What has captured me over the last several years. It is Roland Barthes theory of The Neutral - his life-long, post-structuralist critique of structuralism's system of opposites, possessions, and binaries; how the neutral intends not pleasure, but bliss; a space where language avoids its authoritarianism by diffusion, rupture, and spectralization. In this theory precedes a way to live with culture, with words.
Today I received a new perspective from Tiphane Samoyault's biography of Barthes:
"Thus it is that, throughout his life, Barthes brought Sartre back, without necessarily realizing it so without any degree of clarity: Sartre's 'An Analysis of The Stranger', which Barthes read in the Sanatorium, in the Cahiers du Sud, provided ample material for Barthes own reflections on Camus, containing as it did a discussion on the theme of silence and a formulation of the neutral, here called the 'absurd': 'His hero was neither good nor bad, neither moral nor immoral. These categories don't fit: he is the member of a very singular species, for which the author uses the name 'absurd'.'"
In examining the influence of Sartre on Barthes, Samoyault here provides an auspicious link. Up to now I'd sensed but not read an articulation putting the absurd in hereditary relation to 'The Neutral'. One can see now the Neutral has assimilated the absurd.
The absurd, like the neutral, cannot be categorized peacefully. It is not centrifugal, but confrontational. It is diffuse from the inside of the problem. Thus the absurd like the neutral exists as a social means to actively avoids description ('you will be described' - Dorn). And as long as the neutral articulates itself in language, it is inherently political.
What today requires a similar assimilation of theoretical, yet practicable, aversion?
Samoyault, at least, assists with this truth: "Thought, the scientific project, had truly taken refuge in the imaginary."
Today I received a new perspective from Tiphane Samoyault's biography of Barthes:
"Thus it is that, throughout his life, Barthes brought Sartre back, without necessarily realizing it so without any degree of clarity: Sartre's 'An Analysis of The Stranger', which Barthes read in the Sanatorium, in the Cahiers du Sud, provided ample material for Barthes own reflections on Camus, containing as it did a discussion on the theme of silence and a formulation of the neutral, here called the 'absurd': 'His hero was neither good nor bad, neither moral nor immoral. These categories don't fit: he is the member of a very singular species, for which the author uses the name 'absurd'.'"
In examining the influence of Sartre on Barthes, Samoyault here provides an auspicious link. Up to now I'd sensed but not read an articulation putting the absurd in hereditary relation to 'The Neutral'. One can see now the Neutral has assimilated the absurd.
The absurd, like the neutral, cannot be categorized peacefully. It is not centrifugal, but confrontational. It is diffuse from the inside of the problem. Thus the absurd like the neutral exists as a social means to actively avoids description ('you will be described' - Dorn). And as long as the neutral articulates itself in language, it is inherently political.
What today requires a similar assimilation of theoretical, yet practicable, aversion?
Samoyault, at least, assists with this truth: "Thought, the scientific project, had truly taken refuge in the imaginary."
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