An Epoch of Rest: Roland Barthess 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 BARTHESS NEUTRAL AND THE UTOPIA OF WEARINESS
Rudolphus Teeuwen

Le neutre, le neutre, comme cela sonne trangement pour moi. Maurice Blanchot, LEntretien inWni

he structuralism of the 1970s exalted the importance of language. 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 structuralisms 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 structuralisms 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 Collge 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 Neutral is the arsenal of strategies that allows one to absent oneself from
Cultural Critique 80Winter 2012Copyright 2012 Regents of the University of Minnesota

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the worlds designs. The spring of Barthess utopia is weariness; the shape of it tends toward mysticism. William Jamess 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 inarticulate though they remain (329). With mysticism for its shape, Barthess utopia, by deWnition, is not very clearly deWned. One prominent form in which Barthes sees it manifested, though, is in that of Japan. A third part of this article, therefore, is a look at Barthess 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, structuralists 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 categorical choice from possibilities offered by a linguistic paradigm. Explaining Greimas and Rastiers semiotic square, Louis Hbert 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 Greimass rectangles as a device to uncover unexpected logical and ideological entanglements 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, 17881). They are each others 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

For

Against

Not Against

Not For

keep them both in play. As such, it is the template of bad Utopianism, the utopianism of modernism in its speciWcally aesthetic and aestheticizing fashion, valorizing art as the space in which the incompatibles 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, together 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 utopian 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 LEntretien 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 doesnt the lack of exactness 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

RUDOLPHUS TEEUWEN

that can only be rendered exactly in the form of uncommunication, but Blanchot hastens to discount the suggestion that uncommunication 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 demonstrate 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 Collge de France from February to June 1978, Barthes presents a nonsystematic, nonexhaustive inventory of twinklings of the Neutral.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 reduction, the parrying of generality by inventive, unexpected, nonparadigmatizable 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 Barthess had for its topic Comment vivre ensemble, and the course on the Neutral continues that topic with the suggestion that an infusion of sweetness 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, apathy, androgyny, tolerance, and skepticism; such inducers of states as H (which stands for hashish, rather than heroine, and also for homosexuality), 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, Andr Gide, Lao-Tzu, and all of Japan. This enumeration of states and attitudes brings out both the privacy of Barthess utopia and its mystical nature. Utopia is always a prescription for happiness, but usually for a communal happiness. Barthess 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

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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 speaking 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 lifes 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 diarykept for almost two years from the day after his mothers deathbrings out the extraordinary devastation he felt upon this loss. The entry for February 18, 1978, the day he mentions the serious event, a mourning in his lecture, characterizes mourning as something that doesnt wear itself out because it isnt a continuous process, but one that interrupts ones 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 repugnance against worldliness, this readiness to give up communication for the sporadic chance of communion, is a constant theme throughout the diary, which is to say for much of Barthess remaining lifetime. In this move from worldliness to retirement after the death of ones mother, Barthes also thinks of Proust: he reproduces a chart from a high school literature textbook showing Prousts retirement from the world with his mothers death as turning point and declares himself nurtured by this image of the Proustian retreat (2005, 142). And

RUDOLPHUS TEEUWEN

indeed, Barthes refers to this retreat as the key to Prousts authorship in many of his essays on him (e.g., 1978, 1979). In The Neutral, Barthes writes (as he had done before in A Lovers 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 awakening, 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 utopian sleep, or utopia of sleep, since we cant 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-tolive (38). In another lecture given at the Collge 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 Vacillation, 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 experienced outside the desire that is the will-to-live, a logic of vacillation: the sort of substance that the Neutral, clandestinely as it were, manages 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

abolish useless toil and replace it with useful work. The elimination 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 Barthess Neutral and its utopian bliss are a deliberate departure from hope, planning, and dreaming. The Epoch of Rest that is the dreamed reward for struggle in Morriss utopia News from Nowhere receives a very different coloring in Barthess utopia of sleep. The Epoch of Rest Barthes is after with the Neutral is an exemption from struggle, a time-out from meaning. To Barthes, one way of spoiling a neutral awakening is by remembering 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 productive, rescued from the disgrace of the good for nothing (2005, 39). Barthess 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 revolution, Barthess atopia, by its deliberate unresponsiveness still is, like Morriss imagined postrevolutionary England, a strike against the doxa. In another meditation on utopia, one with a less brusquely defensive stress, Barthes points to how there always remains too much meaning 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 alsoand this is what is difWcultwithout meaning being brutally dismissed, dogmatically foreclosed, in short castrated (ibid.). The rustle of language would be that meaning which reveals an exemption of meaning orthe same thingthat non-meaning which produces in the distance a meaning henceforth liberated from all

RUDOLPHUS TEEUWEN

aggressions of which the sign, formed in the sad and Werce history of men, is the Pandoras 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 universitys academic yearbook. The summary is just about the only part of Barthess book that does not itself display the bafXing qualities of the Neutral it seeks to intimate. Much in The Neutral is bafXing and yet, as a reader one gets the feeling that one is expected to understand more than one does. This quality of Barthess 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 mystery of Barthess The Neutral, a mystery of writing thatas one easily forgets, holding a bookis, 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 Barthess writing, one feels oneself turning into one of its mystai (initiates), the feeling that must have animated the many rapt attendants of Barthess lectures back in 1978. Although not designed as a genre of writing, The Neutrals 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 minds efWcient falling back upon known categories so as to keep the possibility of utopia in play (2005, 180); Barthess Neutral is designed to be such a biblical stumbling block: a passage so contradictory and puzzling that it invites a prolonged, meditative attentiveness. Bernard Comment characterizes Barthess writing as truly a writing with both hands: extolling here what he rejects there, and rejecting only in order to extol higher (15).8 Barthes actually embodies the Neutral: Comment recounts how, before he read Barthes as a teenager at

AN EPOCH OF REST

his lyce, 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 discovery of the additional -es to Barthess name, of Barthess hidden plurality, not only distinguished him from the theologian but also made him as strange and mysterious as the Neutral itself, the -es both written and silenced, pronounced and not pronounced. One Wnds in Barthess very name the contortions of a double-handed writing (294).9 Comments success in making the unvoiced sufWx in Barthess name meaningful as emblematic of Barthess refusal of singular meaning shows up a truth that he does not here entertain: that the Neutrals 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 Barthess writerly prestidigitation, and not all students in Barthess audience at the Collge de France were complicit with him in bafXing the paradigm. 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 containing just one sentence: . . . and <sic> well, if thats how it is, why dont you retire and stop bugging us you too (2005, 136).11 Barthes reXects on how the aggression of this letter lies chieXy in its anonymity: 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 correcting his or her illiterate usage (from which he earlier distanced himself with that supercilious <sic>) and by earning peals of laughter from his audience: Oh well {Eh bien}, since this anonymous person 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 LEntretien inWni on Kafkas

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 Neutrals joining a familiar utopian double bind, one that started with the very name of Thomas Mores island, Utopia being the good place that is also a no place or nonplace. If a reader takes Mores 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 ironically, convinced from the outset of Utopias impracticability, Mores 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 utopias vocation, and deWnes the epistemological 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, nonironic appreciation of utopias negative incisiveness, Jameson points out that utopias 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 transcendental escape hatch, is very much in the spirit of thinkers of the Neutral such as Derrida, Barthes, and Marin.14 Derrida, for instance, chides Lvi-Strauss for his bricolage, for using whatever conceptual apparatus comes to hand. Lvi-Strausss work is concerned with myths and because of that, Derrida argues, structural discourse on myths mythological discoursemust itself be mythomorphic. It must have the form of that of which it speaks (1967, 286). According to this same

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11

requirement, an essay on utopia must be utopomorphic (and it can easily be argued that Structure, Sign, Play is itself, indeed, a utopomorphic 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 meanings 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 showing up the demand for deWnitive meaning as offensive or misguided in one way or another: the Neutral is a repertoire of such ways of showing up the fascism of language (Barthes 2005, 42). Louis Marin recognizes the Neutral (and names it thus) in Mores 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 Marins Utopiques, Kants 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 Kants careful subdivision (in the Analytic of Concepts 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 Kants 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 thesis (the soul is mortal) and antithesis (the soul is immortal), comes the afWrmed non-mortality of the soul. The logical inWnite is thus articulated as a transcendental limit, the reverse or other of the metaphysical stance. The soul is non-mortalthe 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

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RUDOLPHUS TEEUWEN

of possible mortal beings (20). So the advance Marin sees in Kants third, neutral term is that it neither asserts a material nor a metaphysical nature for human souls, but rather the logical possibility (articulated 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; without 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). Kants 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 concept 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 possible 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 representation 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 utopias Wction (its contradictions if measured against possible experience; its departures from concepts of reality; its internal inconsistencies if held

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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. Utopias Wction, picked up in theoretical discourse, should ensure utopias Neutral, 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 identiWes the greatest danger for utopia as that of turning into myth, and the greatest danger for writing about utopia as that of becoming mythomorphic. There should not, in other words, be any Lvi-Strausses coming to Utopia.18 How to write about utopia and not be Lvi-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 utopias main feature of staging escapes from existing categories of thought. Forgetting the Wction 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 ideology 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 familiarity of consanguinity for him;20 or perhaps it is because Barthes prepared 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 compensated 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

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RUDOLPHUS TEEUWEN

logical result of the prodigious mental powers of a German transcendental idealist and Greimas showing how binary oppositions in language 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 [Barthess] choiceexplicit, endorsedfor surface or extension as opposed to depth, to Abgrund? (8).21 And indeed, Abgrund Barthes never seeks in himself: Blanchot is his abyss. Barthess mood in The Neutral, however light, is also pensive and even, occasionally, elegiac. His will-to-live has, in the wake of his mothers death, becomeand Barthes borrows the title of a Pasolini poem herea 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 number 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 subjects 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 professor, occupies the place of mastery (67). Barthes acknowledges this as yet another instance of the Neutrals double bind, but he also says, The Neutral is not an objective, a target: its 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).

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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 Barthess 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 Barthess celebration of Japan in Empire of Signs comes closest to being a generic utopia (1). Her fascinating chapter on Empire of Signs shows Barthess Japan as a place both eroticized and empty of meaning (and thus free for erotic encounters). The Neutral (which only appeared after Knights book was published) conWrms her observation: in his course on the Neutral, Barthes still looks to Japan, savoring the oriental genius for emptiness (buta reluctant pedagogue heretoning down the erotics). Elements of Barthess construction of the East surely are Orientalist in Edward Saids 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 Barthess participation in French orientalism, like Kristevas, 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 embodiment 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 Barthess own private countryside. That countryside is Japan rather than Japan, a countryside of erotic possibilities. Empire of Signs is an account of Barthess coming home in a Wctive 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 notebook 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 schoolsherded there by mindersBarthes gets to hear speech after speech built from

16

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the same ideological bricks. He takes dutiful notes, but his mind and eye start to wander, hoping to penetrate Chinas apparent asexuality by catching someones eye, noticing the shape of someones Wngernails, or a shy smile, or an individual element in hairdo or uniform. The only revenge Barthes can take after yet another display of gymnastics is privately to mock the ofWcial line of healthy mind in healthy body: Je prfrerai: mens fada in corpore salop (Id 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 rotisme possible (196). Still, Barthes has not been able to see le kiki dun seul Chinois (the willy of a single Chinese) and how to get to know a people if you dont get to know their sex? (117). Japan does not resist Barthess advances. Inspired by Daisetz Teitaro Suzukis 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, interpretation, 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 applies 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 activists 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 oppositionor 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. Gricess conversational maxims than by being mystic. In his appreciation for mysticism, Barthess tastes are catholic, however, and also include Western mystics such as Jakob Boehme and Emanuel Swedenborg. Wondering about the question, What are conXicts 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. Lucifers rebellion, which God did not foresee and could not prevent, introduced evil into the world and called forth Gods goodness. Lucifers rebellion creates opposition, conXict, meaning God becomes able to signify himself (to manifest himself) (128). But whereas, to Barthes, Boehmes mysticism is the joyous face of Western reason, Oriental reaching toward emptiness deepens mystery with unfamiliarity and turns into the bridgehead out of the paranoia of meaning, into an abode of rest.

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Barthess borrowings from Zen and Tao in order to unnerve the arrogance of Western intelligence and paranoia may look dilettantish in the eyes of especially Western scholars of China and Japan. The contrast 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 Shikibus 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 197075, 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 Wattss book on Zen (Barthess chief guide along with Suzukis 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 bookwe need one far more than we need Alan Watts and his infantile Zen (10). One of the Genji chapters, Yokobue, is splendid in spite of all the Buddhist mooning and sighing (18788), 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 ceremony [which Barthes invests with the deepest Zen emptiness] and paper-folding (27). Seidenstickers desire for Confucian order is inspired by his distaste for the United States of the 1970s: Vietnam protests, Manson trials (with the three she-defendants chanting a Sokagakkai-Buddhist chant), scruffy, long-haired, leftist students, the rising Naziism (41) of the New Left rabble-rousers who dont 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 (3132), 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,

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acts, shows itself, gives itself, without hysteria, without narcissism, but according to a purethough subtle discontinuouserotic project (10). Diana Knight points out how Barthes gradually assumes, selfconsciously if discreetly, the status of a homosexual writer (15), and Japan is certainly the empire that boosts that erotic project. Seidensticker, Wve years Barthess junior, is less happy, relaxed, and much less sure in his erotic project. Whereas Barthes looks for the punctum of eroticism in all he contemplates (for me, there is no punctum in the pornographic 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 Asakusas 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). Seidensticker 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 Seidenstickers catalogue of American hatreds (tendentious because there is also much he loves: all sorts of Xowers,

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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 language, but only rarely assertion; disdainful of doxa, he embraces paradox. 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 Eastern ideas that promotes an infuriating slackness of thinking. For Barthes, slackness is a twinkling of the Neutral: Barthess 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 opinion in his scholarship, resentful bitterness in his life as an American. In Seidenstickers eyes, Barthess refusal to declare himself deWnitively for or against something would be an instance of liberal wishywashiness. Barthes does indeed recognize the danger of the Neutral dwindling into limp neither-norism and he worries about his own vulnerability to this. A students 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 evenhanded refusal, an easy refuge in the context of a certain liberal discourse such as ours, and that is often due to weariness (truly to assume the I dont know position requires energy, freshness) (7980). In considering the relation between the Neutral and neither-norism, Barthes invokes Marxs 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). Barthess mountains, too, sometimes are no longer mountains. The distinction between the Neutral and its farcical remake comes when Barthes steps out of the Neutrals drift into the anti-Neutral reply,

AN EPOCH OF REST

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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 Skeptically (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. Seidenstickers Japan is a concrete, available, and welcome alternative to the everyday horrors of 1970s America. Japan is both a refuge and a scholarly domain for him. Resident in Japan, he basks in soothingly familiar meaning; scholar of Japanese, he struggles to unlock the subtleties of the Japanese language and culture. Seidensticker wants to communicatewith 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 Genjiand 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 Seidenstickers 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 unassertivethe antithesis of

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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 Hamiltons part to present Seidenstickers style as a robust antithesis to Waleys. Still, with the realization that, unwittingly, he sought the colorless and unassertive as an ideal of style, Seidensticker, as he faces his version of Kafkas 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 Science Council (Taiwan) for a travel grant to the 9th Hawaii International Conference on Arts and Humanities in January 2011. Thomas Wall of National Taipei University of Technology, co-organizer of his universitys 2010 conference Silent and Ineffable, 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 helpful 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 pense moins parlante, la communication plus difWcile, est-ce que, par tous ces signes, linexactitude propre cet tat natteint pas une sorte de prcision qui servirait Wnalement aussi lexacte parole en proposant quelque chose 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 xxixxii of Blanchots LEntretien inWni. 3. The lecture series on the Neutral was not published until 2002. The publication of Barthess notes for this as well as three other courses was held up by various copyright disputes after Barthess death in 1980. See Knight, 1619. 4. About the somewhat uneasy relation between Maurice Blanchot and his younger compatriot Barthes, and the way each developed their notions of the Neutral, see Bident. One of Bidents 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 tourdis vers autre chose viennent dune agitation mondaine, dune importunit, la dpression saccrot. Mais si ces changements (qui font le sporadique) vont vers le silence, lintriorit, la blessure de deuil passe une pense 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 ltat 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,

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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: Barthess lectures were taped when he delivered them and Le Neutre is a transcription of those tapes in combination with Barthess own extensive lecture notes. The sound recording of Barthess lectures is available on the Web and Barthes clearly says, not vice, but vie ltat pur (UbuWeb: Sound, at 41 5842 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 Laertess story about Epimenides, Barthes (2002, 69) has the latter fall asleep for Wfty-seven years, the translators (2005, 39) for Wfty-seven hours. The point of the storythe aged body with the fresh memoryis lost as a consequence.) 7. Here I am summarizing pages 28889 of William Morriss Useful Work versus Useless Toil. 8. . . . une vritable criture deux mains: exaltant ici ce quil rejette l, ne rejetant que pour mieux exalter (15). 9. . . . ce Neutre la fois crit et tu, dit et non dit. . . . O lon retrouve les contorsions dune criture 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 Barthess 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 Barthess multiplicity. 11. The letter writer wrongly writes et bien instead of eh bien: et bien <sic>, si cest comme a, vous navez qu vous retirer et nous foutre la paix aussi (Barthes 2002, 177). 12. The sound recording of his lectures reveals Barthess 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 Adornos in their chapter on the Culture Industry, and their argument is that it is in its necessary failure (im notwendigen 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 Barthess readers to Marins Utopiques: jeux despaces (2005, 214 n.16; 2002, 32 n.15). I will turn to Marins version of the Neutral below. 15. Structure, Sign, and Play announces the unstructured future and dramatizes Derridas 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

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species of a nonspecies, in the formless, mute, infant, and terrifying form of monstrosity (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 Kants Kritik. 17. Kant does not actually use the term Fiktion in his Kritik: it is not a word current in eighteenth-century German. He says of cosmological ideas that they gleichwohl doch nicht willkrlich erdacht sein (nevertheless have not been arbitrarily conceived). Meiklejohn-Politiss rendition of willkrlich erdacht as arbitrary Wctions of thought seems an apt modernization. According to the OED and Le Robert historique, 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 Kants German, and ideas that are willkrlich erdacht thus often become imagines 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, allowing him to use the word Wction to put his intended contrast with concept into clear relief. 18. One can wonder if a Lvi-Strauss has not been present in Utopia from the very start in the form of Hythloday, Thomas Mores 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, LUtopie, for the Italian LAlmanacco Bompiani, 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 possibility: 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 empcheraient le Politique de se Wger en systme totalitaire, bureaucratique, moralisateur; 1994, 44). Barthess point here is very much a less theorized and concise version of Marins. 21. . . . pourquoi le choix, explicite, revendiqu, de la surface ou de la superWcie contre la profondeur, contre lAbgrund? The book by Jean-Claude Milner from which Comment cites here is Le priple 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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. 1974a. Alors, la Chine? In Oeuvres compltes, 3235. . 1974b. LUtopie. In Oeuvres compltes, 44. . 1975a. Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes. Trans. Richard Howard. Houndmills: Macmillan, 1977. . 1975b. The Rustle of Language. In The Rustle of Language, 7679. . 1978. Longtemps, je me suis couch de bonne heure . . . In The Rustle of Language, 27790. . 1979. a prend. In Oeuvres compltes, 99394. . 1980. Camera Lucida: ReXections on Photography. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981. . 1984. The Rustle of Language. Trans. Richard Howard. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. . 1994. Oeuvres compltes. Vol. 3: 197480. Ed. ric Marty. Paris: Seuil. . 2002. Le Neutre: Notes de cours au Collge de France (19771978). Ed. and notes Thomas Clerc. Les cours et les sminaires au collge de France de Roland Barthes. General editor ric Marty. Paris: Seuil/Imec. . 2005. The Neutral: Lecture Course at the Collge de France (19771978). Trans. Rosalind E. Krauss and Denis Hollier. New York: Columbia University Press. . 2009a. Carnets du voyage en Chine. Ed. Anne Herschberg Pierrot. Paris: Bourgois/Imec. . 2009b. Journal de deuil. Ed. Natalie Lger. Paris: Seuil/Imec. . Le Neutre (The Neutral), Lectures at the Collge de France, 1978. Web. UbuWeb: Sound. MP3 Wle. Bident, Christophe. 2007. R/M, 1953. Trans. Michael Holland. Paragraph 30, no. 3:6783. Blanchot, Maurice. 1969. LEntretien inWni. Paris: Gallimard. Comment, Bernard. 1991. Roland Barthes, vers le neutre. [Paris]: Bourgeois, 2002. Derrida, Jacques. 1967. Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences. In Writing and Difference. Trans. and intro. Alan Bass, 27893. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. . 1981. Les morts de Roland Barthes. In Chaque fois unique, la Wn de monde. Ed. and intro. Pascale-Ann Brault and Michael Naas, 5997. Paris: Galile, 2003. Hbert, Louis. 2005. Tools for Texts and Image Analysis: An Introduction to Applied Semiotics. Trans. Julie Taber. Signo. July 15, 2010. PDF Wle on Web. http:/ / www.signosemio.com/documents/Louis-Hebert-Tools-for-Texts-andImages.pdf. [French print version published as Dispositifs pour lanalyse des textes et des images. Limoges: Presses Universitaires Limoges, 2007.] Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. 1947. The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception. In Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trans. John Cummings. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 122340. New York: W. W. Norton, 2001. James, William. 1902. The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature. Intro. Wayne Proudfoot. New York: Barnes and Noble, 2004.

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Jameson, Fredric. 1994. Utopia, Modernism, and Death. In The Seeds of Time: The Wellek Library Lectures at the University of California, Irvine, 73128. New York: Columbia University Press. . 2005. Synthesis, Irony, Neutralization, and the Moment of Truth. In Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions, 17081. London: Verso. Kant, Immanuel. 1787. Critique of Pure Reason. 2nd ed. Trans. J. M. D. Meiklejohn. Trans. rev. and expanded by Vasilis Politis. Ed. Vasilis Politis. London: EverymanDent, 1993. Knight, Diana. 1997. Barthes and Utopia: Space, Travel, Writing. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Lowe, Lisa. 1991. Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Marin, Louis. 1973. Chapter 1: Of Plural Neutrality and Utopia. In Utopics: The Semiological Play of Textual Spaces. Trans. Robert A. Vollrath, 330. Amherst: Humanity-Prometheus, 1984. [Translation of Utopiques: jeux despaces. Paris: Minuit, 1973]. . 1977. Disneyland: A Degenerate Utopia. In Contemporary Literary Criticism: Literary and Cultural Studies. 3rd ed. Ed. Robert Con Davis and Ronald Schleifer, 28395. New York: Longman, 1994. Morris, William. 1884. Useful Work versus Useless Toil. In News from Nowhere and Other Writings. Ed. Clive Wilmer, 285306. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993. Seidensticker, Edward. G. 1977. Genji Days. [Tokyo]: Kodansha, 1983.