From The Neutral:Session of March 11, 1978*

ROLAND BARTHES

OCTOBER 112, Spring 2005, pp. 3–22. © 2005 Columbia University Press.

As Barthes had promised in the lecture with which he inaugurated hisassumption of the Chair of Literary Semiology at the Collège de France, he wouldpursue a “phantasmic teaching,” one based on the “comings and goings of desire,which [the teacher] endlessly presents and represents. I sincerely believe,” he contin-ued, “that at the origins of teaching such as this we must always locate a fantasy,which can vary from year to year.”1

But the fantasy on which Barthes’s penultimate course, “Le Neutre,” is baseddid not “vary from year to year”; it held steady, rather, over the trajectory that tookhim from Writing Degree Zero with the zero degree an early version of le neutre,through all the rest of his books.

Perhaps its most touching statement is to be found in Roland Barthes byRoland Barthes, where Barthes traces his mature commitment to this domain backto the impulses of his early childhood, so that even while playing a version of tagin the Luxembourg Gardens, his inclination was to neutralize the exercise ofpower which rules an opponent “out”:

When I used to play prisoner’s base in the Luxembourg, what I likedbest was not provoking the other team and boldly exposing myself totheir right to take me prisoner; what I liked best was to free the prison-ers—the effect of which was to put both teams back into circulation:the game started over again at zero. In the great game of the powers ofspeech, we also play prisoner’s base: one language has only temporaryrights over another; all it takes is for a third language to appear from

* Excerpted from Le Neutre, by Roland Barthes, forthcoming from Columbia University Press.English translation copyright © 2005 Columbia University Press. Used by arrangement with ColumbiaUniversity Press. All rights reserved.1. Roland Barthes, “Lecture,” trans. Richard Howard, October 8 (Spring 1979), p. 5.

Translated by Rosalind Krauss

Translator’s Introduction

the ranks for the assailant to be forced to retreat: in the conflict ofrhetorics, the victory never goes to any but the third language. The taskof this language is to release the prisoners: to scatter the signified, thecatechisms.2

Indeed, Barthes was obsessed by “the great game of the powers of speech,” acathexis that impelled his interest in semiology’s analysis of these same powers.His prisoner metaphor highlights his sense of language’s coerciveness, somethinghis lecture went so far as to call “the fascism of language.”3 For language alwaysdemands a choice, an identification of gender, of person, of desire for one or theother of two opposed values—the oppositions structural linguistics terms binaries,and semiology calls “paradigms.” It was the position of Ferdinand de Saussure,founder of structural linguistics, that meaning itself is generated by the friction ofone binary element against the other, to form the fundamental oppositions thatleave the unchosen pole implicit within any speech act. Such oppositions could bewhite vs. black (the versus abbreviated by “/”), high/low, hot/cold, or in a laterstudy by Barthes himself: S/Z. Barthes suffered at the hands of this demand forchoice, and he lamented, “by its very structure my language implies an inevitablerelation of alienation.”4 Alienating or not, however, Barthes recounts his commit-ment, indeed his “joy” over binaries in the Roland Barthes:

For a certain time, he went into raptures over binarism; binarismbecame for him a kind of erotic object. This idea seemed to him inex-haustible, he could never exploit it enough. That one might say every-thing with only one difference produced a kind of joy in him, a continuousastonishment.

Since intellectual things resemble erotic ones, in binarism whatdelighted him was a figure. Later on he would find this (identical) figureagain, in the opposition of values. What (in him) would deflect semiologywas from the first the pleasure principle: a semiology which hasrenounced binarism no longer concerns him at all.5

The major binary male/female carries us to the problem of how to translateBarthes’s title: should it be “The Neuter” (the third term between the genders) or“The Neutral” (which is how Barthes’s most effective English translator, RichardHoward, renders it in Roland Barthes?6 What Barthes himself designates as the sexualbasis of the third term in the various disciplines to which he refers in his preliminary

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2. Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), p. 50.3. Barthes, “Lecture,” p. 5. Reacting to a remark by Ernest Renan on the French language’s inoc-ulation against reaction, Barthes said, “But language—the performance of a language system—is neitherreactionary nor progressive; it is quite simply fascist; for fascism does not prevent speech, it compelsspeech” (ibid.).4. Ibid.5. Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, p. 51.6. Ibid., p. 132.

7. “La Critique Ni-ni” appears as “Neither-Nor Criticism” in Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans.Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), pp. 81–83.

presentation (for example, the drones among bees) would lead one to “neuter.”But Barthes also uses the domain of international law (and Switzerland) as a basis,in relation to which only “neutral” makes sense. Furthermore, the structurallinguistics of Barthes’s generation—that of the Prague School, Hjelmslev, andGreimas, in particular—was fascinated by the phonetic fact of “neutralization,”which is the annihilation of distinction between sounds within certain languages:for example, the difference between d and t at the ends of words in German (withhund pronounced as hunt) or the difference between d and t in English after s (asin the case of still, which is pronounced sdill).

Since “neuter” is more transgressive, I was tempted to choose it; but since “neu-tral” has the broadest implication within structural linguistics and relates to Barthes’scontempt for what he calls “The Critique Ni-ni,”7 and in Le Neutre, “niniisme”(neither-norism) refers to the neutrality assumed by journalists committed to tellingboth sides of any story, it seemed far more apt. Additionally, for structural linguistics,neutralization explains the action of sublation or the transcendence of difference.

In this course, Barthes calls the constancy of his commitment to a “thirdlanguage” his “desire for neutral.” In the Roland Barthes, he presents it as hisdream of an “exemption from meaning”:

Evidently he dreams of a world which would be exempt from meaning(as one is from military service). This began with Writing Degree Zero, inwhich is imagined “the absence of every sign”; subsequently, a thou-sand affirmations incidental to this dream (apropos of the avant-gardetext, of Japan, of music, of the alexandrine, etc.).

Curious that in public opinion, precisely, there should be a versionof this dream; Doxa, too, has no love for meaning, which in its eyesmakes the mistake of conferring upon life a kind of infinite intelligibility(which cannot be determined, arrested): it counters the invasion ofmeaning by the concrete; the concrete is what is supposed to resistmeaning.

Yet for him, it is not a question of recovering a pre-meaning, an originof the world, of life, of facts, anterior to meaning, but rather to imagine apost-meaning: one must traverse, as though the length of an initiacticway, the whole meaning, in order to be able to extenuate it, to exempt it.Whence a double tactic: against Doxa, one must come out in favor ofmeaning, for meaning is the product of History, not of Nature; butagainst Science (paranoiac discourse) one must maintain the utopia ofsuppressed meaning.

In his lecture, Barthes returns from semiology to literature to speak of thelatter as the practice that can outwit language’s power play:

Session of March 11, 1978 5

For the text is the very outcropping of speech, and it is within speechthat speech must be fought, led astray—not by the message of which itis the instrument, but by the play of words of which it is the theater. . . .The forces of freedom which are in literature depend not on thewriter’s civil person, nor on his political commitment—for he is, afterall, only a man among others—nor do they even depend on the doctrinalcontent of his work, but rather on the labor of displacement he bringsto bear upon the language.8

This raises one more knot within the flow of translation, for Barthes’s idea ofleading language “astray” is consistently expressed by the verb déjouer, which in itsliteral rendering as “outplay,” or “outsmart,” stays within the idea of languageitself as a play of power. Barthes first takes up Déjouer as a figure in his analysis ofGeorges Bataille’s essay on the Big Toe, where Howard translates it as “baffle,”which I find both precise and economical and have adopted for the most parthere.9 Since the word relates to the field of play, Howard also uses “fake,” as in“fake out.” “Outwit,” or “thwart,” could also serve. Barthes’s argument is that theBig Toe baffles the paradigm noble/ignoble and is thus a foretaste of his idea ofthe Neutral.

The elegant and scrupulous edition of Barthes’s course published by Le Seuilhas been retained here with only a few additions of translator’s footnotes to explainsome technical terms and to guide the reader to pertinent literature.

As a teacher, my own pleasure in following how Barthes constructed acourse, opening his personal experience and his convictions to his students, hasbeen intense and has sustained me during the labor of this translation. This laborhas been shared by my husband, Denis Hollier, whose patience and erudition havecloaked my work with borrowed feathers I can now strip away, but only afterthanking him most warmly.10

—Rosalind Krauss, 2004

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8. Barthes, “Lecture,” p. 6.9. See Bernard Comment, “Politique: Déjouer Tout Pouvoir,” in Roland Barthes, ver le neutre (Paris:Christian Bourgois, 1991), pp. 219–54.10. My thanks as well to David Macklowitch, graduate student at Columbia University, for his perse-verance in finding the English translations of Barthes’s wide range of references.

Supplement II

Concerning the course. Inside me, from one Saturday to another, the course “works.”Even though prepared ahead of time (however little), it keeps moving: it gets a new topicalityfrom what wants to be incorporated into it retrospectively: whether by thoughts posterior to itsverbal presentation [esprit de l’escalier], or because small events in my weekly life resonatewith what was said. I believe that it is important to let such things happen and to admitthis, because it shows that the course is not the presentation of the current state of a“thought” but rather (at least ideally) the shimmering of an individuation --> one could thenaccept the word “course” without bad feelings: its connotation being bad mostly if the“course” is “magisterial.” While, after all, course < cursus: what runs, what flows (course ofa river): 1330: estudier a cours:11 “without interruption”; I would say: without the presentbeing interrupted.

Concerning “Tact.” I return to “Tact” because I have the persistent feeling that I haven’treally explained the reason why I gave so much importance to all the sophisticated protocols ofJapanese tea. I thus return to “Twinklings,” “Minutia.” Going out, evenings at dusk, sharplyreceiving tiny, perfectly futile details of street life: the menu written in chalk on the window-pane of a café (chicken mashed potato, 16 francs 50—kidneys crème fraîche, 16 francs 10), atiny priest in cassock walking up the rue Médicis, etc., I had this vivid intuition (for me, theurban dusk has a great power of crispness, of activation, it’s almost a drug) that to fall intothe infinitely futile helps one’s awareness of the feeling of life --> (it’s after all a novelistic rule).--> Tact is thus on the side of vividness, of what allows life to be felt, of what stirs the aware-ness of it: the utterly pure taste of life, the pleasure of being alive --> of course, one must agreeon what one means by “life,” all-purpose word --> life: (1) as power, will-to-possess, will-to-pleasure: life has nothing to do with tact, it has contempt for it, suppresses it as siding withthe decadent, the deliquescent, the exhausted, of what is on the verge of dying; (2) but also, lifeas lived time [durée]: that whose very duration is a pleasure --> duration of life: Tao value(cf. the magic immortality of the real body): the infinitely futile becomes then so to speak thevery grain of this vital duration --> tact = fabric of life.

Concerning “Affirmation.” I said: writing is in and of itself affirmative (more so thanspeech): unfortunately it doesn’t help to add rhetorical caveats as softening devices (“in myhumble opinion,” “it seems to me,” “according to me,” etc.). However, a typically arrogant sen-tence I read in the newspaper this week made me miss the presence of a “softener” --> it couldhave been about politics, but no: about music --> Télérama, March 11, 1978: “Do youremember? It’s not so distant; eighteen years ago. When the greatest French pianist of this cen-tury died, June 15, 1962, there was, as one would say, ‘a feeling of unease’” = it’s Cortot -->three remarks:

Session of March 11, 1978 7

11. French dictionaries date from 1330 the semantic extension of the word “cours” (as in “thecourse of a stream”) to that of a curriculum of study (as in “Barthes’s course”: estudier a cours).

a. The reader is himself responsible for the arrogance as well: I don’t find that Cortot isthe greatest French pianist of the century;12 besides, this type of improvised rating is unac-ceptable: in art, no “greatest,” because as a subject, I can always disagree, and no criteria ofranking on which to agree.

b. I had the impression to discover that, curiously, but in an interesting way, thearrogance of the judgment comes in large part from the obliqueness with which the syntaxsmuggles it in: “Cortot is the greatest pianist of the century” = altogether more a provocationthan an arrogance; but the incident clause naturalizes the affirmation: it goes so much with-out saying that it is enough to allude to it in passing: as if it were a natural attribute. -->To study: what I have called the “Moussu trope.”13

c. Unbearable arrogance, perhaps precisely because it is not really writing: it’s fake writ-ing (journalistic writing): no use of the “I” (an egotistical writing is not arrogant) and yet akind of verbal fat (“Do you recall?” “as one would say,” etc.). To study one day this journal-istic writing.

Finally a personal incident, which will nicely introduce the figures to come: Thursday,March 9, fine afternoon, I go out to buy some paints (Sennelier14 inks) --> bottles of pigment:following my taste for the names (golden yellow, sky blue, brilliant green, purple, sun yellow,cartham pink—a rather intense pink), I buy sixteen bottles. In putting them away, I knockone over: in sponging up, I make a new mess: little domestic complications. . . . And now, Iam going to give you the official name of the spilled color, a name printed on the small bottle(as on the others vermilion, turquoise, etc.): it was the color called Neutral (obviously I had

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12. Paul Meunier, “Cortot l’enchanteur,” Télérama, March 11, 1977, p. 30. In 1977, special programson the radio and on television were celebrating the centenary of Alfred Cortot’s birth (1877–1962).The atmosphere of “unease” that had surrounded his funeral related to his collaborationist activitiesduring the Occuptaion. Gide, however, did not wait until World War II to dissent from the generalapplause that greeted Cortot’s first Chopin recordings (The Journals of André Gide, trans. Justin O’Brien[New York: Knopf, 1967], vol. 2, pp. 76, 77 [entries for October 30 and November 2, 1929]). As forBarthes, the French pianist whose sensibility he felt to be the closest to his own was Yves Nat, especiallyin his interpretations of Schumann’s Kreisleriana (Barthes, “Rasch” [1975], Oeuvres complètes, ed. EricMarty, 3 vols. [Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1993–95], vol. 3, p. 297). Hereafter cited in the text as OCIII.Télérama is the French TV weekly. 13. Barthes told the story of the origins of the “Moussu trope” during the discussion period thatconcluded the Cerisy decade organized by Antoine Compagnon in June 1977: “I often have to putthings I consider very important in subordinate clauses or in parentheses. I consider it to be a full-fledged rhetorical figure to which I’ve given a proper name. The first time I went to the U.S., I was‘Visiting’ at Middlebury College for the summer, and I left for it on a boat; in the train to Le Havre, Iended up with two people who were also going to Middlebury College to teach. There was an extreme-ly respectable woman, gentle and a bit intrusive, who went there each year to give diction classes: shewould teach students how to tell fables of La Fontaine; her name was Madame Moussu. I call this figurethe ‘Moussu figure.’ You will understand why. At one moment, when Madame Moussu, whom I didn’tknow, saw me light a cigarette, she said to me: ‘Oh, my son always says: Since I began at the Polytechnic,I stopped smoking.’ There’s a rhetorical figure in which the principal and only information, namelythat her son was a polytechnician, was given through a subordinate clause. If you notice present-daylanguage, we all do that. It’s thus a true rhetorical figure” (Prétexte: Roland Barthes. Colloque de Cerisy, ed.Antoine Compagnon [Paris: Union Générale d’Edition, 1978], p. 413).14. Sennelier: art supply store (established in 1887) on the quai Voltaire near the École des Beaux-Arts. The color of ink Barthes bought is named “Teinte neutre” (Neutral tint).

Session of March 11, 1978 9

opened this bottle first to see what kind of color was this Neutral about which I am going to bespeaking for thirteen weeks). Well, I was both punished and disappointed: punished becauseNeutral spatters and stains (it’s a type of dull gray-black); disappointed because Neutral is acolor like the others, and for sale (therefore, Neutral is not unmarketable): the unclassifiableis classified --> all the more reason for us to go back to discourse which, at least, cannot saywhat the Neutral is.

Color

1. The Colorless: Two References

Two references, among many others, on which I will linger for an instant, since itis quite obvious that what interests me is the (mythical) correspondence of thecolorless and the Neutral (“neutral colors”).15

1. Lao-tzu: Portrait of Lao-tzu by himself: “I am as if colorless . . . neutral as thenewborn who has not yet felt his first emotion, as if without project and withoutgoal.”16 (a) The baby without emotion? The metaphor doesn’t work today: thebaby is stuffed with intense, searing emotions, but what Lao-tzu might perhaps be

15. In relation to this figure, see the entry “La Couleur—Color,” in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes,p. 143; OCIII, p. 204.16. Lao-tzu, quoted in Jean Grenier, L’Esprit du Tao (Paris: Flammarion, 1973), p. 36.

Photo: Thomas Hollier. 2005.

saying: these are not “cultural” emotions, coded by the social. (b) Without projectand without goal = without will-to-possess.

2. Hieronymus Bosch: The Garden of Earthly Delights and the altarpiece “form”(“backdrop against which the altar is leaning and which is used as decoration”).Flemish altarpieces: five-surface triptychs closing up --> opposition of front andback (inside/outside) --> opposition of color and grisaille (monochromes: valuesof gray). Thus: the closed wings of The Garden of Earthly Delights: monochromegray—landscape circumscribed by a transparent sphere (the crystal ball of theseers).

2. Interpretations

Let’s try to see the values invested in the opposition between colorful and color-less.

a. Richness/Poverty

Altarpieces, tones of grisaille: less expensive colors—open altarpieces (that is,offering the colored surfaces to the viewer) only on grand occasions or for thegreat nobles who gave a good tip to the guardian --> color = festival, riches, upperclass ≠ grisaille, monochrome, “neutral” = quotidian, social uniformity: cf. present-day China: impression of Neutral (in the clothing, uniforms), social indistinction--> festival, color --> “emblems” of politics, of the “people” as dominant entity(banners).17 (Altarpieces: disappeared at the beginning of the sixteenth century,when the church was no longer commissioning. In a general way: place of colorwithin the economy. In the Middle Ages, vivid colors: financial investment, luxury,like spices.) --> The Neutral is mythically associated, if not with poverty, at leastwith no-money, with the non-pertinence of the riches/poverty opposition.

b. Back/Front

In the altarpiece, criss-crossed: the front side, the “main” surface, rich, brilliant,colorful = what is ordinarily hidden ≠ the side, what is ordinarily shown --> theNeutral is shown in order to hide the colorful. Here we are in an ideology of“depth,” of the apparent versus the hidden. The hidden = rich, the apparent =poor. Evangelical theme (≠ petit-bourgeois ideology of “showing off,” lining offake cloth, front rich, back [unseen] poor). The Neutral = the back, but a backthat shows without attracting attention: doesn’t hide but doesn’t show ( = very dif-ficult): in short, something like The Purloined Letter --> problem for us: is the

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17. Barthes was invited to China in May 1974 with Philippe Sollers, Julia Kristeva, and other mem-bers of the Tel quel editorial board. Upon his return, he published “Alors la Chine?” (So, how wasChina?), an article in which he writes, among other things, “Besides its ancient palaces, its posters, itschildren’s ballets, and its Mayday, China is not colored” (Le Monde, May 23, 1974; OCIII, p. 32).

Neutral really a breachable, peelable surface, behind which richness, color, strongmeaning hide? (cf. the unconscious, is it really what hides behind the conscious?)

c. Origin

Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights:18 wings of the triptych, when closed (reverseside): gray monochrome; this monochrome “is used” to represent a panoramiclandscape, bounded by a stretch of water, with heavy clouds = the third day ofCreation, according to Genesis: time of the first rain, first trees and bushes. Andwe recall Lao-tzu: colorless and undefined, “like the newborn who hasn’t yet felthis first emotion.” --> Neutral: time of the not yet, moment when within the origi-nal nondifferentiation something begins to be sketched, tone on tone, the firstdifferences: early morning; Daltonian space (the Daltonian can’t oppose red andgreen, but he perceives surfaces of different lightness, intensity); cf. silere: the bud,the egg not yet hatched: before meaning.

d. Shimmer

The grisaille, figure that could be called the “color of the colorless,” points toanother way of thinking the paradigm as the great principle of organization. Modelof the paradigm: the opposition of primary contrasted colors (blue/red): it’s theopposition par excellence, the very motor of meaning (phonology). Now the mono-chrome (the Neutral) substitutes for the idea of opposition that of the slightdifference, of the onset, of the effort toward difference, in other words, of nuance:nuance becomes a principle of allover organization (which covers the totality of thesurface, as in the landscape of the triptych) that in a way skips the paradigm: thisintegrally and almost exhaustively nuanced space is the shimmer (already spoken ofin various earlier courses):19 the Neutral is the shimmer: that whose aspect, perhapswhose meaning, is subtly modified according to the angle of the subject’s gaze.

e. Indistinction

In the Fashion System,20 the signifying opposition doesn’t pass between such andsuch color but massively between the colorful and the colorless: colorless here

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18. Painting by Hieronymus Bosch in the Prado Museum in Madrid, dating from the beginning ofthe sixteenth century (1503).19. One of the fragments in the Sade section of Sade/Fourier/Loyola is titled “La Moire,” whichRichard Miller renders as “watered silk”: “it is a damask fabric, a tapestry of phrases, a changing luster,a fluctuat ing and glitter ing surface of styles, a watered silk of languages” (Roland Barthes,Sade/Fourier/Loyola, trans. Richard Miller [New York: Hill and Wang, 1976], p. 135). As for “diaphoralo-gy,” see Barthes’s “Presentation” of the 1979 special issue of Communications on “Conversation” (OCIII,p. 1000), as well as “Deliberation” (1979), in Roland Barthes, The Rustle of Language, trans. RichardHoward (New York: Hill and Wang, 1986), p. 366; OCIII, p. 1009.20. Roland Barthes, The Fashion System, trans. Matthew Ward and Richard Howard (New York: Hilland Wang, 1983).

meaning not “transparent” but precisely: unmarked color, “neutral,” ”indistinct”color: whence the paradox: black and white are on the same side (that of markedcolors) and what comes to oppose them is gray (the muffled, the faded, etc.): col-ors follow a semantic principle of organization (marked/unmarked ).21 --> Thus wesee that in the end the ultimate opposition, the one that both fascinates and is themost difficult to think about to the extent that it self destructs in its very statementis that between distinction and indistinction, and this is what is at stake in theNeutral, the reason the Neutral is difficult, provocative, scandalous: because itimplies a thought of the indistinct, the temptation of the ultimate (or of the ur)paradigm: that of the distinct and the indistinct. We have seen it, this problem:that of fashion but also (let’s shake up genres) that of negative theology. The neg-ative mystics (Eckhart) clearly saw it: “The distinction between the indistinct andthe distinct is greater than all that could separate two distinct beings from oneanother.”22 Thus it is logical that Bosch would entrust to monochrome, to Neutral,the “representation” of the early steps of Creation, when Creation was still veryclose, still clouded by originary indistinction, that is with the God-matter. Thinkhere, with a slight modification, of the lines by Angelus Silesius:

Lose all form <all color> and you will be like God,For yourself your own sky in a quiet rest.23

Thought that brings us back to Lao-tzu’s declaration: “I am as though colorlessand undefined . . . ” etc.: the thought of the Neutral is in fact a borderline thought,on the edge of language, on the edge of color, since it’s about thinking the non-language, the noncolor (but not the absence of color, transparency) --> languageand the coded practices that flow from it always reframe the Neutral as a color: cf.my little apologue at the outset.

The Adjective

Frequent reference here to facts of language: affirmation, adjective, and even factsof grammar. It’s because for me—that’s something I firmly believe in, with all theobdurate strength of my feelings—language is pathetic: I struggle with grammar; I

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21. See the entry “Dialectiques—Dialectics” in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes (pp. 68–69; OCIII,pp. 147, 274). (In the comparisons “John is as old as Mary” and “John is as young as Mary,” “old” is theunmarked term because it raises the issue of age without specifying anything further [one doesn’t needto be old in order to be x years old]; “young” in the second proposition is the marked term because itnot only raises the issue of age but it also qualifies the age as youthful. For structuralism, binaries areoften oppositions of marked and unmarked terms).22. Vladimir Lossky, who adds: “The difference between the colorless and the colorful surpasseseverything that distinguishes two surfaces of different colors” (Lossky, Théologie négative et Connaissancede Dieu chez Maître Eckhart [Paris: Vrin, 1960], p. 261). 23. Barthes quotes from Angelus Silesius, L’Errant chérubinique, trans. Roger Munier, intro. RogerLaporte (Paris: Planète, 1970), p. 90.

pleasure through it: through it a dramatic existence comes to me (cf. fascism oflanguage).24

1. Adjective and Neutral

A.

From the point of view of value (evaluation, foundation of values), i.e., in relationto the desire for Neutral that is the basis of this course, the status of the adjectiveis ambivalent:

1. On the one hand, as a “qualifier,” it sticks to a noun, to a being, it “enstick-ens” [“poisse” à] being: it’s a superqualifier, an epithet: set down on something,added to something; it seals up being into some kind of frozen image, it closes itup in a kind of death (épithèma: top, tomb ornament).25 In this regard, it is a pow-erful counter-Neutral, the anti-Neutral par excellence, as though there were aconstitutional antipathy between the Neutral and the adjective.

2. On the other hand and on the exact opposite, in the Greek philosophicaltradition, the adjective forms an alliance with the Neutral (by means of the arti-cle: to)26 to express being; frequent in Heraclitus: the dry, the humid, etc.; takenover constantly by Romance languages (with articles): the true, the beautiful, etc.:see below “the neutral gender”—and very well highlighted by Blanchot when hestarted to theorize the Neutral.27 In short, when languages (with articles) want toexpress the Neutral insofar as it bears on a substance, they don’t use the substan-tive but the adjective, which they disadjectivize by means of an article in theneutral: they counter the adjective with the substantive (established through thearticle) and the substantive (what follows the article) with the adjective.

B.

The stake of this ambivalence: the predicate, the relation between Neutral andpredication --> the Neutral would be like a language with no predication, wherethemes and “subjects” would not be filed (put on file cards and nailed down) bymeans of a predicate (an adjective); but, on the other hand, in order to deconstructthe subject/predicate paradigm, language has recourse to a hybrid grammaticalentity, the substantivized adjective: a type of category whose very form resists predi-cation: difficult “to file” the humid if not under humidity --> the Neutral wallows in a

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24. For the motive of the fascism of language, see Barthes’s inaugural lecture at the Collège deFrance (Barthes, “Lecture,” p. 5; OCIII, p. 803).25. Barthes: “The adjective is funereal” (“Sa voix—His voice,” in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, p.68; OCIII, p.146; see also “L’adjectif—The adjective,” in ibid., p. 43; OCIII, p. 127).26. To: Greek article of the neuter. 27. For Blanchot, see The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, 1993), pp. xiii–xxiii and “René Char and the Thought of the Neutral,” pp. 298–306.

(as much as possible) nonpredicable form; in short, the Neutral would be exactlythat: the nonpredicable.

Hence, we might possibly stretch the object “adjective” out to substantives, ifthey are theorized by the speaker as kinds of absolute and nonpredicable qualities(Boehme’s qualitas). And we’ll reencounter, mixed, braided together, the goodand the bad adjective: the one that is on the side of the Neutral and the one thatis on the side of arrogance.

2. Quality as Energy

The qualitas (roughly: article + adjective: example: the acrid): a strong theoryamong the Renaissance hermetists: Paracelsus (1493–1541) and above all, later,Boehme (1575–1624), about whom we will often speak.

a. Foundation of the Thing, of the Name

The qualitas is what falls onto “the things” (in their state of indistinction) andimprints itself on them like a force of distinctiveness, of specification, of nomina-tion: it’s what founds the thing by means of its name. Paracelsus: “Everythingcorporeal, plants, trees, animals, belongs to a same essence, but each differs insofaras, at the beginning, the verb fiat imprinted a quality on it.”28 –> This imprinted (byGod) quality = the signature (theory of the signatures, of Paracelsus, then Boehme).Boehme’s vision of qualitas is less transcendent (the fiat landing sovereignly ontothings), more vehement, more “gutsy”: qualitas rises out of things like a force, theimprint of the name coming from within like a potent ink becoming visible:Boehme’s quality = an active force, something that throws itself, spurts and grows,that “qualifies,” that is, something that makes a thing be what it is --> (important forus) nuance: quality is a theater of battling forces: nothing ironic; in modern terms,one would be tempted to say: it is an intensity (thus entering a game, a dialectic ofintensities, a shimmer of forces).

b. Quality as Desire

Being a good mystic, Boehme is Cratylian, he believes in “true” etymology. Thusqualität < quelle, spring, surging force, soaring fountain (we have encountered thisusual meaning with Paracelsus), but < quaal, suffering, torture: “In each qualitythere is an element of anger, of suffering and furor, since each quality suffers from

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28. “Jacob Boehme writes in the De signatura rerum, ‘Everything bodily is of the same essence,plants, trees, and animals; but each differs according to the quality that the Verb’s fiat imprinted ontoit at the beginning.’ It’s there that the theory of the ‘Signatures’ that Paracelsus developed so extensive-ly has its basis (Serge Hutin, L’Alchimie, Que sais-je? no. 506 [Paris, Presses Universitaires de France,1966], p. 61).

its isolation, its limitation and tries to overflow, to be united with other qualities.”29

--> Dynamic, loving battle of the qualities among themselves and of the two sides,the good and the bad, of a single quality:

The hot—light: good, sweet, joyful; ardor: burns, devours, destroys.The cold—freshness: good; furious and incensed form: freezing, which gels.30

A structural, paradigmatic game is thus set between qualities; that’s to say,two opposed qualities + one quality that combines them, reconciles them: it’s theA and B of the A/B paradigm: complex term (≠ Neutral: neither A nor B). (Letme remind you once more: I am “Saussurian” = not a “faith” but a willingness toborrow Saussurian models in order “to understand” [to speak]. (1) Model of theparadigm and of the syntagm + (2) Brøndalian [Hjelmslevian] model: A/B; A + B;neither A nor B; complex degree, zero degree, neutral).31

Thus, in Boehme: acrid/sweet --> bitter.32

The acrid: this is not a sensuous quality = power of abstraction, of coagula-tion, of condensation. Gives birth to hardness and cold. Like a salt = salinity.

The sweet: victory over the acrid. Quality of water that dilutes and attenuatessalt. Without sweetness, all bodies as though petrified, in an absolute hardness =bodies in which life would be impossible. Principle of fluidity.

The bitter :33 trembling, penetrat ing. A tendency to raise it self up.Interpenetrating movement of the acrid and the sweet. Notice that in Boehmianenerget ic (it’s a purely paradigmatic thought): the relat ion of two terms(acrid/sweet) is never defined by juxtaposition, discourse, narration, syntagm (cf.Jakobson’s conception of poetry: an extended paradigm),34 the dialectical relation(combinatory: cf. myth, the story for Lévi-Strauss )35 occurs, however, within the lim-its of the paradigm, by means of the invention of a complex term.36 This, important

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29. “It is extremely interesting to see Boehme’s etymological explication of the word: Qualität(Boehme sometimes spells it Quallität) comes from quellen, Quelle and thus evokes a surging force, aspring, a fountain. . . . ‘Quality’ is also related to Quaal or Quahl, suffering, torture; an indication thatin every quality there an element of anger, of suffering, and of furor, since each quality suffers fromits isolation and its limitation” (Alexandre Koyré, La Philosophie de Jacob Boehme [1929; Paris: Vrin,1979], p. 88). 30. [Oral: “which deadens.”]31. See “Argument,” in the February 18 session of Le Neutre. 32. Boehme’s first three qualities (Koyré, La Philosophie de Jacob Boehme, p. 132). The full list includesthe acrid, the sweet, the bitter, heat, love, the tone, the sound or Marcunius, and the body (p. 129).33. In this example, “bitter” is thus the third, or complex, term.34. “The poetic function projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection onto theaxis of combination” (Roman Jakobson, “Linguistics and Poetics,” in Style in Language, ed. Thomas A.Sebeok [Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1960], p. 354).35. See Claude Lévi-Strauss, “The Structural Study of Myth,” in Structural Anthropology, trans. ClaireJacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf (New York: Basic Books, 1963), pp. 206–231; see also “FromMyth to Novel,” The Origins of Table Manners, trans. John Weightman and Doreen Weightman (NewYork: Harper and Row, 1978), pp. 87–131. 36. [Oral: Barthes develops the difference between paradigm and syntagm for speaking subjects.]

for us: this purely paradigmatic view leaves the thing (the being) isolated,erratic—the acrid, the sweet—saving it from predication: world of nonpredicated,non “storied” essences.

What type of thought of the Neutral is implied in such a system? = reflectsthe ambivalence alleged at the outset:

1. = thought of things as nonpredicable, since the object fades away to theprofit of the quality: world of qualities, not of qualified, predicated substances. It’sthus the thought of a certain Neutral.

2. But this Neutral remains conflictual, sensitive to the struggle of angryforces that stand against each other: the overcoming of the conflictual doesn’toccur through suspension, abstention, abolition of the paradigm, but throughinvention of a third term: complex term and not zero, neutral term.37

3. Aggression Through the Adjective

A.

Not to be forgotten: the adjective is a commodity. In a good many domains, (mar-ket) value of an object, of a service, is debated and calculated as a function of theadjectives that one is able to attach to it, or at least one should study the fieldswhere the adjective comes first: a painting by Klee? No, but a movie star, yes. Andpolitical ratings are inseparable from adjectives, manifestation of the image.Télérama, March 4, p. 22.38

If, leaving these historical, mystical (Boehme), and sociological regions, Imove to the way, subjectively, I am affected by, the way I feel the adjective (Ibelieve, as you know, in the pathetic structure of language), I will still have to dealwith some aspects of the conflictual energy, of the “anger” that defines theBoehmian quality: for I always receive the adjective badly, as an aggression, and Ido so in all cases, no matter which value is attributed to it by the figure underwhich it is addressed to me.

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37. See Roland Barthes, “The Third Meaning” (1970), in The Responsibility of Forms, trans. RichardHoward (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), pp. 40–62; OCIII, pp. 147, 196.38. [Oral: Barthes describes opinion polls as “festivals of adjectives.”] Barthes is referring to anopinion poll conducted by Télérama of TV viewers, who were asked to attribute a set of adjectives—“sin-cere, convincing, warm, intelligent, simple, competent, dynamic, courteous, close to the concerns ofpeople like you, interesting, clear, amusing, none”—to five French political figures (Valéry Giscardd’Estaing, Raymond Barre, Jaques Chirac, Georges Marchais, and François Mitterand) (“Télévisionpendant la campagne,” Télérama, March 4, 1977, pp. 22–23).

B.

a. The Deprecating Adjective

I (like everyone) sometimes hear myself qualified (as a writer) with intentionallydepreciative adjectives: accusation of “preciousness,” of “theoretical coquetry,” ofmuffling, etc. The aggression (the unpleasantness) doesn’t only arise from the(depreciative) intention but from this:

1. The adjective that comes from outside me upsets the Neutral in which Ifind my quietude: I am tried by being qualified, predicated, I rest by not being so(she alone, isn’t the mother the only one who doesn’t qualify the child, whodoesn’t force him into an assessment?): subjectively, as a subject, I never feelmyself adjectivized, and it’s on this mode of adjectival anesthesia that the postula-tion of the Neutral is grounded in me.

2. The adjectival interpellation throws me back like a ball (a stake) into thevertigo of reciprocal images: by adjectivizing me as “precious,” the other puts him-self in a paradigm, he adjectivizes himself as “plain,” “direct,” “frank,” “virile”; andto this paradigm (I-bad/he-good) there responds the symmetrical and reversedparadigm: I can adjectivize myself not as precious but as subtle-delicate andhenceforth adjectivize him as hick, crude, stubborn, victim of the virility lure -->formally both value paradigms have entered some kind of deal, “work” like a turn-stile: ego +/alter -, in which ego and alter oscillate according to the source of theutterance --> endless walk, two-termed dialectic, vertigo without respite, becausethe turning excludes respite, suspension, the Neutral. I am caught in the weari-ness of the paradigm.

b. The Laudatory Adjective: The Compliment

Do laudatory adjectives appease me at least? How does the Neutral man behave whenfaced with “compliments”? The compliment pleases, it doesn’t appease, it doesn’tbring rest --> in the received compliment, there is for sure a moment of narcissistictingle; but (quickly) past this first instant, the compliment, without wounding (let’snot exaggerate!), makes one uneasy: the compliment puts me in apposition to some-thing, it adds the worst complement to me: an image (compliment = complement).For there is no peace in images. The refusal of the compliment probably arises froma boundless narcissism, which equates the subject to a god:

Paul Valéry (“M. Teste’s Logbook”): “A compliment-–what an insult! Hedares praise me! Am I not beyond all qualification? That is what a Self would say, ifit dared!”39 Moralistic demystification (very much like La Rochefoucauld) justified

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39. Paul Valéry, “Extracts from Monsieur Teste’s logbook,” in Monsieur Teste, trans. Jackson Matthews(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), p. 42.

only if one doesn’t use it to harden the ego into an essence. Hypernarcissism like ablushing that passes: followed by the desire not to be above all qualification but tobe outside it. Narcissus knows no rest—and ultimately, what I fundamentally wantis to rest. Yet, as for myself, I pay compliments, I distribute adjectives: Why? How? Atype of reaction prompted by the (frequent) situations where abstention is taken asnegation: not to “compliment” = too negative meaning, which I don’t want --> also,“my” compliments, in a certain way, are embarrassed: not because of insincerity butbecause of a kind of compromise between the good that I think and the anti-adjective principle that makes it impossible for me to say it: I am trapped bylanguage –> apparent lack of conviction, luke-warmth, noncredibility.40

We thus understand the damage that an excessive compliment can cause.The nature of this compliment: it compromises (which is what all adjectives do). Agrandiose example of this assassination through compliments (the dithyramb, theunconditional apologia): Joseph de Maistre and the pope: the pope panicked bythe avalanche of dithyrambic arguments. Cioran (excellent introduction): “deMaistre, as skilled at compromising what he loves as what he detests”41 --> ulti-mately: to inspire fear in the one you extol.

c. The Refusal of the Adjective

Do not confuse the refusal of the adjective with the suspension of adjectives (seebelow). Refusal of the adjective = moral practice, suppression of the adjectivewhich we call de rigueur for more than a question of “attitude”: in general, “scien-tific” attitude, which suppresses the adjective, not because it wounds but because itis hardly compatible with objectivity, truth. Someone even went so far as to con-nect this refusal on the part of science to the question of pleasure: Lucien Israëlon hysteria: “pleasure difficult to describe scientifically, because only adjectivescan describe pleasure.”42 To tell the truth, I don’t believe this: thousands of adjec-tives applied to pleasure won’t describe it: the only linguistic approach to pleasureis, I believe, metaphor or more precisely catachresis: “limping” metaphor in whichthe denotated term doesn’t exist in language (the arms of a chair); but metaphor

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40. [Oral: “For a compliment to be credible, one must make it inventive.”]41. Cioran in the preface to his Joseph de Masitre anthology: “For those who are ignorant in theart of excess, there is no better school than that of de Maistre, as skilled at compromising what heloves as what he detests. A mass of praises, an avalanche of dithyrambic arguments, his book Du Papesomehow alarmed the Holy Pontiff, who sensed the danger of such an apologia. There is only oneway of praising: to inspire fear in the one you extol, to make him tremble, to force him to hide farfrom the monument you are raising to him, to constrain him by generous hyperbole to measure hismediocrity and suffer from it. What is a defense that neither torments nor disturbs, what is a eulogythat doesn’t kill? Apologias should always be murders by enthusiasm” (E. M. Cioran, preface to Josephde Maistre, Textes choisis et présentés par E. M. Cioran [Monaco: Rocher, 1957], p. 11).42. “Scientific language eschews adjectives while, in the area that concerns us, they seem to be theonly terms available” (Lucien Israël, L’Hystérique, le sexe et le médecin [Paris: Masson, 1978], p. 87).

has none of the “dangers” of the adjective: it is not apposition, epithet, comple-ment, but slippage (which is what its name means).43

4. To Dismiss Adjectives

Refusal, suppression, censorship of adjectives ≠ abolition, lapse, obsolescence, era-sure: preparation for experiments in linguistic abolition: they are to be found inthe borderline languages (and not in the endoxal44 language). I will flag four ofthese experiments that share the attempt at this superhuman project: to put intoquestion + to exhaust predication ( = adjectives):

a. The Lover’s Discourse

On the one hand, the loving subject covers the other with laudatory adjectives (apolynymy well known to theology or to religious practice; for example: litanies tothe Virgin); but also, or finally, unsatisfied by this rosary of adjectives, feeling therending lack from which predication suffers, he comes to seek a linguistic way ofaddressing this: that the totality of imaginable predicates will never reach orexhaust the absolute specificity of the object of his desire: he moves frompolynymy to anonymy --> to the invention of words that are the zero degree ofpredication, of the adjective. The “Adorable!” the “je ne sais quoi,” the “it,” the“something,”45 etc. (In linguistic culture, two objects seen as beyond predicationeither in horror or in desire: the corpse [Bossuet]46 and the desired body).

b. The Sophists

Here is an intellectual (nonmystical) treatment of predication: Antisthenes’s argu-ment used by Protagoras to demonstrate that it is not possible to contradict:nothing can be attributed to a being, if not its own denomination: only the indi-vidual exists: I see the horse, not horsiness --> predication becomes impossible,because the subject is irreducible to the predicate --> therefore two contradictorydiscourses don’t contradict each other; they simply bear on different objects:there can never be anything false because one cannot say on a given subject any-thing else than the subject.47 Notice the social strength of this paradox (in

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43. [Oral: “To speak not through adjectives but through metaphors, that’s what poets used to do.”] 44. Barthesian neologism, from the Greek doxa; it designates the language of the doxa, of publicopinion.45. [Oral: “Elle a du chien” (she is really something).]46. Barthes has in mind Bosset’s 1662 Sermon sur la mort, which begins: “Could I allow myself todayto open a grave in front of the court, and wouldn’t such delicate eyes be offended by such a lugubriousobject?” (Sermons: Le Carême du Louvre, ed Constance Cagnat-Deboeuf [Paris: Gallimard, 2001], p. 146).47. “As we learn from Plato in the Euthydemus, he [Protagoras] was the first to use in discussion theargument of Antisthenes which strives to prove that contradiction is impossible” (Diogenes Laertius,“Protagoras,” in Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, trans. R. D. Hicks [Cambridge: HarvardUniversity Press, 1925], IX, 53, vol. 2, p. 465). Antisthenes insisted “that nothing can be described

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except by its proper definition: one predicate for one subject; from which it followed that contradic-tion is impossible, and falsehood nearly so” (Aristotle, Metaphysics, trans. Hugh Tredennick, in Aristotlein Twenty-three Volumes [1933; Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989], V, 29, 4, vol. 17, pp.287–89). Barthes source was Jean-Paul Dumont, trans. and ed., Les Sophistes: Fragments et témoignages(Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1969), p. 25.48. “The search for the ‘unnameable name’ should not make us forget the multiplicity of namesthat fit God. If the theology of the Pseudo-Dionysius [the Areopagite] exalts the anonymity of God inhis transcendent ‘superessence,’ it doesn’t exclude polynymy. God is anonymous or ‘polynymous,’according to whether he is considered in himself or, qua Universal Cause, in his operations ad extra”(Lossky, Théologie négative, p. 41).49. Cataphasis, in Greek: affirmation; apophasis: negation. Barthes considers his negative semiologyto be apophatic (see “Lecture,” p. 13; OCIII, p. 811).50. “On Divine Names as well as the lost (or more probably fictitious) treatises On Symbolic Theologyand Theological Sketches thus appear as successive degrees of an exegesis that begins by positively express-ing itself (affirmative method, or cataphasis). They are voluminous, because they proceed by consider-ing the relation of a universal Cause to its effects, God’s operations, both internal or external. . . . Tograsp something of the powers of God, they multiply inadequate formulae and ‘dissimilar’ images. Onthe other hand, the negative method (or apophasis) is very quick, because it is content to define divineessence by successively denying to it the further names and then the nearest ones. Thus it outstrips therealm of causality. But the true Mystical Theology is still beyond progressive negations” (Maurice deGandillac, introduction to Pseudo-Denys l’Aréopagite, Oeuvres complètes, trans. and ed. Maurice deGandillac [Paris: Aubier-Montaigne, 1943], p. 34).

relation to society, to social practices of discourse): if the paradox were to beretained, generalized subversion.

1. Contradiction would no longer be a weapon that defeats the enemy; thetrue and the false would no longer settle the disputes of language.

2. This would be the reign of the irreducible: on the one hand, no individualwould be reducible to another --> absolute individuation; on the other hand, everyindividual being incomparable (for the adjective, the predicate is the middle termthat allows for the comparison), no generality would be possible, and, notably, noscience; and if we recall that, according to Kierkegaard, language is general (andhence moral), to block, to evacuate all generality, is truly to carry oneself to thelimit of language, to the edge of its impossible.

c. Negative Theology

This is the exemplary field of the suspension of the adjective, since the whole mys-tical experience consists precisely in not predicating God. But, as in the lover’sdiscourse (and we know the affinities between the lover’s discourse and mysticaldiscourse), this “suspension” occurs in two phases; or by two degrees:

1. Affirmative method, or cataphasis: affirmation through polynymy: divinenames, numerous and voluminous: God considered as universal cause; names cor-respond to the various effects of this cause, the determination, the operations ofGod aimed ad extra48 -->

2. Then, negative method or apophasis:49 anonymy: brief method: aims at thedivine essence by denying it, first its furthest names, then its most proximatenames; thus goes beyond the plane of causality.50 (Notice again that the abolition

of predication upsets, erodes all scientific and endoxal logic: “outmodes” contra-diction and proposes a world [a language] that does without causality, withoutdetermination --> “mad” attitude.)

d. East

For the sake of speed, I’ll talk at the same time about Hinduism and about theTao while, of course, they are not identical at all:

a. In India, way followed by Shankara and his school. Universal beingdefined in a negative manner: neti . . . neti: it is neither this nor that51 ≠ visiblethings: in fact “you are that”:52 what the mirror says (Lacan),53 inauguration of theimage. (It’s pure negative theology.)

b. The Tao is unknowable because, were we to know it, we would enter thedomain of the relative and it would lose its quality of absoluteness. --> “One can-not say anything about it, because, if one said something about it, it would besubjected to affirmation and to negation.”54 We know this, the Tao is not a religion(it’s more a magic and/or an ethics): no God. --> The “without-God” of the Taoand the “God” of mysticism (above all, the negative) merge on the way to apopha-sis, to the rejection of predication, which is captured so well in this verse ofAngelus Silesius:

“If you love something, you love nothing.God is neither this nor that. Give leave to the something.”55

5. The Time of the Adjective

Suppress the adjective? First of all, this is not “easy” (to say the least!), and then, inthe end, it would suppose an ethics of “purity” (“truth”/“absoluteness”) to whichshould be opposed a more dialectic ethics of language (that’s what’s at stake inthis course: an ethics of language):

A friend points out to me: “to say of someone that he’s handsome is toimprison him in his beauty”! I say: yes, it’s true, but all the same: not too fast! let’snot go too fast! It’s beautiful, it’s free, it’s human. It might end up being neces-sary to let go [faire son deuil] of desire (that’s what psychoanalysis tells us), but

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51. Grenier, L’Esprit du Tao, p. 118. Shankara: Indian philosopher (788–820). 52. Tat tvam asi: “you are that” in Sanskrit. Barthes also quotes the Sanskrit Ta, Da, Tat as an exam-ple of a blank word in “Tel—Thus,” in A Lover’s Discourse, p. 221; OCIII, p. 666. See also “Tathata,” inCamera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), p. 5; OCIII, p. 1112.53. Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I,” in Ecrits: A Selection,trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977). 54. Grenier, L’Esprit du Tao, pp. 14–15.55. Silesius, L’Errant chérubinique, p. 47.

let’s not do it right away: pleasure of desire, of the adjective: so that “truth” (ifthere is any) not be immediate: pleasure of the lure: the sculptor Sarrasine diedfrom truth (Zambinella was nothing but a castrato), but he got pleasure from thelure (Zambinella was an adorable woman):56 without the lure, without the adjec-tive, nothing would happen. Of course, an adjective always imprisons (the other,myself), that’s even the definition of the adjective: to predicate is to affirm, thusto confine [affirmer, donc enfermer]. But at the same time to evacuate adjectivesfrom language would be to pasteurize to the point of destruction, it’s funereal, cf.this Australian tribe that suppressed a word, as a sign of mourning, each time amember of the tribe died. Don’t bleach language, savor it instead. Stroke it gen-tly or even groom it, but don’t “purify” it. We can prefer lure to mourning, or atleast we can recognize that there is a time for the lure, a time for the adjective.Perhaps the Neutral is that: to accept the predicate as nothing more than amoment: a time.

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56. In Balzac’s Sarrasine, to which Barthes devoted the seminar in 1968 and 1969 that led to thepublication of S/Z .