by referring the differences in meaning to a level of abstraction
on which they can become merely objects of reXection. The Neutral
deXects that same linguistic urgency by resisting to choose or by show-
ing up the demand for deWnitive meaning as offensive or misguided
in 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’s
descriptions of the island of Utopia. As a nonplace, it is neither England
nor 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 not
quite 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 than
from Greimas or Blanchot. In the dense “Second Preface” and Wrst
chapter of Marin’s Utopiques, Kant’s transcendental logic features as
“striking indication at the end of the eighteenth century of the complex
critical movement of which utopic discourse has been the symptom
since 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 in
afWrmative, 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, and
its relation to the negative one, Marin remarks: “In fact Kant presents
a third neutral term. Between afWrmation and negation, between the-
sis (‘the soul is mortal’) and antithesis (‘the soul is immortal’), comes
the 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 the
abstraction made from all contents in the predicate. It points out the
pure limit for the concept of the soul as the line excluding the group
12 RUDOLPHUS TEEUWEN

of possible mortal beings” (20). So the advance Marin sees in Kant’s

third, 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 entirely
different 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 Antinomy
of Pure Reason” (itself part of the “ Transcendental Dialectic” division
of the Critique of Pure Reason), Kant deals with the problem that in the
dialectical play of the cosmological ideas (the Wrst one famously being:
the world has a beginning/the world has no beginning) “no possible
experience can present us with an object adequate to them. . . . And yet
they [cosmological ideas] are not arbitrary Wctions of thought” (341;
A462/B490).16 Kant goes on to say a few pages later:17 “ The reason is
this. 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 which
we are to judge whether an idea is anything more than an idea and
Wction 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 moored
to 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 the
cosmological 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 1973
book Utopiques), Marin writes: “I try to discern in the utopian texts
the 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 formulates
his emblematic ambition of turning what he calls utopia’s “Wction” (its
contradictions if measured against “possible experience”; its depar-
tures from “concepts” of reality; its internal inconsistencies if held
 AN EPOCH OF REST 13

responsible for representing objects in the world) into a theory that

favors this Wction over “concept” and “image.” “Concept” and “image”
are the categories that apply in current, pre-utopian conditions, the
condition from which a utopian writer could not free himself. Utopia’s
Wction, 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 his
theoretical discourse about utopia utopomorphic. Marin also identi-
Wes the greatest danger for utopia as that of turning into myth, and the
greatest 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 contradiction
as its Wction, opposed to concept or image” (1977, 285). But why is it
that contradictions should not be reconciled? Or, in other words, why
should we care about the Neutral? Marin has a double answer. First,
utopian contradictions, if kept alive, keep alive an awareness of utopia
as a critical discourse that attempts to negate aspects of its present
historical moment. The power of utopia is “not the fact of the model
itself, but the differences between model and reality” (286). Second,
an emphasis on contradiction brings out a utopia’s main feature of
staging escapes from existing categories of thought. Forgetting the “Wc-
tion” leaves one with what Marin calls a “degenerate utopia,” in which
a utopian representation is “entirely caught up in a dominant system
of ideas and values” and is thus “changed into a myth or a collective
fantasy” (ibid.). Whereas utopia is “an ideological locus where ideol-
ogy is put into play and called into question,” a myth is “a narration
which fantastically ‘resolves’ a fundamental contradiction in a given
society” (294).19
Roland Barthes does not directly refer to Marin in Le Neutre or, for
that matter, to Greimas or Derrida (except for a single mention). This
is 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, “which
is 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 rigor
to their investigations of the Neutral, Marin showing the Neutral the
14 RUDOLPHUS TEEUWEN

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 more
intuitive thinker and also one who, whether on vacation or not, prefers
to keep things light. In the introduction to the 2002 republication of
his 1991 book Roland Barthes, vers le neutre, Bernard Comment repeats
a question Jean-Claude Milner posed in a book of his: “why [Barthes’s]
choice—explicit, endorsed—for surface or extension as opposed to
depth, to Abgrund?” (8).21 And indeed, Abgrund Barthes never seeks in
himself: Blanchot is his abyss. Barthes’s mood in The Neutral, however
light, is also pensive and even, occasionally, elegiac. His will-to-live
has, in the wake of his mother’s death, become—and Barthes borrows
the title of a Pasolini poem here—“‘a desperate vitality’→ desperate
vitality is the hatred of death” (2005, 14). And his library in Urt, from
the “free reading” of which he selects his course materials, is “a library
of dead authors” and “I am always saddened by the death of an author.”
Closer to Buddha than to Marin, Barthes concludes: “to mourn is to
be alive” (10).
In explaining his own nonmethod in presenting an arbitrary num-
ber of “Wgures” of the Neutral in an arbitrary order, Barthes writes
that each Wgure is “as if one were establishing a bridgehead: after that
everyone is free to scatter in the countryside: his own countryside”
(2005, 10). This idea of the Neutral as a passage to unscripted privacy
returns regularly throughout The Neutral. For instance, considering
what it means to give a “course” on the Neutral, Barthes deWnes a
course not as a “magisterial” account but as “the shimmering of an
individuation” (47). And “shimmer” Barthes deWnes as “that whose
aspect, perhaps whose meaning, is subtly modiWed according to the
angle of the subject’s gaze” (51). A student in his course points out
that when Barthes says, “I desire the Neutral” and “ The strength of
literature [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 this
as 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 famous
apologue, Zen makes fun of people who mistake the pointing Wnger
for the moon it points to → I am interested in the Wnger, not in the
moon” (68).
 AN EPOCH OF REST 15

Going for the Wnger rather than the moon, for the desire rather
than its object, Barthes gives his utopia of the Neutral a gestural and
yearning indeterminacy. Diana Knight, in Barthes and Utopia, stresses
the constancy of Barthes’s utopian imagination throughout his career
as well as how he thinks of utopia as a form of slipperiness rather
than an achieved ideal. Knight suggests that Barthes’s “celebration of
Japan in Empire of Signs” “comes closest to being a generic utopia” (1).
Her fascinating chapter on Empire of Signs shows Barthes’s “Japan” as
a place both eroticized and empty of meaning (and thus free for erotic
encounters). The Neutral (which only appeared after Knight’s book was
published) 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 the
East in the interest of Western domination. Rather, he wants to extract
himself from that domination. Lisa Lowe links Barthes’s participation
in French orientalism, like Kristeva’s, to a concern “with criticizing
the power of the French state and its ideology, an ideology that had
justiWed, among other things, imperialist policies in North Africa and
Indochina.” China especially could be represented not as a colonized
space but as a “desired position outside western politics, ideology, and
signiWcation.” As such, it is still framed as the Other, but “no longer
as colonized but as utopian” Other (188). But actually China, the em-
bodiment of non-European communism, never realized its utopian
potential for Barthes, impatient as he was whenever politics became
ideologically inXexible. Japan, by contrast, is that bridgehead into the
happiness 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 familiar
concepts (1970, 3). China, however, yielded “rien.”22 Barthes visited
China in April and May 1974 as part of a delegation from the journal
Tel Quel, which invited him to see Maoism in action. He kept a note-
book on his experiences, recently published as Carnets du voyage en
Chine. These notes are a variation on those on Japan in a key of comic
distress. Visiting factories, naval yards, museums, and schools—herded
there by minders—Barthes gets to hear speech after speech built from
16 RUDOLPHUS TEEUWEN

the same ideological “bricks.” He takes dutiful notes, but his mind
and 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 healthy
body: “Je préférerai: mens fada in corpore salop” (“I’d prefer: stupid mind
in Wlthy body”; 2009a, 114). One time Barthes manages to escape,
with the China correspondent of Le Monde, to spend an evening in
Beijing on his own and to walk through its lanes and streets; Wnally
“un érotisme possible” (196). Still, Barthes has not been able to see “le
kiki d’un seul Chinois” (“the willy of a single Chinese”) and how to
get 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 to
what he considers the more strained and straining forms of Western
dialectics, be they Hegelian, Husserlian, or Kantian. The three stages
of this Zen dialectics are: “(1) mountains are mountains and waters
are waters → then (2) (following a good Zen teaching): mountains are
no 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 the
middle of phase 2: “every object is converted, by some analysis, inter-
pretation, into the contrary of its name . . . : we live in a world where
mountains are truly no longer mountains, etc.” Barthes blames “the
secular path of science (eighteenth century)” for this predicament of
analytical complexity. He translates the three phases in three sets of
catchwords:

(1) Stupidity, tautology, narrow scientism

(2) Intelligence, paranoia
(3) Innocence (mystic), wisdom, “method” (= Tao) (125)

This Zen dialectics provides Barthes with a vantage point outside

Western communicative rationality from which to invalidate it. In his
discussion of “apathy,” one of the Wgures of the Neutral, Barthes ap-
plies Zen dialectics to matters of politics and statecraft. Barthes draws
a diagram, the Wrst phase of which is the terror of burning subjectivity
 AN EPOCH OF REST 17

(in an activist’s absolute conviction of being right); the second phase

is a scientiWc working out of a theory into a “Fake Neutral,” before
reaching (if we are so lucky to arrive in that abode of rest) the third
phase of irenic subjectivity of the Neutral (184; 252 n.13). And in the
Wgure of “drift” (deWned as “to dismiss opposition—or gently to take
leave of” [203]), Barthes discusses the strategy of being dilatory and
delaying an answer “with the hope (often satisWed) that the question
will be lost, that the demand will shift, and that there will no longer
be any reason to reply” (205). Here, too, Zen dialectics is at work.
Barthes takes the example (a more pressing one in his Parisian circle
than 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 not
identical to the Wrst one: “ The back-and-forth makes one pass through
an experience of wising-up; . . . people closed to psychoanalysis in a
simplistic way: unbearable arrogance (arrogance of reason); but there
is an arrogance of psychoanalysis itself → one tacks between the two
arrogances” (206).
Barthes reads his “Japan” with that “intensity and the pleasure of
free reading” that makes it holiday reading, that is to say, reading with
the serious design to Wnd in it a break from the “methodological rigor”
(9) that turns intelligence that could be sweet, tactful, and discreet into
arrogance. Barthes appreciates Zen for its mysticism: no better way
to 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 and
Emanuel Swedenborg. Wondering about the question, “What are con-
Xicts useful for?” (2005, 228), for instance, Barthes delights in turning
to Boehme, whose meditations on evil suggest that conXict creates
meaning and has even created God. Lucifer’s rebellion, which God
did not foresee and could not prevent, introduced evil into the world
and 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 is
the 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.
18 RUDOLPHUS TEEUWEN

Barthes’s borrowings from Zen and Tao in order to unnerve the arro-
gance of Western intelligence and paranoia may look dilettantish in
the eyes of especially Western scholars of China and Japan. The con-
trast between Barthes in “Japan” and an eminent scholar of Japanese
such as Edward G. Seidensticker in Japan is an instructive example of
this. Seidensticker, celebrated translator of Murasaki Shikibu’s The
Tale of Genji and lover of Tokyo, spent much of his time in the 1970s in
Tokyo (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 at
the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and half the year in Tokyo, via
Hawaii. To Seidensticker, Alan Watts’s book on Zen (Barthes’s chief
guide 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 to
write a Confucian book—we need one far more than we need Alan
Watts 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 themselves
invite being taken very seriously when they make it appear that their
chief contributions to the culture of the world have been the tea cer-
emony [which Barthes invests with the deepest Zen emptiness] and
paper-folding” (27). Seidensticker’s desire for Confucian order is in-
spired by his distaste for the United States of the 1970s: Vietnam
protests, Manson trials (with “the three she-defendants” chanting a
Sōkagakkai-Buddhist chant), scruffy, long-haired, leftist students, the
rising “Naziism” (41) of the New Left rabble-rousers who don’t even
understand the art of rabble-rousing anymore: “Even Hitler, I would
imagine, did it with considerably more grace” (14). Seidensticker also
hates French movies (31–32), the ugly peace sign (35), “intellies” and
their “random musings on life, beauty, and death” (189), and the
Bokhara rug he bought at an auction because it is pink, which “makes
me think of the intellies” (146).
Barthes and Seidensticker share a predilection for the same Tokyo
neighborhoods: Ueno, Asakusa, Sanya, can easily have walked them
at the same time, and like them for some of the same reasons. We see
Barthes, in Empire of Signs, relaxed and socially adept, his mother still
alive, turning his inability to speak Japanese into an opportunity to
forgo language and to experience the Japanese body, which “exists,
 AN EPOCH OF REST 19

acts, shows itself, gives itself, without hysteria, without narcissism, but
according 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 less
sure 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, Seidensticker
seeks the pricks of pornography and experiences their letdowns. Both
in Japan and in Ann Arbor a regular visitor of “pornography mills”
(“Why must our [American] pornography be so utterly wanting in
grace?” [43]), Seidensticker feels himself drawn to one of Asakusa’s
pornographic movie houses, but he reacts to what he Wnds there with
an exclusive virtuous horror: “ The cruelty was perhaps more striking
than the lubricity. The sadism was of an extreme sort that I was literally
unable to watch. No one seemed to suffer from this disability; everyone
was 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 weight
and alcohol for his solitude) tells of an ambiguous Tokyo adventure. A
man who calls out to him, smiling and with “a rather pleasant face,”
turns out to be stark naked and “emphatically tumescent.” “As I stood
expressing silent wonder at this prospect,” a policeman appeared on
the scene and Seidensticker “turned in headlong Xight” (19). Seiden-
sticker ends his narration of this episode with a headlong Xight into
irony, that is, into the complex rather than the neutral term: “Can it be
that the good ofWcer had proclivities, which made the pursuit of me
unimportant? / Oh what an exciting city is ours” (20). “Proclivities”
(and policemen) make another, more oblique irruption in Genji Days, a
diary 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 “tried
to get Fukuda to make inquiry as to whether it might be for rent, but
he demurred, saying he did not wish to attract the attention of the
police. 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,
20 RUDOLPHUS TEEUWEN

scents, weathers, and quite a number of people, many of whom nearly

as lonely as he himself) make him sound arrogant and paranoid, then
that is mostly because his hatreds have the intensity of concreteness
and the bitterness of disappointment. Also, allowances are due the
diary 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 with
his own culture anywhere to the extent that Seidensticker is with his.
For Seidensticker, Western Civ does not have to go and yet inexorably
it goes, in part because of the modish infusion of half-digested East-
ern ideas that promotes an infuriating slackness of thinking. For
Barthes, slackness is a twinkling of the Neutral: Barthes’s ethics of the
Neutral are a celebration of the “heteroclite” (130), of the irregular
verb in the grammar of life.
Had Seidensticker cared to mention Barthes, he undoubtedly
would have classiWed him as one of the “intellies.” There is nothing of
the 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 Neutral
dwindling into limp “neither-norism” and he worries about his own
vulnerability to this. A student’s letter prompts him to consider the
matter and, for once, “I will not drift but ‘reply,’ that is, take sides
concerning 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 assume
the I don’t know position requires energy, freshness)” (79–80). In con-
sidering the relation between the Neutral and neither-norism, Barthes
invokes Marx’s idea of the farcical return of great events in history:
neither-norism (a “reactive-afWrmative” force) is the farcical copy of
the Neutral (an “active-negative” force) (80).
Barthes’s mountains, too, sometimes are no longer mountains. The
distinction between the Neutral and its farcical remake comes when
Barthes steps out of the Neutral’s “drift” into the anti-Neutral “reply,”
 AN EPOCH OF REST 21

and the very usefulness of the distinction makes one glad that he did.
Philosophically, the Neutral is a form of skepticism and the “Skeptic
is free to renounce his Skepticism at every moment, without his doing
so 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 alert
to ho kairos requires “energy, freshness” and is subject to “weariness.”
Barthes claims not the Neutral but the desire for it, and he accepts
that 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 refuge
and a scholarly domain for him. Resident in Japan, he basks in sooth-
ingly familiar meaning; scholar of Japanese, he struggles to unlock the
subtleties of the Japanese language and culture. Seidensticker wants
to communicate—with the culture of the eleventh-century Heian court,
with Murasaki Shikibu, with his imagined future readers, with Arthur
Waley, his famous predecessor as translator of the Tale of Genji—and
he wants to prove, with all careful translators, that it is precisely the
difWculty of communication that elicits subtlety and tact. Barthes, by
contrast, wants to commune, and happily does. To Barthes, visitor to
Japan, “Japan” is the Neutral: a guide for living, a suggestive ethics
for 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 Seidensticker
loses its robustness. On December 20, 1973, in Honolulu, Seidensticker
hears from Charles Hamilton, to whom he regularly sends drafts of
his completed chapters. Hamilton writes of Seidensticker’s Wrst three
chapters that they are “in a ‘throwaway’ style, and, with a very low
speciWc gravity, tend to get away from the reader unless he keeps a
close watch” (153). Seidensticker is puzzled and “unsettled” by this
appraisal. Hamilton arrives for a visit with Seidensticker on January
7, 1974, and explains what he meant by “throwaway.” “He means a
style which seeks to be colorless and unassertive—the antithesis of
22 RUDOLPHUS TEEUWEN

the Waley style. It is true, I suppose, that I have so sought. How very
difWcult 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 realization
that, unwittingly, he sought the colorless and unassertive as an ideal
of style, Seidensticker, as he faces his version of Kafka’s dilemma—
how unmannered can you be if you do not want to be considered
mannered?—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 Conference
on 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 Philip
Watts of Columbia University by name for his encouragement and suggestions.
1. “Admettons que la fatigue rende la parole moins exacte, la pensée moins
parlante, 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 Wnalement
aussi l’exacte parole en proposant quelque chose à incommuniquer?” (1969, xxi).
2. This sentence is my reconstruction of various reXections (quite resistant
in nature to such reconstruction) on the character of weariness on pages xxi–xxii
of 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 by
various copyright disputes after Barthes’s death in 1980. See Knight, 16–19.
4. About the somewhat uneasy relation between Maurice Blanchot and his
younger 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 a
man of plurality” (68).
5. “Si les interruptions, les sauts étourdis vers autre chose viennent d’une
agitation 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 de
deuil passe à une pensée plus haute” (2009b, 105).
6. Life in “life in its purest state” is my amendation: the text of The Neutral
has vice, as has the French edition of Le Neutre: “vice à l’état pur” (67). “Vice in its
purest 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,
 AN EPOCH OF REST 23

but who needs such warning and why would Barthes sound that here? Or, taking
on an opposite meaning, the phrase can be considered in apposition to “kind of
clear joy in C major,” and declare vice, when pure, to be such a joy. That, too, does
not make sense: Barthes is, after all, discussing the rare joy of a particular kind of
awakening. I suspect a mistake in transcription here: Barthes’s lectures were taped
when 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’s
lectures is available on the Web and Barthes clearly says, not vice, but “vie à l’état
pur” (UbuWeb: Sound, at 41’ 58”–42’ 00” of Lecture 3). This would make the white
or 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. On
page 97 the translation has the English drug derive from the nonexistent Dutch drool
rather than droog [“dry”] as Barthes has it, correctly, for the French drogue; and in his
retelling 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. The
point 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 Work
versus Useless Toil.”
8. “. . . une véritable écriture à deux mains: exaltant ici ce qu’il rejette là, ne
rejetant que pour mieux exalter” (15).
9. “. . . ce Neutre à la fois écrit et tu, dit et non dit. . . . Où l’on retrouve les
contorsions d’une écriture à deux mains” (294).
10. Like Bernard Comment, many others also think of Roland Barthes as a
plural being. Bident calls him “a man of plurality” (68; see endnote 4). And upon
Barthes’s death on March 26, 1980, Derrida wrote a remembrance entitled “Les
morts de Roland Barthes” (“ The Deaths of Roland Barthes”), a title that in one of
its 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 monotonous
delivery and how this achieves a deadpan quality whenever it leads up to jokes or
ironic asides.
13. This phrase is Horkheimer and Adorno’s in their chapter on the Culture
Industry, 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 embodied
in 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 to
Marin’s Utopiques: jeux d’espaces (2005, 214 n.16; 2002, 32 n.15). I will turn to
Marin’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 yet
unnamable which is proclaiming itself and which can do so . . . only under the
24 RUDOLPHUS TEEUWEN

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 arbitrarily
conceived”). Meiklejohn-Politis’s rendition of willkürlich erdacht as “arbitrary Wctions
of 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 only
entered usage in the eighteenth century. French translations of the Kritik generally
stay close to Kant’s German, and ideas that are “willkürlich erdacht” thus often
become “imaginées arbitrairement.” Marin was fond of the word Wction; he refers to
Kant 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 the
very start in the form of Hythloday, Thomas More’s returning visitor from that
good 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, politics
that of need. Utopia ruins the present with its images of happiness that do not
have 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 hardening
itself into a totalitarian, bureaucratic, and moralistic system” (“si nous les captions
mieux, 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 la
superWcie 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 of
his Chinese tour in Le Monde, “Alors, la Chine?”: “Well, how about China?” (1974a).

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