Roland Barthes - The Neutral

European Perspectives

European Perpectives A Series in Social Thought and Cultural Criticism

Lawrence D. Kritzman, Editor

European Perspectives presents outstanding books by leading European thinkers. With both classic and contemporary works, the series aims to shape the major intellectual controversies of our day and to facilitate the tasks of historical understanding. For a complete list of books in the series, see pages

281-282.

ROLAND

BARTHES

lecture Course at the at the College de France (1977-1978) Translated by Rosalind E. Krauss and Denis Hollier Text established, annotated, and presented by Thomas Clerc under the direction of Eric Marty

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS

NEW YORK

Columbia University Press

Publishers Since I 893 New York

Chichester, West Sussex

Translation copyright© 2.005 Columbia University Press Copyright© Editions du Seuil, 2.002 All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Barthes, Roland. [Neutre. English] The neutral; lecture course at the College de France (1977-1978) I Roland Barthes ; text established, annotated, and presented by Thomas Clertc under the direction of Eric Marty ; translated by Rosalind E. Krauss and Denis Hollier. p. cm.-(European perspectives) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-231-13404-5 (alk. paper) r. Difference (philosophy).

III. Title.

I. Clerc, Thomas.

II. Marty, Eric, 19 5 5-

IV. Series.

B809.o.B3713

2005

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper.

Printed in the United States of America cro987654321

ROLAND

BARTHES

Lecture Course at the at the College de France

(1977-1978) Translated by Rosalind E. Krauss and Denis Hollier Text established, annotated, and presented by Thomas Clerc under the direction of Eric Marty

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS

NEW YORK

Columbia University Press

Publishers Since r893 New York

Chichester, West Sussex

Translation copyright© 2005 Columbia University Press Copyright © Editions du Seuil, 2002 All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Barthes, Roland. [Neutre. English] The neutral; lecture course at the College de France (1977-1978} I Roland Barthes ; text established, annotated, and presented by Thomas Clertc under the direction of Eric Marty ; translated by Rosalind E. Krauss and Denis Hollier. p. cm.-(European perspectives) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-231-13204-5 (alk. paper) I.

Difference (philosophy).

III. Title.

I. Clerc, Thomas.

II. Marty, Eric, 1955-

IV. Series.

B809.o.B3713

2005

l94-dc22

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper.

Printed in the United States of America c10987654321

2004065673

xiii

Translators' Preface

xix

Notice

xxi

Preface

xxix

Preliminaries

SESSION OF FEBRUARY 18, 1978

Preliminaries

Intertext I. In Guise of Epigraphs 3 a. Joseph de Maistre 4 b. Tolstoy 5 c. Rousseau 5 d. Portrait of Lao-tzu by Himself 6 2. Argument 6 3. Processes of Preparation, of Exposition 8 a. The Library 8 b. Figures_.,. "The Neutral in Thirty Figures" 4. The Desire for Neutral 12 a. Pathos 12 b. The Wirelike Sharpness of Mourning r 3 14

Benevolence

Benevolentia 14 2. Dry and Damp r5 3. Emotion and Distance I.

16

r5

Weariness I.

2.

Placeless r 6 What Wearies

r8


20

Weariness (Continued)

3. Rightness of Weariness 20 4. Weariness as Work, as Game, as Creation a. Weariness as Work 20 b. Weariness as Game 20

20

ro

c. Weariness as Creation 21

20

Silence

r. Sileo and Taceo 21 2. To Outplay Speech 23 a. To Keep Silent as Worldly Tactic 23 b. Keeping Silent as the Obligation of an Inner "Morality": The Silence of the Skeptic 2 5

3. Silence as Sign 2 6 4. To Outplay Silence 29

27

Tact

r. Principle of Tact 29 Twinklings of Tact 30

2.

a. Minutia 30 b. Discretion 3 l SESSION OF MARCH 4, 1978

32

Supplement I

32

Tact (Continued)

c. Supplement and Not Redundancy 32 d. Politeness as Thought of the Other, Consideration of and for Otherness

33

e. Metaphorization 34 3. Tact and Sociability 34 a. Tact as the Social Obscene 34 b. The Sabi, the Amorous 3 5 c. Sweetness. Last (Provisional) Word on Tact 37

Sleep

r. The Neutral Awakening

37

The Utopia of Sleep 3 7 3. Sleep, Love, Benevolence

2.

41

40

Affirmation

r. Language and Discourse

41 2. Affirmation and Language 42 3. Affirmation and Discourse 4 3 4. Drags, Dodges, Hollow Corrections

SESSION OF MARCH 11, 1978

47

Supplement II Color

r. The Colorless: Two References 2.

vi

Interpretations 49 a. Richness/Poverty

CONTENTS

49

49

44

36

b. Back/Front 50 c. Origin 50 d. Shimmer 5 l e. Indistinction 5 l 52

The Adjective

Adjective and Neutral 5 2 Quality as Energy 5 3 a. Foundation of the Thing, of the Name 5 3 b. Quality as Desire 54 3. Aggression Through the Adjective 55 a. The Deprecating Adjective 5 6 b. The Laudatory Adjective: The Compliment c. The Refusal of the Adjective 57 4. To Dismiss Adjectives 5 8 a. The Lover's Discourse 58 b. The Sophists 5 8 c. Negative Theology 59 d. East 59 5. The Time of the Adjective 60 l.

2.


62

Supplement Ill

69

Images of the Neutral

Depreciative Images 69 a. Thankless 69 b. Shirking 70 c. Muffled 70 d. Limp 70 e. Indifferent 71 f. Vile 72 2. The Neutral as Scandal 72 I.

73

Anger I.

2.

States 74 a. Anger 74 b. Suffering/Queasiness 7 5 c. Minimal Existence 76 "Patho-logy" 77


78

Supplement IV

81

The Active of the Neutral I.

vii

Active

CONTENTS

81

56

2. Features 82 a. A-correction= Abstention from Correcting 82 b. Contamination= Indifference to Being Contaminated c. No Ranking 82 d. Relation to the Present e. Banality 83 f. Weakness 83 g. Strength 84 h. Restraint 84 i. Stupidity 85 3. The Chinese Portrait 86

83

85

ldeospheres r. Features

87 a. Consistency 87 b. The Lever 88 c. Mania 88 Ideosphere and Power (to sacrifice to fashion)

2.

89

3. Sincerity 9 I 4. Perpetuity 92 SESSION OF APRIL 1, 1978

94

Supplement V

95

Consciousness I.

Consciousness as Drug: Monsieur Teste

2.

a. M. Teste 96 b. H.B. 97 c. Differences and Identities 99 The Valerian Self as Imaginary 100 a. The Paradox IOI b. "Sensibility" 102 c. The Imaginary as Crisis I03

96

SESSION OF APRIL 29, 1978

107

Answer r. Answer as Form 2.

I07 Beside-the-Point Answers 109 a. Departures, Flights, Silences, Forgettings

b. Deviations rr2 c. Incongruities I I 3 3. Another Logic, Another Dialogue

viii

CONTENTS

rr4

I09

82

SESSION OF MAY 6, 1978

Rites

122

Public Rites 122 2. Private Rites 123 3. A Little Bit of Symbolic + The Letter l 24 I.

l 24

Conflict

125

I.

2.

Banality of the Notion Coded Conflict 126

3. Dodges 127 4. Conflict as Meaning 129

Supplement VI

130

Oscillation I.

2.

136

125

128

Image and Etymologies Vibratory Time l 3 3

130

S ES S I 0 N 0 F M A Y 1 3 , 1 9 7 8

136

Supplement VII

137

Retreat

The Gesture l 3 7 a. Rousseau 138 b. Swedenborg 140 c. Proust 142 2. Organization 143 3. Sitio 144 4. Vita Nuova (Dante: Nova) 147 a. Fantasy: Its Constituting Feature: Radicality b. Old Age 148 c. Destitution l 50 l.

152


152

Arrogance l.

2.

3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 163

Anorexia l 5 2 Western Frenzy l 54 Obviousness, Interpretation The Concept l 5 6 Memory/Forgetting 157 Unity-Tolerance 158 Writing 162

l

55

Panorama I.

ix

Suppression of Time: Dreams

CONTENTS

163

14 7

Suppression of Suffering: Halcyonian Calm

2.

l

64


166

Supplement VIII

166

Panorama {Continued)

3. Sovereign Memory 4. Ubiquiplace 16S 169

166

Kairos l.

Sophist Kairos and Skeptical Kairos

a. Sophists 169 b. Skeptics 169 c. The Two Kairos 170 2. Validity and Truth 170 3. Ambivalence of the Kairos

l

69

17 l

4. The Satori 172 a. In the Field of Rationality, of Empereia

b. Outside the Field of Rationality c. "Ah, This!" 5. The Perishable 175

173

173

174 17 5

Wou-wei r. The Will-to-Live

175 Wou-wei 176 3. Figures of the West 177 a. Leonardo da Vinci According to Freud

2.

b. Prince Andrew 17S c. John Cage 17S 4. The Sacred 17S 5. To Abstain from 179 a. Dietary Self-denial 179 b. Pathetic Abstinence l So c. Pyrrhonian Abstinence l So SESSION OF JUNE 3, 1978

Wou-wei {Continued)

182

6. Apathy I S2 a. Tao: Image of the Mirror

b. Pyrrho 1S2 c. Political Apathy 7. To Be Sitting a. Tao 1S4 b. Zen 1S5

x

CONTENTS

1S4

l

S3

1S2

177

186

The Androgyne

r. The Gender of Words l 8 6 a. The Grammarians' Neuter l 87 b. From Language to Discourse 189 2. The Androgyne 191 ANNEX

196

Intensities

r. Neutral, Structure, Intensity 196 197 3. Name Changes 198 4. Minimalism 199 2. Apophasis and Apheresis

201

To Give Leave

r. Epoche, Balance

201

a. Epoche (Epechein) b. Balance 202 2. Leave, Drift 203 206

201

Fright

r. Fright 207 2. Anxiety 208 3. Prayer

208

211

Summary: Literary Semiology (M. Roland Barthes, Professor)

213

Notes

261

Bibliography

269

Name Index

273

Subject Index

xi

CONTENTS

As Barthes had promised in the lecture with which he inaugurated his assumption of the chair of literary semiology at the College de _!'!a~~e, he would pursue a "phantasmic teaching," one based on the "comings and goings of desire, which [the teacher] endlessly presents and represents. I sincerely believe," he continued, "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 based did not "vary from year to year"; it held steady, rather, over the trajectory that took him 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 By Roland Barthes, where he traces his mature commitment to this domain back to the impulses of his early childhood, so that even whilic playing a version of tag in the Luxembourg Gardens, his inclination was to neutralize the exercise of power that I1:1!es an opponent_9_ut: (

When I used to play prisoner's base in the Luxembourg, what I liked best was not provoking the other team and boldly exposing myself to their right to take me prisoner; what I liked best was to free the prisoners-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 of speech, we also play prisoner's base: one language has only temporary rights over another; all it takes is for a third language to appear from the ranks for the assailant to be forced to retreat: in the conflict of rhetorics, the victory never goes to any but the Third Language. The task of this language is to release the prisoners: to scatter the signified, the catechisms. 2 Indeed, Barthes was obsessed by "the great game of the powers of speech," a cathexis that impelled his interest in semiology's analysis of these same powers. His image of the prisoners highlights his sense of language's coerciveness, something his lecture went so ~-------far as to call "the fascism of language." 3 For language always de---·"~-···--~~~--·-~~.<-~'

xiii

mands a choice, an identification of gender, of person, of desire for one or the other 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 of one binary element against the other, which forms the fundamental oppositions that leave the unchosen pole implicit within any speech act. Such oppositions could be white versus black (the versus abbreviated by "/"),high/low, hot/cold, or, in a later study by Barthes himself, S/Z. Barthes suffered at the hands of this demand for choice, lamenting, "by its very structure my language implies an inevitable relation of alienation. " 4 Alienating or not, however, Barthes recounts his commitment-indeed, his "joy"-over binaries in Roland Barthes: For a certain time, he went into raptures over binarism; binarism became for him a kind of erotic object. This idea seemed to him inexhaustible, he could never exploit it enough. That one might say everything with only one difference produced a kind of joy in him, a continuous astonishment. Since intellectual things resemble erotic ones, in binarism what delighted him was a figure. Later on he would find this (identical) figure again, in the opposition of values. What (in him) would deflect semiology was from the first the pleasure principle: a semiology which has renounced binarism no longer concerns him at all. 5 The major binary Male/Female points up the problem of how to translate Barthes's title: should it be "The Neuter" (the third term between the genders) or "The Neutral" (which is how Barthes's most effective translator, Richard Howard, renders it in Roland Barthes)? 6 What Barthes himself designates as the sexual basis of the third term in the various disciplines to which he refers in his preliminary presentation (for example, the drones among bees) would lead one to "The Neuter." But Barthes also uses the domain of international law (and Switzerland) as a basis, in relation to which only "The Neutral" makes sense. Furthermore, the structural linguistics of Barthes's generation, that of the Prague School, and Hjelmslev, and Greimas, in particular, was fascinated by the phonetic fact of neutralization, which is the annihilation of opposition between sounds within certain languages: for example, the difference between d and tat the ends of words in German (with "hund" pronounced "hunt") or the difference between d and t in English afters (as in the case of "still," which is pronounced "sdill"). Since

xiv

TRANSLATORS' PREFACE

"The Neuter" is more transgressive, I was tempted to choose it; but since "The Neutral" has the broadest implication within structural linguistics and relates to Barthes's contempt for what he calls "The Critique ni-ni" and, in Le Neutre, "ninisme" (neither-norism)-in reference to the neutrality assumed by journalists committed to telling both sides of any story-it seemed far more apt. 7 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 "third language," his "desire for neutral," and in Roland Barthes, he presents it as his dream 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, in which is imagined "the absence of every sign"; subsequently, a thousand affirmations incidental to this dream (apropos of the avant-garde text, of Japan, of music, of the alexandrine, etc.). Curious that in public opinion, precisely, there should be a version of this dream; Doxa, too, has no love for meaning, which in its eyes makes the mistake of conferring upon life a kind of infinite intelligibility (which cannot be determined, arrested): it counters the invasion of meaning by the concrete; the concrete is what is supposed to resist meaning. Yet for him, it is not a question of recovering a pre-meaning, an origin of the world, of life, of facts, anterior to meaning, but rather to imagine a post-meaning: one must traverse, as though the length of an initiatic way, 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 of meaning, for meaning is the product of History, not of Nature; but against Science (paranoiac discourse) one must maintain the utopia of suppressed meaning. In his lecture, Barthes returns to literature from semiology to speak of it as the practice that has access to a kind of outwitting of language's power play: For the text is the very outcropping of speech, and it is within speech that speech must be fought, led astray-not by the message of which it is 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 the writer's civil person, nor on his political commitment-for he is, after all, only a man among

xv

TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE

others-nor do they even depend on the doctrinal content of his work, but rather on the labor of displacement he brings to bear upon the language. 8 (p. 6) This raises one more knot within the flow of translation, for Barthes's idea of leading language "astray" is consistently expressed by the verb dejouer, which in its literal rendering as "outplay," or "outsmart," stays within the idea of language itself as a play of power; Barthes first takes up dejouer as a figure in his analysis of Georges Bataille's essay on the Big Toe, where Richard Howard translates it as "baffle," which I find both precise and economical and have adopted for the most part here. 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 the Big Toe baffles the paradigm noble/ignoble and is thus a foretaste of his idea of the Neutral. The elegant and scrupulous edition of Barthes's course published by Seuil has been retained here with the addition of only a few translators' notes to explain some technical terms and to guide the reader to pertinent literature (our interpolations appear in curly brackets). In translating the notes, we tried whenever possible to translate its quotations and references from a French library to an English one. Hence, in addition to the list Barthes himself circulated during the first session (see "Intertext," in the February IS session), there are two bibliographies at the end of the volume: one for the works quoted in the text or in the notes that were originally written or translated in English; another for those for which we were unable to locate an existing English version. 10 The marginalia are mostly a remnant of Barthes's scriptorium. Even though he used them in the page setting of his late books (such as A Lover's Discourse), they were also, in the case of these lecture notes, a mnemotechnic tool Barthes found useful while delivering his lectures. We have stuck as close as possible to Barthes's own abbreviated references: "Boehme" refers to Alexandre Koyre's book, "Gide" to Maria Van Rysselberghe's Cahiers de la petite dame, "Swedenborg" to Matter's biography, "de Maistre" and "Maistre" to Cioran's anthology of the writer, "Joly" to Joly's anthology on tolerance, "Sceptiques" and "Sophistes" to Dumont's anthologies of those ancient Greek philosophical schools, "Baudelaire" to his Artificial Paradise. Thus, for example, the same quotation from de Maistre's can be referenced twice: once, by Barthes himself, in the xvi

TRANSLATORS' PREFACE

margin with the page number of Cioran's anthology and a second time in the editorial note where it is referred to in the English translation (when available) of the specific book by de Maistre it comes from; or the same page by Voltaire will be referred to in the margin by the indication "Joly" followed by a page number and in the notes by the edition of an English translation of Voltaire's Treatise on Tolerance. 11

Notes r. Roland Barthes, "Lecture," trans. Richard Howard, October, no. 8 (spring 1979 ): 5. 2. Roland Barthes, Roland Bartheslby 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 inoculation against reaction, Barthes said, "But languagethe performance of a language system-is neither reactionary nor progressive; it is quite simply fascist; for fascism does not prevent speech, it compels speech." 4. Ibid. 5. Barthes, Roland Barth es/by Roland Barth es, p. 5 r. 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. 8. "Lecture," p. 6. 9. Roland Barthes, The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1986), p. 242. IO. Our thanks to David Macklowitch, graduate student at Columbia University, for his perseverance in finding the English translations of Barthes's wide range of references. rr. See Bernard Comment, "Politique: Dejouer Tout Pouvoir," in Roland Barthes, vers le neutre (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1991), pp. 219-254.

xvii

TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE

This "Notice" is a shortened version of the general foreword that introduces the publication of Barthes's courses. For more details, one should consult

Comment vivre ensemble. The organizing principle of the three volumes of Barthes's courses at the College de France is the class session, since such was the true rhythm of the reading, 1 a rhythm that Barthes inscribed on his manuscript, after the fact, by marking a date at the place where he had stopped on that day at a given hour and where he had to take up again the following week. Within this chronological sequence are inserted the structures specific to the writing of the course: the title of the "trait," or the figure, that constitutes the unity articulating the ensemble of the topos (topic) and the various titles, subtitles, columns, and so forth that, for their part, constitute the second-level articulations interior to each figure, or "trait." As for the "text" of the course itself, we chose to intervene as little as possible. We have retained the symbols Barthes uses-for example, to condense a logical construction [__,,,.,]-but we gave ourselves permission to complete abbreviations when these arise from a common shorthand (for instance, Robinson Crusoe for R.C.) and to correct punctuation where it was too muddled. When Barthes's written argument was too obscure, we also gave ourselves permission to paraphrase the general intention of the passage in a footnote to spare the reader an unnecessary enigma. We have used the wide margins of the collection "Traces ecrites" to inscribe the bibliographic references for the citations that in his manuscript Barthes placed at the very same place on the page. We should add that we have kept the few passages Barthes crossed out but identified them as such in notes that indicates their extent. When Barthes, as an introduction to a course session, comments on letters he received or on his argument from the preceding week, these passages (or "Supplements") appear in italics. Finally, the editors' interventions in the text of the course are marked by square brackets ([ ]);

xix

Barthes's own interventions in the course of a citation are indicated by angle brackets (< > ). The footnotes are of a classical philological style, necessary for a text that is at times so allusive. Citations, proper names, expressions in foreign languages (particularly in Ancient Greek, which we have chosen to transliterate in Latin characters), place-names, historical events are to the extent possible identified by these notes, which a complete bibliographic index saves from being too repetitive. To this index of names and works, we have added an uncommented index of concepts. When Barthes refers to a rare or unlocatable edition, our footnotes indicate a more accessible one. 2 A short preface contextualizes the course and emphasizes its most salient features. -Eric Marty

Notes I. 1977: Roland Barthes, Comment vivre ensemble: Simulations romanesques de quelques espaces quotidiens, ed. Claude Coste (Paris: Seuil/IMEC, 2002); 1977-1978: Le Neutre: Cours et seminaires au College de France, 1977-1978, ed. Thomas Clerc and Eric Marty (Paris: Seuil, 2002); 1978-1980: La Preparation du roman I et II: Cours et seminaires au College de France 1978 et 1979-1980, ed. Nathalie Leger (Paris: Seuil, 2003 ). 2. {Most of Barthes's original references are to the items listed in "lntertext," all in French; for English readers, we have changed subsequent citations to refer to the volumes listed in the bibliography. For the texts written in English, we quote from the original. For those originally in French or another non-English language (German, Italian), we quote, whenever possible, from an English translation. Even for French works, for reasons of availability, we were occasionally compelled to cite editions that do not correspond to those in Barthes's "lntertext." For these reasons, we didn't always keep the page references that Barthes noted in the text or in the margins of his notes.}

xx

NOTICE

The course on "The Neutral" that Roland Barthes gave at the College de France extended over thirteen weeks, from February 18 to June 3, 1978. After "How to Live Together," it was the second series of courses since his election to the College on March 14, 1976, and the inaugural lecture of January 7, 1977· Th~ course, which took place on Saturdays, lasted two hours, broken by a short pause. After the "preliminaries" that occupy the largest part of the first session and in which he presented his research, Barthes would explore, during these several months, some twenty "figures" (about two per class), twenty-three to be exact, which he also calls "traits" or "twinklings." These figures, which correspond to the possible embodiments of the Neutral (and of the anti-Neutral), ranging from "Sleep" to "Silence," from "Rage" to "Arrogance," are presented in a happenstance order, as Barthes says during the opening session, so as not to submit the course to a preestablished meaning that would be in contradiction with the concept of Neutral. After the alphabetical order he had adopted the year before, he turned to a new mode of arbitrariness, the figures being now distributed according to the randomness of numbers and letters he found in a journal of statistics. This playful dimension, even though it didn't encounter, as Barthes humorously admits, "any echo," allows him to desacralize somewhat the ritual of the course. Variable in their length, the figures are not always integrally treated in one session, in which case they are completed in the following one. The shortest, "Benevolence" (which is also the first), extends two pages in the manuscript; the longest, "Retreat," nine. The slicing of the book according to sessions rather than to traits thus reflects the diachronic dimension that is part of the structure of a course. At the head of the preliminaries is a list of the traits, with the exception of three Barthes didn't treat, which are reproduced as an appendix in the present edition: "Intensities," "To Give Leave," "Fright." The documents related to the course, preserved at the Institut de la Memoire de !'Edition Contemporaine (IMEC), comprise four bundles of around eight hundred little notecards altogether, containing the bibliographic indications, some summaries, notes, and xxi

projects on abandoned figures, the whole accompanied by several commentaries; a series of cassettes and computer disks (around twenty) on which are recorded the quasi-totality of the twenty-six hours of oral presentation; and finally, of course, the manuscript of the course properly speaking, which takes up r So pages written in blue ink on sheets of 21 x 29.7 cm. The writing, regular and legible, is dense. It takes up almost all the page, which nevertheless includes a larger left-hand margin that Barthes uses to indicate the references to the texts he cites (name of the author, page of the book), to underscore the key term of the page or paragraph or to indicate in one word the point of his argument. These marginalia, like those he used in A Lover's Discourse, guide the reading of the main text, in an exercise of clarity and orientation, but they attest as well to Barthes's involvement in an aesthetic use of the layout of the page. The manuscript consists of notes that are fully developed, even if marked by a relative ellipsis at the syntactical level. The core of it, however, is written in a clear manner: Barthes used to follow his notes closely when he delivered his course. If the logical articulations are often replaced by signs of punctuation, with colons and arrows taking over the lion's share, the general structure is sufficiently clear to allow for an accessible reading. Barthes in fact deviates very little from the manuscript, in accordance with his view that written discourse should take precedence over the oral form. In this regard, the oral digressions, rare and precisely framed, produce a contrast: we have reproduced some of them in the notes. Being neither an achieved piece of writing nor the dry outline that would have suited a speaker perfectly at ease with improvisation, this text offers itself to a reading that thus belongs to the specific regime of the ne-uter, of the "neither/nor." A bibliographic intertext is included with the opening session, during which it was distributed to the audience. This book list will be enriched, as the research goes along, by several titles. Quite varied, it comprises works of Eastern and Antique mysticism, philosophical texts, and literary works in which the fictional dimension is rather reduced: Tolstoy and Proust are present (the latter being cited only through George Duncan Painter's biography), but Pascal, Baudelaire, Michelet, and the Rousseau of the Reveries du promeneur solitaire are more thoroughly exploited. The list's unpredictable character distances it from a bibliography that could claim to "cover" a subject. It offers itself less as a summa on the neutral-inexistent, moreover-than as a set of directions, promoting the model of an interdisciplinary semiotic to which Barthes was alxxii

PREFACE

ways alert: linguistics, theology, philosophy, science, and literature testify, together with the polynymy of the references, to the richness of the Neutral. Thanks to the figure, Maurice Blanchot and John Cage, Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Lacan, Pascal and Baudelaire, Pyrrho and Joseph de Maistre are joined. Admitting that his is often a secondhand erudition, Barthes relies on anthologies (especially for Greek and Eastern philosophies) or monographs: he cites Jacob Boehme, Spinoza, or Vico by means of Alexandre Koyre, Sylvain Zac, or Michelet. Since the art of the course consists in making the Neutral twinkle, a certain joyous dilettantism-if we agree to take the word at its original meaning-appears in the paths Barthes followed to pursue his research: "The material must be racy," he announces at the start, in reference to the texts and the authors he plans to privilege but also to the library from which they are drawn, which is at least in part that of his vacation home in Urt, in the southwest of France. The chosen references are thus obsessive references, texts he has loved and practiced for a long time or has recently discovered, like the works of the Eastern philosophies, but to which he feels an affinity. Often remarking to the audience on the beauty of his texts, Barthes gives his course an aesthetic dimension that is enhanced by the connections he never misses an opportunity to establish between the books and the authors, different as they may be. Those textual cross-references have no motor other than desire: which brings us back to the vow he took during his inaugural lecture of "always placing a fantasy" at the origin of his teaching. As well, far from pretending to hand over the keys of a concept about which the Western sphere knows little, Barthes proposes a research that pays its debt to his precursors, of course, but is first and foremost personal. Even if he often cites Blanchot, Barthes's perspective is very different; similarly, he admits to having bracketed the phenomenological approach, or "Husserlian neutralization"; finally, even if he takes off from an old linguistic intuition (the theory of the zero degree, taken from Vigo Brondal), this is not a course on language. Barthes rather sees the Neutral as the occasion for a "divagation" that would turn the course into a work and, to use the Nietzschean typology, the professor into an artist-"without 'mission accomplished' certificate," as he says in passing. He therefore insists in the abstract he wrote after the course (p. 211) that the Neutral was approached "not in language but in discourse." What interests him most, in fact, is to track down who speaks the Neutral and how the Neutral speaks and to extend the list of its utterers through the xxiii

PREFACE

course, conceived thus as the place of a brief but intense mediation. Accompanying the traits are what Barthes calls "supplements." There are seven of them, each delivered at the beginning of a session. To the extent to which they come to recall the moves of the preceding session, they constitute a link between one Saturday and the next; they also give Barthes the possibility of sharpening points that he couldn't develop as much as he wanted by allowing him to return to certain figures; moreover, they sketch a kind of dialogue with the audience, since these points often arise from written or oral remarks made by the participants that Barthes had reviewed over the course of the week: one listener gives him the reference to an episode of the Gospels he didn't have, another writes him a letter he reads to the class. As for the anonymous note he receives, it offers the occasion for him to present a brief analysis of linguistic pragmatics, which leads him to defend a conception of writing where the subject takes responsibility for his signature. Finally, the supplements work to aerate an often dense course, giving it the phatic dimension that the inevitably magisterial aspect of the proceedings was doomed to dampen in part. These supplements vary in form and length. The first (March 4) occurs during the third session: a short one, it allows for the reading of a poem by Pasolini that Barthes had mentioned during the preceding session. The second (March II), a return to the figures "Tact" and "Affirmation," triggers a commentary on the very meaning of the course. The third (March IS) is the longest: in addition to corrections to the already treated figures, it is a response to some written remarks by students that gives Barthes the opportunity to sharpen the stakes of the Neutral as a research for aporia, or atopia. The same goes for the fourth supplement (March 2 5 ), in which these meta discursive commentaries, working like precious auxiliaries to the exploration of the stakes of the Neutral, lead Barthes to prolong his reflections on an evasive concept, resistant to capture by meaning. Indissociable from the course, the supplements undergo a kind of depletion, however: as the research progresses, their necessity becomes less evident, since the drift across the fantasy of the Neutral, however eventful it might be, is nonetheless strongly pursued. Readings during the sessions are frequent. During the preliminaries, Barthes reads four "epigraphs": one by Joseph de Maistre, another by Rousseau, a passage by Tolstoy, and Lao-tzu's portrait of himself. These extracts, on which he doesn't comment and which xxiv

PRE FACE

-are sometimes revisited later, signal from the first the directions taken by the Neutral: Joseph de Maistre, whose writing seduces Barthes, refers explicitly to what could be called the anti-Neutral; Rousseau is evoked, as is Tolstoy, to testify to the interest attached to modifications of states of consciousness (fainting, spatial confusion). The portrait of Lao-tzu, a kind of paradoxical apology for stupidity, announces the central role Eastern mystics will play in the elaboration of the Neutral. Other readings intervene later, when Barthes judges it necessary, to make the resonances of the concept better heard: a long passage from Voltaire on tolerance; many from Rousseau (in connection with the figure "Retreat"); the Pasolini poem titled "Una disperata vitalita"; a letter by Jean-Michel Ribettes on anorexia; passages by Walter Benjamin relative to the experience of using drugs; and a scene from Pe/leas et Melisande illuminating the notion of reply by evasion. In Barthes's intellectual itinerary, the course on the Neutral is located between the publication of A Lover's Discourse (1977), the "Pretexte-Roland Barthes" colloquium devoted to him at Cerisy (1977), and the publication of Lecture (1978), his inaugural lecture on assuming the chair of literary semiology at the College de France. In the sequence of his courses there, The Neutral comes after How to Live Together, that of the first year, and before The Preparation of the Novel, the third and last, cut short by Barthes's death on March 26, 1980. Thus, through the happenstances of existence, "The Neutral" henceforth assumes today the median place in this triptych, not without a touch of tragic irony that aptly reflects the spirit of the course. Simultaneously marked by difficult biographical circumstances (the death of his mother, the effects of which, from the preliminaries on, he doesn't conceal) and by an ironic-which is to say indirect, if we believe in etymology-manner of interrogating the concepts, the quest for the Neutral takes place during a period of intense creativity for Barthes. From Writing Degree Zero to Empire of Signs, from Camera Lucida to Incidents, the Neutral already twinkled in places in a work whose whole has henceforth become available to us: with the publication of the course, it finally finds the occasion (the kairos, the opportune moment, to repeat the title of one of the figures) to shine in producing another image of Roland Barthes, unique in our literature: that of the artist-professor. -Thomas Clerc

xxv

PREFACE

1.

Benevolence

2. 3. 4.

Weariness Silence Tact Sleep

5. 6.

Affirmation Color

7. 8. 9.

The Adjective Images of the Neutral Anger

10. 11.

The Active of the Neutral

12. 13.

Consciousness

ldeospheres

14. 15. 16.

Answer

17. 18.

Oscillation

19. 20. 21.

Arrogance

22. 23.

Wou-wei

Rites Conflict Retreat Panorama Kairos The Androgyne

xxix


Preliminaries This year, no seminar: 1 only a lecture course, conducted by myself, for two hours, over thirteen weeks. Between each hour, a pause of a dozen minutes. The sequence of the weeks will be interrupted for the Easter holiday, which is to say that there will be no class on the Saturdays 8, l 5, and 22 of April. This course: The Neutral or, better: "The Desire for Neutral."

lntertext

What follows is not a bibliography on the "Neutral," even if such a bibliography were conceivable, considering the fact that the notion crosses many disciplines (grammar, logic, philosophy, painting, international law, etc.). It is nothing more than a list of the texts whose reading, in various ways, has punctuated the preparation of this course. 2

ANGELUS SILESIUS

-L'Errant cherubinique, preface by Roger Laporte, Paris, Planete, 1970. BACHELARD

-La Dialectique de la duree, Presses Universitaires de France, 1950. BACON (Francis)

-Novum Organon, Paris, Hachette, 1857. -De la dignite et de l'accroissement des sciences et Essais de morale et de politique, in Oeuvres completes, 2 vols., Paris, Charpentier, l 84 3. BAUDELAIRE

-Les Paradis artificiels, Paris, Garnier-Flammarion, 1966. BENJAMIN (Walter)

-Mythe et violence, Paris, Denoel, coll. "Lettres nouvelles," l97r.

BLANCH OT

-L'Entretien infini, Paris, Gallimard, 1969. -Le Livre a venir, Paris, Gallimard, coll. "Idees," 1959· BOEHME

-Koyre (Alexandre), La Philosophie de Jacob Boehme, Paris, Vrin, l97I. CAGE (John)

-Pour !es oiseaux, Paris, Belfond, 1976. DENYS L'AREOPAGITE {DIONYSIUS THE AREOPAGITE}

-Oeuvres completes, trans. Maurice de Gandillac, Paris, Aubier-Montaigne, 1943· DIOGENE LAERCE {DIOGENES LAERTIUS}

-Vie, doctrines et sentences des philosophes illustres, Paris, Garnier-Flammarion, l 9 6 5.

2

vols.,

ECKHART (Master)

-Lossky (Vladimir), Theologie negative et connaissance de dieu chez Maitre Eckhart, Paris, Vrin, 1960. FICHTE

-Methode pour arriver ala vie bienheureuse, Paris, Ladrange, 1845. FREUD

-Un souvenir d'enfance de Leonard de Vinci, Paris, Gallimard, coll. "Les Essais," 1927. GIDE

-{Maria Van Rysselberghe}, Cahiers Andre Gide, Cahiers de la Petite Dame, vol. 4, r945-r95r, Paris, Gallimard, 1977· HEGEL

-Legons sur l'histoire de la philosophie, vol. 4, La Philosophie grecque, Paris, Vrin, 1975· LESSING

-Dramaturgie de Hambourg, Paris, Didier, 1869. MAISTRE (Joseph de)

-Textes choisis et presentes par E. M. Cioran, Monaco, Ed. du Rocher, 1957· MARTIAL

-Oeuvres completes, vol.

l,

Epigrammes, Paris, Garnier, l 8 8 5.

MICHELET

-La Sorciere, Paris, Hetzel-Dentu, 1862. PASCAL

-Pensees, 2 vols., Paris, Gallimard, coll. "Folio," 1977·

2


f'

?

QUINCEY (Thomas de)

-Confessions d'un mangeur d'opium, Paris, Stock, l92r. ROUSSEAU

-Les Reveries du promeneur solitaire, Paris, Garnier, n.d. SKEPTICS

-Brochard (Victor), Les Sceptiques grecs, Paris, Vrin, 19 59 (1st ed., 1887). -Kojeve (Alexandre), Essai d'une histoire raisonnee de la philosophie paienne, vol. 3, Paris, Gallimard, 1973· -Les Sceptiques grecs, ed. Jean-Paul Dumont, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1966. SOPHISTS

-Les Sophistes: Fragments et temoignages, ed. Jean-Paul Dumont, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1969. SPINOZA

-Zac (Sylvain), La Morale de Spinoza, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1972. SWEDENBORG

-Matter (M.), Emmanuel de Swedenborg: Sa vie, ses ecrits et sa doctrine, Paris, Didier, 1863. TAO

-Maspero (Henri), Melanges posthumes sur les religions et l'histoire de la Chine, vol. 2, Le Taoisme, Paris, SAEP, Publications du musee Guimet, 19 50. TOLSTOY

-La Guerre et la paix, Paris, Gallimard, coll. "Bibliotheque de la Pleiade," 1947· VALERY

-Monsieur Teste, Paris, Gallimard, 1929. VICO

-Michelet (Jules), Oeuvres choisies de Vico, Paris, Flammarion. -Chaix-Ruy (Jules), La Formation de la pensee philosophique de G. B. Vico, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, n.d.

1. In Guise of Epigraphs

For the whole course

--?

reading of four texts:

a. Joseph de Maistre: The Inquisition b. Tolstoy: The Night of Austerlitz c. Rousseau: Tuesday 24 October r776 d. Tao: Portrait of Lao-tzu 3


a. Joseph de Maistre

"Considerable noise has been made in Europe concerning the rack of the Inquisition, and the fiery ordeal with which crimes against religion have been punished. The infidels of France wasted much of their crocodile sympathy and philosophic pathos on the occasion; but their flimsy assertions are not proof against the powerful artillery of logic and facts. "The civil inquisitors resorted to the rack, in compliance with the national laws, and because it was adopted by all the Spanish tribunals. The Grecian and Roman laws had sanctioned it. Athens herself, who was universally believed to be somewhat acquainted with liberty, subjected even freemen to it. All modern nations have employed this terrible means to obtain the truth. I shall not, however, on the present occasion inquire whether all those who prattle about the Inquisition exactly understand, or sufficiently reflect upon, what they assert; and whether there were not as strong motives in those times for its employment as there are now for its suppression. However, since the rack is applicable to every other tribunal as well as to the Inquisition, I see no reason why the reproach of the entire should be visited upon the latter. < ... > Amidst the frightful display of the inquisitorial apparatus, it is merciful and mild; and the circumstance of the priesthood of the true Church being in any way concerned with this tribunal renders it unique. It wears on its standard a motto necessarily unknown to every tribunal upon earth,--"MISERICORDIA ET JUSTITIA" (Mercy and Justice.) . Justice alone characterizes the others, and mercy belongs only to the sovereign. Were judges to lean towards mercy, they might be considered rebels, who thus usurp the rights of sovereignty. But when the ecclesiastical power is called in, it requests, as a sine qua non, the free exercise of the sovereign prerogative. Mercy accordingly takes her seat with Justice, and even in allowed precedence. The accused, who is brought before this tribunal, is at liberty to plead guilty, to sue for pardon, and submit to a religious expiation. The crime then bears the character of sin, and punishment is commuted into penance. The culprit prays, fasts, and mortifies his body. Instead of going to the place of execution, he recites the penitential psalms, hears mass, duly examines the state of his conscience, becomes contrite, confesses his sins, and finally is restored to his family and to society. If the crime be enormous, if the culprit obstinately refuse to retract, if he will die sooner than to have it said that he

4


recanted his errors, or felt sorrow for his transgressions, the priest then retires; and when he reappears, it is for the special purpose of consoling the unfortunate victim on his way to the scaffold." 3

b. Tolstoy

"What's this? Am I falling? My legs are giving way," thought he, and fell on his back. He opened his eyes, hoping to see how the struggle of the Frenchmen with the gunners ended, whether the red-haired gunner had been killed or not and whether the cannon had been captured or saved. But he saw nothing. Above him there was now nothing but the sky-the lofty sky, not clear yet still immeasurably lofty, with gray clouds gliding slowly across it. "How quiet, peaceful, and solemn; not at all as I ran," thought Prince Andrew-"not as we ran, shouting and fighting, not at all as the gunner and the Frenchman with frightened and angry faces struggled for the mop: how differently do those clouds glide across the lofty infinite sky! How was it I did not see that lofty sky before? And how happy I am to have found it at last! Yes! All is vanity, all falsehood, except that infinite sky. There is nothing, nothing, but that. But even it does not exist, there is nothing but quiet and peace. Thank God! " 4

c. Rousseau "After lunch on Thursday, the 24th of October, 1776, I followed the boulevards as far as the Rue du Chemin-Vert which I took up to the heights of Menilmontant and from there, taking paths across the vineyards and meadows as far as Charonne, I crossed over the cheerful countryside which separates these two villages; then I made a detour in order to come back across the same meadows by taking a different route.< ... > I was on the road down from Menilmontant almost opposite the Gallant Jardinier at about six o'clock when some people walking ahead of me suddenly swerved aside and I saw a huge Great Dane rushing down upon me. Racing before a carriage, the dog had no time to check its pace or to turn aside when it noticed me. I judged that the only means I had to avoid being knocked to the ground was to make a great leap, so well-timed that the dog would pass under me while I was still in the air. This idea, quicker than a flash and which I had the time neither to think through nor carry out, was my last before my accident. I did not feel the blow, nor the fall, nor anything of what followed until the moment I came to.

5


"It was almost night when I regained consciousness. I found myself in the arms of three or four young people who told me what had just happened to me. The Great Dane, unable to check its bound < ... > 5 "Night was coming on. I perceived the sky, some stars, and a little greenery. This first sensation was a delicious moment. I still had no feeling of myself except as being 'over there.' I was born into life at the instant, and it seemed to me that I filled all the objects I perceived with my frail existence. Entirely absorbed in the present moment, I remembered nothing; I had no distinct notion of my person nor the least idea of what had just happened to me; I knew neither who I was nor where I was; I felt neither injury, fear, nor worry. I watched my blood flow as I would have watched a brook flow, without even suspecting that this blood belonged to me in any way. I felt a rapturous calm in my whole being; and each time I remember it, I find nothing comparable to it in all the activity of known pleasures. " 6

d. Portrait of Lao-tzu by Himself

"The others are as happy as if they were attending a banquet or were climbing a tower in springtime. I alone am quiet, my wishes are not apparent; I am like the child who has not yet smiled; I am sad and beaten as if I hadn't a secure place. The others have all the superfluity; I alone seem to have lost everything; my mind is that of a fool; what chaos! The others seem intelligent; I alone seem a naive. The others seem totally discerning; I alone am stupid. I seem tossed by the currents, as though I hadn't a place of rest. The others all have their labors; I alone am limited like a savage. I alone, I differ from the others in that I respect the Nourishing Mother." 7

2. Argument

I am going to post the object of this course, its argument, from the outset.

A. I define the Neutral as that which outplays {dejoue} the paradigm, or rather I call Neutral everything that baffles the paradigm. 8 For I am not trying to define a word; I am trying to name a thing: I gather under a name, which here is the Neutral. 6


The paradigm, what is that? It's the opposition of two virtual terms from which, in speaking, I actualize one to produce meaning. Examples: r. In Japanese: no opposition between l and r, simply an indecision of pronunciation, thus no paradigm"' in French !Ir, since "je !is" {I read} "' "je ris" {I laugh}: creation of meaning. Similarly (I have often given this example} 9 slz, for it is not the same thing to eat poisson {fish} or poison {poison}. This is phonological, but there are also semantic oppositions: white versus black. Put another way, according to the perspective of Saussure, to which, on this matter, I remain faithful, the paradigm is the wellspring of meaning; where there is meaning, there is paradigm, and where there is paradigm (opposition), there is meaning _.,. elliptically put: meaning rests on conflict (the choice of one term against another}, and all conflict is generative of meaning: to choose one and refuse the other is always a sacrifice made to meaning, to produce meaning, to offer it to be consumed. 2. Whence the idea of a structural creation that would defeat, annul, or contradict the implacable binarism of the paradigm by means of a third term_.,. the tertium: (a) In structural linguistics, Hjelmslev, Brondal, and phoneticians: 10 A/B _.,. A + B (complex) 11 and neither A nor B: amorphous, neutral term (phonological neutralization), 12 or zero degree. (b) Transposed to the "ethical" level: injunctions addressed by the world to "choose," to produce meaning, to enter conflicts, to "take responsibility," etc. _.,.temptation to suspend, to thwart, to elude the paradigm, its menacing pressure, its arrogance _.,. to exempt meaning _.,. this polymorphous field of paradigm, of conflict avoidance = the Neutral. We are going to grant ourselves the right to treat all conditions, conducts, affects, discourses (with no intention or even possibility of exhaustiveness) as far as they deal with conflict or its release, its parrying, its suspension. 3. My definition of the Neutral remains structural. By which I mean that, for me, the Neutral doesn't refer to "impressions" of grayness, of "neutrality," of indifference. The Neutral-my Neutral-can refer to intense, strong, unprecedented states. "To outplay the paradigm" is an ardent, burning activity.

B. Field

Lexically, the Neuter refers to the following fields: (1) Grammar: gender, neither masculine nor feminine, and verbs (Latin), neither active nor passive, or action without regime: 13 to walk, to die (al7


ways grammar's favorite example: good subject for a linguistic thesis: the grammar of "to die"! or of blows). 14 (2) Politics: those who don't take sides between contenders 15 (Neutral states). (3) Botany: neuter flower, flower in which the sexual organs constantly abort (not a pleasant image). (4) Zoology: the drones: which have no sexual organs, which can't mate. ( 5) Physics: neutral bodies, which don't have any electrical charge, conductors that aren't the seat of any current. (6) Chemistry: neutral salts, neither acidic nor basic. We will return to these canonical (in the Littre, in language) images of the Neuter, the basis of which is clearly gender related. 16 Our project is obviously not disciplinary: what we are in search of is the category of the Neutral insofar as it crosses language, discourse, gesture, action, the body, etc. However, to the extent that our Neutral defines itself in relation to the paradigm, to conflict, to choice, the general field of our reflections will be: ethics, that is, the discourse of the "good choice" (no political pun intended!), 17 or of the "nonchoice," or of the "lateral choice": discourse of the other of choice, the other of conflict, of paradigm. Ethics: word that might very well become fashionable (to be on guard!), if only because of the structural law of the turnover of the repressed: in Marx, in Freud, there is no ethical discourse: they did not give themselves (or didn't want to give themselves) the means to have one; or, rather, perhaps with them ethics as such is repressed. But in fact ethics is here, always, everywhere; simply, it is grounded, accepted, or repressed under different guises: crosses all discourses. Besides, if the word frightens: praxis (rests on proairesis). 18 I add: a reflection on the Neutral, for me: a manner-a free manner-to be looking for my own style of being present to the struggles of my time. 19

Litt re

Ethics

3. Processes of Preparation, of Exposition a. The Library

r. Topic. To prepare this course, I took the word "Neutral," insofar as its referent inside me is a stubborn affect (in fact, ever since Writing Degree Zero), 20 for a series of walks along a certain number of readings = the procedure of the topic: a grid over the surface of which one moves a "subject." Notice that the topical method is not as archaic an approach as it would seem: all the current "committed" discourses uses it: just take one of today's mana words, 21 "power," pair it with any other word and advertise:

Topic

8


"Power and Unconscious" (Verdiglione), "Power and Sexuality," 22 "Power and Still Life," etc. However, I hope (I dare to believe) that my topic is not so manic, for I took the Neutral for a walk not along the grid of words but along a network of readings, which is to say, of a library. This library, neither analytical (I didn't follow a bibliographic program: cf. the intertext that is handed to you) 23 nor exhaustive: infinite library: even now, I can read a new book in which certain passages will crystallize around the notion of Neutral as a whimsical sourcery: I read, the water-divining rod rises: there is Neutral underneath, and, for this very reason, the notion of the Neutral expands, inflects itself, modifies itself: I persist, and I transform myself at the same time. 2. Then, what library? That of my vacation home, 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. To describe this library, to explain its origin, would mean to enter into biography, familial history: library of a subject = a strong, complete identity, a "portrait" (cf. medicine chest). 24 I would only say, globally: classical (literary and philosophical) + a "humanistic" modernity that stops at WWII + an annex that comes from the touristic happenstances of my life. Two remarks: (I) The given of the references is arbitrary (egotistic library: cf. Egotistic Concert): 25 library that comes to me from an elsewhere (familial): huge, "typical" deficiencies, for example: nothing on Husserlian neutralization (I leave this deficiency as is); moreover, in this library, I made some very arbitrary choices of reading, I decided not to go against what I will call an aesthetic of work (a value ruled out by science): books whose inspiration and form are "unaesthetic"; I always want the material to be "racy," for example: in psychoanalysis, I continue to read some Freud or some Lacan, but Karen Horney or Reich, that falls outside my reading and thus outside my working sensibility: I don't "crystallize" (lover's word). (2) This library of dead authors ~ That could toll the funerary, retrograde bell (;,; doxa: to interest oneself in the present, to let the dead bury the dead, etc.). I don't take it that way: (a) Critical, creative distance: to get myself vividly interested in what is contemporaneous to me, I might need the detour through death (History); Michelet's example: absolutely present to his century but working on the "life" of the Dead: I make the dead think in myself: the living surround me, penetrate me, lock me up precisely in an echo chamber-of which I am more or less conscious-but only the Dead are creative objects= we all are caught up in "fashions," and they are

Urt

9


useful; but only death is creative. Cf. the wisdom of that capitalist (I forget his name) who is said to be sponsoring the Communist Party: 26 being asked how he was dealing with the reading of Solzhenitsyn, he answered: I read Marx, Lenin, "I only read the dead." (b) To read the dead author is, for me, to be alive, for I am shattered, torn by the awareness of the contradiction between the intense life of his text and the sadness of knowing he is dead: I am always saddened by the death of an author, moved by the story of the deaths of authors (Tolstoy, Gide).27 _,,.To mourn is to be alive.

b. Figures_,. "The Neutral in Thirty Figures" I. As I did last year: series (sequence) of fragments, each of which is given a title = the figures of the Neutral. Figure: rhetorical allusion (= a circled piece of discourse, identifiable since titleable) + face that has an "air," an "expression": fragment not on the Neutral but in which, more vaguely, there is some Neutral, a little like those rebus drawings in which one must look for the silhouette of the hunter, of the rabbit, etc. A dictionary not of definitions but of twinklings {scintillations}. 2. Why? Why this discontinuous exposition? Perhaps inability on my part to "construct" a development, a course? Inability or disgust? (Who can distinguish between inability and the lack of taste?) Perhaps my reasons, just alibis? (r) The sequence of fragments: it would put "something" (the subject, the Neutral?) in a state of continuous flux (instead of articulating it with a view to a final meaning): relation to contemporary music, where the "contents" of forms matter less than their circulation, and also perhaps to the current research of Deleuze. 28 (2) Each figure: as if one were establishing a bridgehead: after that everybody is free to scatter in the countryside: his own countryside. Accepted principle of nonexhaustivity: to create a projective space, ignoring the law of the syntagm. (3) The Neutral as such requires that the sequence of figures be unstructured, inasmuch as it embodies the refusal to dogmatize: the exposition of the nondogmatic cannot itself be dogmatic. Inorganization = inconclusion. (4) Institution, course _,,. they prepare a site of mastery. Now, always my problem: to outsmart mastery (the "parry"). Juxtaposition of figures: experiments with a "paradox" formulated by the Tao. For the Tao is "simultaneously the path to travel and the end

The Fragment

Continuous variation

Projective space

Nondogmatic

Mastery

Tao, Grenier, 14

10


of the travel, the method and the achievement. There is no distinction between the means and the aim < ... > scarcely has one started on the path, than one has traversed it entirely" 29 ___,, each figure is at the same time search for the Neutral and performance of the Neutral(>' demonstration). Paradoxical category of discourses with no outcome: or, better, that do not censure effects but do not care about results. This discredited by the law of Western discourse. Bacon: "Aristotle< ... > ingeniously but hurtfully derides the Sophists of his time, saying. 'They acted like a professed shoe-maker, who did not teach the art of shoe-making, but set out a large stock of shoes of different shapes and sizes."' 30 I don't construct the concept of Neutral, I display Neutrals. 3. Within each figure, the matter is neither of explaining nor of defining but only of describing (in a nonexhaustive manner): To describe = to "unthread" a word (the title of each figure), whence the frequent recourse to etymology. Ancient word that can serve as metaphor: parfiler {to unthread}: Voltaire, "La Toilette de Mme de Pompadour" (1765, Melanges): "Newton a parfile {unthreaded} the sun's light, as our ladies parfilent {unthread} a cloth of gold.-What is parfiler, sir?-Madame, the equivalent of this word is not to be found in Cicero's discourses. It's to unthread a fabric, to unweave it thread by thread to separate out the gold. " 31 To describe, to unthread what? The nuances. In fact, I would want, if it were in my power, to look at the figure-words (beginning with the Neutral) with a skimming gaze that would make the nuances come out (increasingly rare commodity, true displaced luxury of language; in Greek= diaphora, a Nietzschean word). 32 Make no mistake: this is not about more intellectual sophistication. What I am looking for, during the preparation of this course, is an introduction to living, a guide to life (ethical project): I want to live according to nuance. Now, there is a teacher of nuance, literature; try to live according to the nuances that literature teaches me ("My tongue on his skin,. my lips on his hand") 33 _.,.chair of literary semiology= (r) Literature: codex of nuances+ (2) Semiology: listening to or watching for nuances. 4. Chance. In what order to put the figures, since the meaning must not gel? Ancient question, emerging on the occasion of each new work, in particular here last year, all the more vivid this year as the Neutral is the shedding of meaning: all "planning" (thematic grouping) on the Neutral would fatally lead to an opposition between the Neutral and arrogance, that is, to reconstituting the very paradigm that the Neutral wants to baffle: the Neutral would be-

Bacon, Advancement of

Learning, book 5, 148 (chap. 3)

Describe

Unthread

Nuance

11


come discursively the term of an antithesis: in displaying itself, it would consolidate the meaning it wanted to dissolve. Thus arbitrary process of sequencing. Last year: the alphabet. This year, reinforcement of chance: Title -"' Alphabetical Order -"' Numbering -"' Lottery draw: table of random numbers: table no. 9 of the Statistics Institute of the University of Paris (Revue de statistique appliquee 7, no. 4 [1959]). Series of two-digit numbers in ten columns: I followed the numbers horizontally, according to the direction of reading: pure and simple chance. 34 I would like to call attention to the fact that my repeated efforts to use and to justify an aleatory exposition (breaking from the "dissertation" form) have never had any echo. It's fine to comment, to discuss the concept of fragment, it's fine to have a theory of the fragment-I am regularly interviewed about it-but no one realizes what a problem it is to decide in what order to put them. There is the real problem of the fragment: just think about the importance of this problem for Pascal's Pensees or for the dialectic of the plan and of the no-plan in Nietzsche's writing (notably The Will to Power). For me, still in the stage of infancy: "electronic" chance= solution.

4. The Desire for Neutral

a. Pathos All that: dispassionate apparatus of intellectual nature: the argument of the course + principles of exposition. It remains to bring out the truth of the course: the desire that is its origin and that it stages. The course exists because there is a desire for Neutral: a pathos (a patho-logy?) r. Recall the inaugural lecture: 35 the promise that each year the course, the research, would overtly spring from a personal fantasy. In short: I desire the Neutral, therefore I postulate the Neutral. He who desires, postulates (hallucinates). 2. The topical, exhaustive, final description of this desire for Neutral doesn't belong to me: it is my enigma, which is to say, what of me can only be seen by the others. I can only make out, in the undergrowth of myself, the cave where it opens and deepens. Thus I propose that the desire for Neutral is desire for:

Desire

Suspensions

-first: suspension (epoche) of orders, laws, summons, arrogances, terrorisms, puttings on notice, the will-to-possess. -then, by way of deepening, refusal of pure discourse of opposition. Suspension of narcissism: no longer to be afraid of images 12


(imago): 36 to dissolve one's own image (a wish that borders on the

negative mystical discourse, or Zen or Tao). 3. The desire for the Neutral continually stages a paradox: as an object, the Neutral means suspension of violence; as a desire, it means violence. Throughout the length of the course, it will be necessary to understand that there is a violence of the Neutral but that this violence is inexpressible; that there is a passion of the Neutral but that this passion is not that of a will-to-possess _..,. I sometimes recognize this passion in myself through the calm with which I witness the display of "wills-to-possess," of dogmatisms. But this is discontinuous, erratic, as desire always is: this is not about a wisdom but about a desire. As a general rule, desire is always marketable: we don't do anything but sell, buy, exchange desires. The paradox of the desire for the Neutral, its absolute singularity, is that it is nonmarketable _..,. People tell me: "You'll make a book with this course on the Neutral?" All other problems put aside (particularly problems of performance), my answer: No, the Neutral is the unmarketable. And I think of Eloy's words: "there is nothing perfectly beautiful except what is invisible and above all unbuyable. " 37 _..,. "Invisible"? I would say: "unsustainable" _..,.We'll have to hold on to the unsustainable for thirteen weeks: after that, it will fade.

Paradox

Violence

Non marketable

b. The Wirelike Sharpness of Mourning

To conclude these preliminaries, and before letting the figures of the Neutral roam, it seems to me that I should say something about the situation of the Neutral, of the desire for Neutral in my current life-for there is no truth that is not tied to the moment. Between the moment I chose the subject of this course (last May) and the moment I had to prepare it, there entered my life, some of you know it, a serious event, a mourning: 38 the subject who will speak of the Neutral is no longer the same as the one who had decided to speak of it _..,. Initially, it was a matter of speaking of the suspension of conflicts, and that's still what we are going to speak of since one doesn't alter a posting of the College; but, underneath this discourse whose argument and whose approach I just presented, it seems to me that today I myself hear, in fleeting moments, another music. Which one: I would locate it, its elsewhereness, in the following way: as a second question that separates itself from a first one, as a second Neutral that is glimpsed behind a first Neutral: 13


r. The first question, the first Neutral, announced subject of

the course, is the difference that separates the will-to-live from the will-to-possess: the will-to-live being then recognized as what transcends the will-to-possess, as the drifting far from arrogance: I leave the will-to-possess, I move in the will-to-live. 39 2. The second question, the second Neutral, implicit subject of the course, is the difference that separates this already decanted will-to-live from vitality. __., Pasolini, in a poem, says that the last thing that remains to him is "a desperate vitality" 40 __.,desperate vitality is the hatred of death. What is it then that sets retreat from arrogance apart from hated death? It's this difficult, incredibly strong, and almost unthinkable distance that I call the Neutral, the second Neutral. In the end, its essential form is a protestation; it consists of saying: it matters little to me to know if God exists or not; but what I know and will know to the end is that He shouldn't have simultaneously created love and death. The Neutral is this irreducible No: a No so to speak suspended in front of the hardenings of both faith and certitude and incorruptible by either one.

Benevolence 1. Benevolentia

Start with voluntas. This word: an ideologically interesting slippage. Voluntas = goodwill, benevolence __., "will," only once a philosophical vocabulary had been created (Cicero). In short, originally: voluntas = studium: to have the taste, the attachment, the zeal for something or for someone. Therefore: presence of desire; then, "aseptic" evolution, either toward the hardness of the concept (voluntas), since the concept is without desire, or toward sublimation (taste, desire for things). Trace of desire in Italian: Ti voglio bene: familiar, romantic, adolescent: hesitant passage from tender affection into love: desire for the other's strong presence (cf. Stammi bene: porte-toi bien pour moi {take care of yourself for my sake}) __., Ti voglio bene can't be translated by je veux bien {I don't mind} (alter avec toi {going with you}), which implies a kind of passive acceptance, an indifference that eventually consents to a prior request from the other. Would be better translated by je voudrais bien {I would love} (alter avec toi (to go with you}): note the cunning of language that makes the conditional a stronger mode of desire than the indicative: je voudrais bien "' je veux bien = I am the one who

Etymology

14


demands ---.. Benevolentia doesn't go as far as Ti voglio bene yet paradoxically corresponds to its word-for-word translation: I accept not to be blocked by your request, your person: I don't refuse, without necessarily wanting to: exactly the position of the Neutral, which is not absence, refusal of desire, but possible wavering of desire outside of will-to-possess. Perhaps two benevolences (depending on the readings): the damp and the dry.

2. Dry and Damp r. "Damp": on the side of demand: "kindness" {gentillesse) so as to be loved; diffuse aura of amiability. Walter Benjamin: experience of Hin Marseilles: feeling of benevolence: "Only a certain benevolence, the expectation of being received kindly by people. " 41 Typical feature of H, at least literarily: Baudelaire: "benevolence holds a rather large place < ... > a slow, lazy, inarticulate benevolence that derives from a tendering of the nerves." 42 and elsewhere: "a most singular benevolence and goodwill, a kind of philanthropy, that extends even to strangers, and is made more of pity than of love < ... > that goes even to the point of fear of hurting anyone at all" 43 ---.. Image: the body's emotivity ("the nerves") transformed into feeling: visibly on the side of the affect of being in love: desire sublimated by diffusion, wavering---.. Agape. 44 2. "Dry." This tenderness ;e benevolence according to the Tao. A stiff benevolence, because rooted in indifference. For the sage, everything is equal. Refrains from exerting a function. If he is obliged to do it, treats the "good" and the "bad" evenly, as if they both were children---.. His "goodness": nothing of Agape and nothing of the tender benevolence (under H): a kind of condescending and soft benevolence, a "transcendent" goodness. (I feel this "benevolence" for people who are such strangers to me that I have no occasion for internal conflict with them= total and peaceable incommunication.)

Benjamin, 138

Baudelaire, 47-48, 72

Tao, Grenier, 110

3. Emotion and Distance

Subject prey to benevolence: strongly aware of this double postulation, the first of which he doesn't trust, while he doesn't like the second 45 ---.. finds himself confronted with an aporia: wishing for a logical "monster," the right mix of emotion and distance: emotion, mark of Agape, acknowledgment of desire, (unsuppressed) anchor-

Distance

15


age in the body, and distance, guarantee that one doesn't crush the other under the stickiness of a demand, that one in no way blackmails him into tenderness _,. in short, a well-behaved Eros, "restrained," "reserved" (in the sense of coitus reservatus). Let's recall that withholding is an erotic principle of the Tao (more sensual here than in its conception of dry benevolence). Put another way: Benevolence =Agape imbued with Eros. Now, strangely, one of the initiators of negative theology, Dionysius the Areopagite, persists, while speaking of sublime, divine love, in using the word Eros (desiring love), which he prefers to Agape (charitable love); because Eros implies ekstasis: 46 carries lovers out of themselves, pushes God to produce the universe. And Gregory of Nyssa (another negative mystic): Eros is the ecstatic apex of Agape_,. In short, benevolence = an Agape tightened by Eros and restrained by a Tao principle.

Agape Eros

Denys,38, 104

Weariness Let's look at the knot, the etymological spectrum. Weariness: 47 three words in Latin: Labor, Lassitudo, Fatigatio (or Defatigatio). At the crossroads of two images: a. Labor (painful work, mostly rural word, engages the whole body) _,. probably, labo: to slip so as to fall (cf. lapsus); burden under which one totters. Labor: animated genre, active force. Lassitudo, cf. lassus: the one who bends, who falls forward _,.perhaps laedo, to wound, to harm, to wear out. _,. General image of sagging, of one's being squashed. b. Fatigo: to wear out {faire crever)(horses). Cf. French: etre creve {to be exhausted}. We easily reconstruct the image: "burst," by blow or pressure, following which a slow, progressive deflation; fullness that empties; walls whose tension slackens. The topical image = that of the flat tire that deflates. Cf. the older Gide: I am a tire that flattens. 48 In the very image, an idea of duration: what doesn't stop leaning, emptying itself. It's the paradoxical infinity of weariness: the endless process of ending.

Etymology

Gide Tire

1. Placeless

Social (linguistico-social) value of weariness (but, alas, linguistic science doesn't attend, any more than sociology, to these decisive

16


nuances _,. thus nothing more than a kind of intuitive, empirical exploration): Tied to work (labor). But it seems that, in the current social field, it is hard to connect "weariness" with the worker's, the farmer's, the employee's manual or assimilated type of work. Class condition? In any case, caste condition: mythically associated with the work of the head, which is exposed to deflation, exhaustion. This raises the problem of the place of weariness in society. What is the place of a lesion of the (total) body in the (socially) recognized table of illnesses? Is weariness an illness or not? Is it a nosological reality? Lacking a good study of medical language (an idea in the air, seminar at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales two years ago, seminar of Clavreul, 49 but to my knowledge no lexicographically usable outcome), let us listen intuitively to language:

Work

a. Depression is increasingly recognized as a nosological reality (perhaps through the creation of a-supposedly-relevant pharmacopeia): one can have sick leaves for "depression" (exemptions from military service, etc.). b. But weariness? Try this experiment: draw up a table of received (credible) excuses: you want to cancel a lecture, an intellectual task: what excuses will be beyond suspicion, beyond reply? Weariness? Surely not. Flu? Bad, banal. A surgical operation? Better, but watch out for the vengeance of fate! Cf. the way society codifies mourning in order to assimilate it: after a few weeks, society will reclaim its rights, will no longer accept mourning as a state of exception: requests will begin again as if it were incomprehensible that one could refuse them: too bad if mourning disorganizes you longer than stated by the code. Society has always coded the duration of mourning: "Manners," in the Memento Larousse (end of the nineteenth century): father or mother: eighteen months; at least it was a generous large-scale framework. Today, the right to mourning very reduced _,. right to mourning: to be inscribed in the social claims (utopias?): sick leave for pregnancy, for mourning ...

Mourning

Thus weariness is not coded, is not received = always functions in language as a mere metaphor, a sign without referent (cf. Chimera)50 that is part of the domain of the artist (of the intellectual as artist) _,. unclassified, therefore unclassifiable: without premises, without place, socially untenable _,. whence Blanchot's (weary!) cry: "I don't ask that weariness be done away with. I ask to be led back to a region where it might be possible to be weary." 51 _,.

Blanchot, Conversation, xx

17


Weariness = exhausting claim of the individual body that demands the right to social repose (that sociality in me rest a moment= topical theme of the Neutral). In fact, weariness = an intensity: society doesn't recognize intensities.

Individual

2. What Wearies

Everyone should try to make a chart of his weariness: at what moments, under what circumstances, am I "a tire that deflates,'' with on top of it the feeling that, if this is the case, I will deflate indefinitely? I will signal-among many-one (subjective) weariness: r. Conversation. I will read a text written in the "I" mode, a little diary fragment (summer '77). (My excuse: we have to choose between egotistic discourse and terroristic discourse): "Visit from

Conversation

X; in the room next door, he speaks interminably to my mother. I don't dare close the door. What wearies me is not the noise; it's the banality of the conversation (ah, if he could speak a language unknown to me and which would be musical!). I am always surprised (stunned) by the tireless character of others. The energy-and above all the linguistic energy-stuns me: for me, it's like a mark of madness. The other, is the indefatigable. " 52 Indeed, it seems to me, conversation embodies what is perpetual about language (perpetual adoration): 53 strength of a form raised to the scale of the species: monstrous strength from which I feel excluded as an individual (unless I make myself another chatterbox!). However, when confronted with a conversation, a means for me to regain control, to retake a grip on myself: no longer to hear it but to listen to it: at another level, to receive it as a novelistic object, a linguistic spectacle, with an artistic self-distancing. It's why conversations with strangers (in the train, for instance) less fatiguing (for me) than conversations with friends: I am able to take control of my exclusion by looking at the picture. 2. What is at stake in conversation is finding my place in relation to language when it is performed by others: it wearies me to have to look for (and not to find) my place (conversations with strangers), but this weariness is converted (language of rugby) if I'm asked not to take up a place (in a game) but only to float in a space _,.place "'space. _,.Also, another form of weariness: that of the "position," of the "relation to": "How do you situate yourself with regard to Marxism, Freudianism, to x, toy?" "What is your position in this

Perpetuity

Exclusion

Sitio

Space

18


debate?" Weariness: the demand for a position. The present-day world is full of it (statements, manifestos, petitions, etc.), and it's why it is so wearisome: hard to float, to shift places. (However, to float, i.e., to live in a space without tying oneself to a place = the most relaxing position of the body: bath, boat.)

Signing

19



Weariness (Continued) 3. Rightness of Weariness Just a quotation from Blanchot (The Infinite Conversation): "Weariness is the most modest of misfortunes, the most neutral of neutrals; an experience that, if one could choose, no one would choose out of vanity. 0 neutral, free me from my weariness, lead me to that which, though preoccupying me to the point of occupying everything, does not concern me.-But this is what weariness is, a state that is not possessive, that absorbs without putting into question. " 1 That is very well put, nothing to add besides weariness: the price one has to pay in order not to be arrogant?

Blanchot Neutral

4. Weariness as Work, as Game, as Creation I said: social basis. Weariness: a fact of caste. Faced with weariness, or coping with it-among others-three possible ways of using it. a. Weariness as Work

Paradox noted by Blanchot (The Infinite Conversation): "It seems that, however weary you may be, you still accomplish your task, quite properly. One might say that not only does weariness not impede the work, but the work demands this being weary without measure. " 2 __.,,. This is why one could say that weariness does not constitute an empirical time, a crisis, an organic event, a muscular episode-but a quasi-metaphysical dimension, a sort of bodily (and not conceptual) idea, a mental kinesthesia: the tactile experience, the very touch of endlessness: I use its infiniteness as an accompaniment of my work. Here, one grasps this: fatigue: in one sense, the opposite of death, since death-the unthinkable definitive ;: fatigue, the infinitude but livable in the body.

Blanchot Work

b. Weariness as Game

I said that weariness was deprived of the socially recognized power of excusing. Which means that I often, that we often think of weariness 20

as a possible excuse: we would like to use it as a piece in the social game of dodges, of protections. This is well put with regard to Gide (Cahiers de la Petite Dame, 170). (1950: Gide is eighty-one, he is going to die a year later): "A very subtle game takes place between the deep and real fatigue that he often feels and the way in which he sometimes plays with it, unconsciously sheltering behind it when the moment of necessary and disagreeable explanations comes . 3 Then, he gets out of it by declaring: 'But basically all that doesn't matter to me (which is only half true); I only ask for one thing, that they leave me in peace."' 4 Right: just remember that this is the time when Gide declares that he feels like "a tire that deflates." What could a flat tire ask for, if not to be left alone! _,.The game is not only social: one can, in addition to "playing with one's weariness," "play one's weariness" by turning it into discourse. It's what Gide does: invincible form of speech: the metaphor (of the tire), and it's what Blanchot does. Perhaps it's what I do myself in devoting a figure of the course to it.

Gide Play

Position

c. Weariness as Creation Pyrrho. A figure whom we will often reencounter, a figure of choice for me (fourth-third century), is Pyrrho, 5 that's to say the Pyrrhonian (and not the founder of Pyrrhonism, since his attitude was precisely asystematic, adogmatic), out of weariness: he was worn out by all the words of the Sophists and, a little like Gide, asked to be left in peace. In so doing, in assuming his weariness-the speech of others as excessive, as oppressive-he created something: I won't specify what because as a matter of fact it was neither a philosophy nor a system; I could say: he created the Neutral-as if he had read Blanchot! Weariness is thus creative, from the moment, perhaps, when one agrees to submit to its orders. The right to weariness (but what is as stake here is not a problem of health coverage) thus shares in the new: new things are born out of lassitude-from being fed up {ras-le-bol}. Exit weariness.

Pyrrho Sophists Ciao

Silence 1. Sileo and Taceo

In classical Latin, same meaning: to keep quiet, to be silent. But earlier, interesting nuance: tacere = verbal silence "' silere: stillness, 21


absence of movement and of noise. Is used for objects, night, the sea, winds. ~ Hence a series of very beautiful ordinary metaphors: the moon turned invisible at its waning, the bud or the tendril that hasn't yet opened up, the egg that is not yet hatched: silet, sileunt. In short, silere would refer to a sort of timeless virginity of things, before they are born or after they have disappeared (silentes = the dead). This "silence" of nature draws near Boehme's mystical vision of God. For Boehme, God "in himself": goodness, purity, liberty, silence, eternal light without shadows or oppositions, homogeneous, "calm and voiceless eternity." However, the silere of Boehme's God makes him unknowable, since silere in short = preparadigmatic condition, without sign. God, deprived of paradigm, cannot manifest himself, cannot reveal himself even to himself: "a pure will is as thin as a nothing" :6 ~ God provides himself with a paradigm, he gives himself a contrarium: a sevenfold "nature" (symbolism of the

Boehme, 260, 245

7, Apocalypse [7 angels, 7 luminaries], Kabbala [the 7 Sephiroth]),7 itself articulated around two dynamic centers (and later into paradigm): the devouring fire, the wrath of the Father, orge, ira, 8 mortal anguish/clarifying light, the Son: the enparadigmization {mise en paradigme} (of God by Himself and in Himself) obviously coincides with the apparition of the Word: there begins language, the act of speaking, the production of speech (locutio: always this insupportable slippage of language-particularly in French: essentializing, substantivizing, which transforms production into product, utterance into statement, the speech-act into speech-sentence). Tacere (here I mix, unduly it goes without saying, the Latin etymological series and the Boehmian mystical series), tacere thus, as silence of speech, is opposed to silere, as silence of nature or of divinity; then, last avatar, the two equalize, become synonyms, but to the benefit of tacere: nature is so to speak sacrificed to speech: there is no longer silence outside speech, if not poetically, archaically: "Everything was silent." We can return from the remoteness of etymology or redescend from the heights of mysticism without losing the paradigm sileo/ taceo; as everyone knows, speech, the exercise of speech, is tied to the problem of power: it's the theme of the right to speech. There was in Greek (because there was in the institutions) a word for this legal right: isegoria: 9 the right for everyone to speak in the assembly. The problem still occupies the front stage: the claim for speech, the suppressions of speech. But backstage, or downstage, on the side, another demand tries to make itself heard (but how?): the right to silence (cf. American jukeboxes, records of silence). The right to

Locutio

Power lsegoria, Finley, 19

22


be quiet, the right not to listen: that rings paradoxical today. Ah" here, a reversal: what is taking the shape of a collective, almost political-in any case, threatened by politics-demand is the right to nature's peacefulness, the right to silere, not the right to tacere: here we find ecology, the ecological movement; but the hunting down of pollutions (I dislike the word because, since in Sade pollution means ejaculation, masturbation, to complain about it takes on a moral connotation) never addresses, or at least not yet, or at least not to my knowledge, pollution by speech, the polluting words _,. therefore tacere, as a right, still remains in the margin of the margins (which is where the true combat should be fought, infinitely). _,. Neutral = postulates a right to be silent-a possibility of keeping silent.

Pollution Ecology

2. To Outplay Speech

Silence (i.e., after my precisions =keeping quiet, not speaking): tactic to outplay oppressions, intimidations, the dangers of speaking, of the locutio. I will mention two modes of the tacere:

a. To Keep Silent as Worldly Tactic

There is of course a whole worldly "morality" that recommends silence as a way of avoiding the traps of speech = theme of classical ethics, dissimulation: Bacon (Francis), Essays Civil and Moral. Art of veiling and of hiding oneself_,. three modes or degrees: (r) reserved man, discreet and silent, who doesn't give any purchase on himself and doesn't let himself be found out; (2) "negative" dissimulation (it would be better to say "denializing" {denegatrice}): misleading signs_,. to look other than one really is; (3) "positive" or "affirmative" dissimulation = to pretend expressly, to claim formally to be other than one is _,. Bacon recommends a tactical use of these three degrees: "The best composition and temperature is to have openness in fame and opinion; secrecy in habit; dissimulation in seasonable use; and a power to feign, if there be no remedy." 10 _,. This is of course about an external silence, either general (a taciturn, "discreet" man) or topical (being silent about something, if needed by saying something else). On these premises, a whole complex of worldly morality develops-one might say a microideology (as we talk about microclimate)-that can be subsumed under the vague concept of "Jesuit

Bacon

Dissimulation

Subterfuge

23


morality": the "inner reservation": "to make use of linguistic ambiguities and inner reservations is permitted without sin." 11 Interesting from the semiological point of view: silence is not a sign, properly speaking; it doesn't refer to a signified: it is there like the tacet in a score (violin); 12 syntagmatic value: in discourse, I insert blanks, not for their own sake but in relation to what I am thinking: therefore, syntagmatic value in a polyphony of at least three voices: what I think +what I do or do not say +what the other receives (because my "silence" is not necessarily received as "silence"!). In such a "semiology" of worldly morality, silence has in fact a "speakerly" or "speechly" substance: it is always at the level of the implicit. When in the field of worldliness, of strong sociality (and what else is it but an excessively social, worldly language?), the implicit (and the silence that works as its "index") 13 takes part in the worldly combat: It is a polyvalent weapon: ( l) the Jesuits accept it as the weapon that permits one to be both worldly and Christian; (2) the Inquisition, to the contrary, saw in the implicit a weapon directed against true faith. Torquemada (1420-1498) extends the competence of the Holy Office to crimes and misdemeanors such as "implicit heresy," which refers not to a language that is outspokenly against the church (silent on this topic) but to a subject who is silently heretical through his conduct (bigamy, stealing from the church, blasphemers, married priests, etc.): obvious goal: to extend the jurisdiction of the church to nonverbal offenses that would normally be addressed in part in civil suits 14 _,, formidable: in fact, in every "totalitarian" or "totalizing" society, the implicit is a crime, because the implicit is a thought that escapes power; thus it's the zero degree, the signifying place, the joker of all crimes: "imprisoned by reason of implicitness"-or, better, "condemned by reason of silence." Church: "hard" tradition of "saying everything conformingly": Augustine and the obligation always to say the whole truth, whatever the consequences (let's recall: Augustine: a sort of "exemplary" intolerance with regard to the Donatists) 15 _,, Jansenism, Protestantism: moral "rigor" =expulsion of the implicit, of inner reservation. _,, Secularization of the rejection of the implicit, morality of frankness (Scouts, of Protestant origin). We now have a political resurgence of it. Political = unsaid _,, Therefore one ceaselessly says that one says everything. Raymond Barre bragging about being lucid and frank + Marchais's book: "Let's speak frankly." 16 For me, the only acceptable form of the "frank": overheard in a cafe (in relation to a trick to make a car run better): "Frankly, I don't know."

Jesuits

Vico, Chaix-Ruy, 13

Implicit heresy;

Inquisition, p. 74

Tolerance

Frankness

24


__,.How many times, in our lives, do we have to deal with "frank" people (that's to say, who show off being so): in general, that precedes a small "attack": one clears oneself (in a tactless way) of one's own tactlessness; but the worst about frankness is that in general it is an open door, and wide open, onto stupidity. To me, it seems difficult to have the proposition "I will be frank" followed by anything else but a stupid statement 17 __,.There is a certain complicity between tact and the Implicit, the silence of the tacere.

Tact Stupidity

b. Keeping Silent as the Obligation of an Inner "Morality": The Silence of the Skeptic

Hegelian interpretation (Hegel, Kojeve) of Skepticism (we will have many occasions to return to this): the basis of Skepticism is psychological (it's not a "philosophy," it is not in search of the concept): witness the coexistence of a mass of contradictory "myths," axioms, and undemonstrable theories, which contradict each other: philosophical systems (Plato, Aristotle) 18 =mere opinions: the sayings of a philosopher don't differ in any essential way from those of the man on the street. (Even if we were to adhere to Skepticism, at least one difference between Plato and the man on the street: the artist.) Philosopher or not, man speaks by contradicting what others say and there is no way of deciding between them. __,. It's a "nihilism." Now, from the fact that the reasons are "equivalent" (isosthenia, antilogia), 19 the Skeptics (Timon) 20 infer silence (aphasia: 21 science of the tacere). This silence: nihilistic appearance of the "empty" (of reasons, of implications) mystical silence. All that, picked up again (with a moral emphasis) by the later doctrinaire of Skepticism, Sextus Empiricus (Sextus the Physician: middle of the third century after Christ): "When a Skeptic chooses to remain silent, he isn't searching for a comfortable refuge in the midst of doubt or for a means of avoiding error. To the contrary, he is only reflecting the state of balance of his soul when confronted with uncertain representations and submitted to equal contrary forces" :22 __,. this silence thus is psychological (concerning the "soul"), logical (inferred from the contradiction between "truths"), and ethical (aimed at providing rest, ataraxia). Notice, it's important, that the Skeptical silence is a silence not of the mouth (the Skeptics speak like anyone else) but of "thought," of "reason," of the implicit system that underlies and articulates all philosophy, all declaration, all noncontingent discourse __,. speech: accepted in its superficial, contingent forms. What's objected to is systematic

Skepticism Psychology Concept Kojeve, 25

Sceptiques, 48

Kairos

25


(dogmatic) speech; in the end, we could say that "chatter," being a discourse of pure contingency, is a form of silence insofar as it outplays words (this should be said carefully, because chatterboxes are bores).

Chatter

Dogmatism

3. Silence as Sign

As we know, in music, silence is as important as sound: it is a sound, or, again, it is a sign. Here, we reencounter a process that struck me as early as Writing Degree Zero 23 and has obsessed me ever since: what is produced against signs, outside of signs, what is expressly produced so as not to be a sign is very quickly recuperated as a sign. That's what happens to silence: one would like to reply to dogmatism (heavy system of signs) with something that outplays signs: silence. But silence itself takes on the form of an image, of a "wise," heroic, or Sibylline, more or less Stoic posture: it's a drape -"' fatality of the sign: it is stronger than the individual. -"' File to be opened, to be constituted (if it isn't done already}: silence as sign. I think of this file (I offer it to whomever wants it). 24 For now, three index cards that might open in two "methodological" directions:

Dogmatism

r. Silence is the signifier of a full signified: the alms bowl of the Buddhist monks (Percheron): "On receiving the alms, for which he has not begged in words, the monk expresses no thanks. " 25 -"' Silence refers to a two-pronged signified: (a)= "request" (ah, all the silences-requests! what a file!) + b) -"' "sovereignty": nonhumiliating request; free, sovereign request. 2. Silence = caught in an "extended" paradigm, which is to say, both paradigmatic and syntagmatic: the one who is taciturn ¢ those who speak -"' anecdote (Bacon, Advancement of Learning, book 8, chap. r}:"There goes an old tradition< ... > that many Grecian philosophers had a solemn meeting before the ambassador of a foreign prince, where each endeavored to show his parts, that the ambassador might have somewhat to relate of the Grecian wisdom; but one among the number kept silence , so that the ambassador, turning to him asked: 'But what have you to say, that I may report it?' He answered: 'Tell your king that you have found one among the Greeks who knew how to be silent."' 26 Notice the paradox: silence only becomes sign if one makes it speak, if one doubles it with a caption that gives it a meaning; we could say that, less stupid, the ambassador of the prince

Buddhism

Bacon

26


would have been able to find the meaning by himself, a polysemic meaning moreover ("There are also silent Greeks" + "This silence is a philosophical discourse" + "The others [my competitors] are all chatterboxes" + "You don't impress me," etc.); but, of course, the story is meant for us; it's a "narrateme," and, as such, it matters little whether it is about silence.

4. To Outplay Silence

Silence: initially, weapon assumed to outplay the paradigms (the conflicts) of speech; then congeals itself into a sign (which is to say, is caught up in a paradigm): thus the Neutral, meant to parry paradigms, will-paradoxically-end up trying to outplay silence (as sign, as system). r. Problem of behavior, modestly but very well framed by Kafka (Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation): "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" :27 a familiar anxiety, I believe, for most of us: I have to say something, no matter what, etc., otherwise they'll think I'm bored (which is, in any case, the truth, etc.). Here, the cost of the sign is quantified: how many repetitions are required for a sign either to be constituted-or to outplay the opposing sign ("I am not silent")?__.,,. the Neutral would be defined not by permanent silence-which, being systematic, dogmatic, would become the signifier of an affirmation ("I am systematically taciturn")28-but by the minimal expenditure of a speech act meant to neutralize silence as a sign? 2. This fully understood by Pyrrho. Pyrrho, not to be confused with dogmatic Skepticism. We have seen paragraph 2, b: silence as the systematic element of Skepticism, as the logical conclusion of antilogia. But Pyrrho's own position is pragmatic, antisystematic __.,,. a kind of signpost: ouden mallon: 29 "neither this nor that," "neither yes nor no." For us, that would come down to saying nothing at all, if not "maybe yes, maybe no," because for us the yes differs absolutely from the no. Pyrrho's reasoning more radical (more sovereign): if it is equal to say yes or no, why not say one or the other or even both rather than keeping quiet by saying neither the one nor the other (to say one and the other~ case of "scatterbrained" discourses or replies, useful for outplaying the speech/silence paradigm; see "Beside-the-point replies") __.,,. absolutely equal to keep

Blanchot Kafka

Pyrrho Kojeve, 26

Beside-the-point reply

27


quiet or to speak, to say one thing or its contrary __,. the Pyrrhonian doesn't contradict himself when he speaks or keeps quiet according to the occasion, which is to say, like everyone else does: what's important for him (the Neutral isn't far) =that the game of speech and silence not be systematic: that, to oppose dogmatic speech, one not produce an equally dogmatic silence. 3. This: a pragmatic of silence = problems of intraworldly behavior, from the Jesuits to Pyrrho (who obsessed Pascal at least as much as the Jesuits did). However, of course, language isn't limited to books, 30 worldliness. There is that which speaks in me. There is therefore the problem of inner silence. The subject being nothing but language (speech), thoroughly from end to end, the ultimate silence of inner speech can be found, be looked for, be evoked, only in a limit zone of human experience, there where the subject puts his death into play (as subject): (r) Christian mysticism: burning issue, because the church (as theology and as institution) is essentially speakerly: speech is what it demands again and again, it is insatiable for language "' the mystic: the one who tries to stop language, to suspend its perpetuity; and there he can only encounter the hostility, the suspicion of the church: Mme. Guyon (a substitute, largely, for John of the Cross) 31 finds herself admonished by Bossuet because she wanted to pray without language, while, says Bossuet, one must pray with words: orthodox faith passes through language; cf. also Kierkegaard: 32 Abraham = someone who doesn't verbalize sacrifice, who doesn't go through the generality of language = hero of faith. (2) The Pyrrhonians-but here it's no longer in relation to pragmatism but following Hegel's (Kojeve's) interpretation: call to a moral (authentic, since rigorously "interior" or "personal") conscience that no longer speaks at all, even softly, whatever they happen to do and even if they do nothing. More taciturn even than the moral conscience of the Stoic moralists: One can no longer say what it is, since it no longer says anything at all. 33 ( 3) Zen: Zen's suspicion with regard to theoretical verbalization. (a) In a monastery, out of five hundred disciples who fully understood Buddhism, a thoroughly unique layman: he didn't understand anything about Buddhism; he understood only the way and nothing else. (b) Why did the sixth patriarch succeed the fifth: "It's because," he says, "I don't understand Buddhism." 34 (4) Tao: (r) Lao-tzu: "He who knows the Tao speaks not, he who speaks knows not. " 35 (It's really my case! Notice once more the same aporia for the Neutral: to make known, to state the not

Kairos

Christian mystics

Pyrrho Kojeve, 64

Zen, Suzuki, 1:30

Tao Suzuki, 1:31 Aporia of the Neutral

28


to speak, however lightly, there needs to be speech at a certain moment. Neutral = impossible: to speak it is to defeat it, but not to speak it is to miss its "setting up.") (2) Integral silence (inner-integral): borderline act, therefore linked to an initiation. Initiation to the Tao: "first stop judging and speaking; then stop judging and speaking mentally ... " 36 __,. "exterior" speech __,. "interior" speech ~ integral silence; speech: a kind of springboard for silence. This integral silence is no longer simply the tacere but joins the silere: silence of all nature, scattering of the fact-of-man throughout nature: as if man were some kind of noise of nature (in the cybernetic sense), a caco-phony. But always the same aporia: to speak this cacophony, I need a course.

Initiation Grenier, 110

Tact 1. Principle of Tact I must return-so as to start from it one more time-to a citation from Sade that I quoted during last year's class, on the principle of tact: The Marquise de Sade, having asked the imprisoned Marquis to have his dirty linen sent out to her (knowing the Marquise, for what reason other than to have it washed?) Sade pretends to see in her request another, properly Sadian, motive: "Charming creature, you want my dirty linen, my old linen? Do you know, that is complete tact? you see how I sense the value of things. Listen, my angel, I have every wish in the world to satisfy you in this matter, because you know the respect I have for tastes, for fantasies: however baroque they may be, I find them all respectable, and because one is not the master of them, and because the most singular and bizarre of them, when well analyzed, always depends on a principle of tact.

Sade

(Sade/Fourier/Loyola, p. 170) 37

Never separate a behavior from the account the subject gives of it, for the word penetrates the act throughout. Sade's very utterance exposes what the principle of tact is: a pleasure {jouissance} in analysis, a verbal operation that frustrates expectation (the laundry is dirty in order to be washed) and intimates that tact is a perversion that plays with the useless (nonfunctional) detail: the analysis generates minutiae (a possible meaning for "delicate" though dubious etymology), and it's this cutting and rerouting that is the source of 29

SESSION 0 F FEBRUARY 25, 1978

pleasure~ one could say: pleasure in the "futile" (<(undo-which flows, that nothing withholds). In short, tact: analysis (luo 38 ~ to untie) when aimless. Such is the background, the semantic web. ~ Thus, we as well, let's analyze:

Etymology

2. Twinklings of Tact

Not "traits," "elements," "constituents," but what shines by bursts, in disorder, fugitively, successively, in the "anecdotal" discourse: the weave of anecdotes of the book and of life.

Anecdote

a. Minutia

Tea ceremony (Japan)~ Aesthetic religion, fifteenth century: tea-ism =Taoism in disguise (Tea. Era of the schools of tea. I: boiled tea (tea cake to be boiled); II: whipped tea; III: steeped tea). 39

Tea, Kakuzo, 20

r. Boiled tea: observe the minutia of the analysis, of the classi-

fications. Water: the best: mountain spring water, then river water, then spring water. Bringing to the boil: ( r) little bubbles like the eyes of fishes; (2) bubbles like crystal beads rolling in a fountain; ( 3) billows surge wildly in the kettle (~ roast the tea cake before the fire until it becomes "soft like a baby's arm. " 40 Shred it to powder between pieces of fine paper ~ put the salt in the first boil, the tea in the second; and, in the third, a dipperful of cold water to settle the tea and "revive 'the youth of the water"'). 2. Whipped tea: Grind the leaves to fine powder in a small stone mill (Song) 41 ~ beat the mixture in hot water with a fine wand of cut bamboo. Verging on the useless or enigmatically useful detail: minutia: at the edge of eccentricity. In short: art of the useless supplement. (Cf. a way of approaching the question of cleanliness. In para-hippie ideology, protest against cleanliness because, it is true, society increasingly turns it into a (a) functional (hygiene), (b) moral (by metonymy: purity, uprightness, honesty, etc.) value. But cleanliness can also be established and defended as art: not that it makes one beautiful automatically, but because it can become the medium of an art, like Kakuzo: don't attack an antique with the zeal of a Dutch housewife, cf. the bleached Grecos produced by today's restorations. Art = refined practice of difference: don't treat all objects the same way: treat what appears to be the same as though different.

Kakuzo,27

Eccentric

Cleanliness

30


b. Discretion Etymology: to separate, discernare. Discretion indeed connotes an implicit view of the subject as made up of airtight compartments; accepts heterogeneity"' massive, arrogant image of a subject "all of a piece," "frank," etc. _,. r. Separation of action and manifestation: Tao produced a kind

of political utopia that took the form of a golden age dating from the ancient princes: "In the early times, ... the subjects barely knew that they had a prince (so discreet was his action) < ... >"; "How delicate was the touch of the ancient sovereigns< .... >" 42 2. Separation of Signifier and Signified: distance internal to the sign: Tao: difficulty of the Way. 43 The disciple informs the master of his progresses (which are in fact regressions), and the master gives very discreet but more and more flattering marks of approval: a glance, a smile, an invitation to sit down. _,. Utopian delights of a world where smiling would be the manifestation of a doctrinal, political, etc., solidarity, for example: a gesture of militancy or of mastery (in juries, exams). _,. Field of the rules that measure the act of love (not to weigh on the other). For example: compare the investitures in the Western world (kings, bishops, congresses, elections, inheritances, etc.) and this Eastern gesture: Zen transmitted by Buddha to his disciple Mahakasyapa: before the congregation, Buddha presents a bunch of flowers to the disciple: gesture whose meaning is at once grasped by the disciple who responds to his master with a quiet smile. 44 3. Delirious separation of functions: art of flowers (Japan). A special attendant was detailed to each flower: to wash its leaves with soft brushes made of rabbit hair. As written in the Pingtse: the peony should be bathed by a handsome maiden in full costume, a winter plum should be watered by a pale, slender monk. 45

Tao, Grenier, 144

111

Suzuki, 1:49

Kakuzo,96

31



Supplement I Mention of a letter from a listener about the -figure "Silence" seeming to ask what should actually be done to break out of the aporia "silence-sign. " 1 My perspective, throughout the whole of this course, is that of desire, not of law: not a silence that one should reach but only the desire for silence, fugitive but insistent -figure of the desire for the Neutral. I describe rather lacks, fantasies, "impossibilities" (aporias), concerning which there is only one positive thing, i.e., the tension (the intensity) I am trying to bring to recognition (by myself). Myself: desiring, and not a guru. 2 It's a matter, I believe, of an utterly ir-realistic (and, in this, im-moral) discourse.

Tact {Continued) c.

Supplement and Not Redundancy

r. According to the Eastern model, tact requires the punctilious elimination of all repetition: tact is scared, it's hurt by repetitions. Example, Japan: in the tea room: no color or design shall be repeated: if you have a living flower, a painting of flowers is not allowable. If the kettle is round, the water pitcher should be angular; a cup with a black glaze should not be associated with a tea caddy of black lacquer; white plum blossoms should not be used when snow lies in the garden. Even space must not repeat itself, thus becoming symmetrical: in the tea room, never put anything in the exact center, lest it divide the space into equal halves. 3 __.,. 2. The rejection of redundancy goes together, if one can say so, with the search for the "supplement," for what elsewhere I have called the overdetermination of pleasures 4 (or, to be more modest, given the examples chosen: of pleasances). The principle is that the same substance (flower, color, etc.) shouldn't be repeated but that, conversely, one should try to superimpose the features of different substances (by appealing, for example, to different sensory tracb). For example, pleasure of the tea: should be doubled, be exalted by the song of the kettle: music of the boiling water in the iron kettle:

Tea, Kakuzo, 71, 102

Tea, Kakuzo, 63

32

the kettle sings well, for pieces of iron are so arranged in the bottom as to produce a peculiar melody. Or again (always problems of beverages): Critias (Sophist) had a sense of the quotidian and of practical invention: he invented the kothon (a kind of cup, or plate, for the Lacedaemonian soldiers): "its colour concealed the disagreeable appearance of the water which they were often compelled to drink, and its curving lips caught the muddy sediment and held it inside, so that only the purer part reached the mouth of the drinker" 5 ~ Problem for an aesthetic of behaviors: can pleasures be indefinitely overdetermined? Very quickly we get to a "comfort" that is overdetermined by an accumulation of gadgets: saturation of eases that becomes ridiculous or laughable: Chaplin in his prison cell, Modern Times ~ a kind of exponential rule for pleasure: rule of limitation: two pleasures, two senses mobilized: beyond that, it becomes perhaps more obsessional than perverse, more baroque than delicate.

Sophistes, 215

Aesthetic of comportments Chaplin

d. Politeness as Thought of the Other, Consideration of and for Otherness

Politeness (a file to open one day): "interesting" (for us, in relation to the principle of tact) only in its excessive features (since otherwise prisoner of a conformist straitjacket of habits: can'ts and musts); politeness is tactful only if, through excess, it recovers an inventiveness that can border on the eccentric. Two examples among others: (a) Walter Benjamin, in Marseilles, experiments with H; he goes to the Basso restaurant and hesitates over several dishes: "not from greed, but from an extreme politeness towards the dishes that I did not wish to offend by a refusal." 6 (b) This, where an admirable reversal is an effect of tact = since doctrinal tact: Tao doctrine on immortality of the body (soul"' body: Western dichotomy): it's the body that must be immortal. Immortality: conservation of the live body.7 In the course of life, one must little by little replace the mortal body by an immortal body and give birth in oneself to immortal organs that are substituted for the mortal ones. However, immediate rebuttal by the facts: it's obvious that everyone dies. "In order not to bring trouble into human society, where death is a normal event, he who became immortal pretended to die and was buried normally: what was placed in the coffin was a sword or a cane to which he gave the look of a corpse; the real body had gone to live among the Immortals" = "the Liberation of the Corpse. " 8 Admirable concern for others,

Benjamin, 141

Immortality

Tao, Maspero, 297

Corpse

33


pure tact: to take on the appearance of being dead so as not to shock, hurt, disconcert those who die.

e. Metaphorization Principle of tact= principle (in the sense of movement, force) of value-distinction (to distinguish by valorizing): possible only through the practice of language. Tact is consubstantially tied to the power of metaphorizing, that is, of isolating a feature and letting it proliferate as language, in a movement of exaltation. Example: in the Chaking, the Holy Scripture of tea, the code of tea, written by Luwuh (eighth century) 9-tea, as we have seen, generator of tact equal to a superior drug-tea leaves, submitted to the principle of tact as soon as they are drunkenly metaphorized: they must have "creases like the leathern boot of Tartar horsemen, curl like the dewlap of a mighty bullock, unfold like a mist rising out of a ravine, gleam like a lake touched by a zephyr, and be wet and soft like fine earth newly swept by rain." 10 "Everything passes through language" means = language creates everything: metaphor creates tact; in humanist discourse, one would have said: metaphor creates civilization (the latter not being necessarily "humanist," classical)._,,. I would go as far as saying: language creates reality; in choosing one's language, one chooses one's real: it's not the same real, the same contact (since the example is going to be about love) if one says to the desired being: my tongue on your skin or my lips on your hand; 11 or, rather, I would say that the desired being receives the same gesture under two different verbal species. For Sade, founder of the principle or eponymous author of the category, this principle would not have been possible without the marquise, the letter, the interlocution, language.

Tea, Kakuzo, 24

Civilization

3. Tact and Sociability

a. Tact as the Social Obscene Tied to language, founded by it, tact: falls under the prohibition of preciosity.

Preciosity

r. The bottom of this prohibition: the protestation of virility: Delicatus = effeminate: virile condemnation of the delicate, of the precious one, of the "deliquescent," of the "decadent"; this combined with a virile representation of empiricity: the useless, the futile

34

SES SI 0 N 0 F MARCH 4, 1 9 7 8

are feminine: well perceived by Valery prefacing Japanese haikus: "Some people are not moved by this exquisite quality. There are even some who condemn it and claim that it saps courage. Narrow minds fantasize that taste pushed to the extreme isn't compatible with energy." 12 2. Principle of tact: contiguous with a kind of social errancy, takes upon itself excessive marginality = that which in mass culture cannot become the object of any fashion: true, "margins" are the objects of fashion: fashion = a conformism, an imitation of the margins (for instance, today, skinny necktie, short hair, raised collar, scarf): but there are margins within the margin, marginalities that can't be recuperated by any fashion. Principle of tact: absolute interstice of conformism and fashion_..,. a kind of social obscene (the unclassifiable), cf. amorous feeling. Here a quote from Baudelaire. De Quincey: in order to make it actual, just replace "moralist" with a more modern form of doctrinaire arrogance, and you will have the quintessential obscene: "An inhuman moralist I can no more endure in my nervous state than opium that has not been boiled" 13 (A "political" discourse on television, etc.)

Yarnata + Valery

Margins fashions

Baudelaire, 121

b. The Sabi, the Amorous

Principle of tact: supported (and its behaviors: determined, oriented) by something that resembles an amorous state. We have seen, in ancient Eastern civilization, tea: privileged field for the principle. Lotung, a Tang 14 poet (eighth century after Christ), describes the six (successive) cups of tea in a metaphorical-or affective-mode that is that of falling in love. First (cup of tea): moistens my lip and my throat; second: breaks my solitude; third: penetrates my guts and there waves thousands of strange ideograms; fourth: causes a slight sweat, all the badness of my life departs; fifth: I am purified; sixth: in the realm of the immortals.15 This amorous state "unhooked" from the desire-to-possess (a [male or female] partner) can generate a whole complex of feelings-values that Japanese (notably with regard to haiku and Zen) call sabi: "simplicity, naturalness, unconventionality, refinement, freedom, familiarity singularly tinged with aloofness, and everyday commonness which is veiled exquisitely with the mist of transcendental inwardness." 16 This in my view is a relatively good definition of the principle of tact-which of course leads to preciosity only when society abusively forces it into the

Amorous Kakuzo,26

Suzuki, 3:1328 1336

Preciosity

35


preciosity/vulgarity paradigm: it is only from an "uncouth" point of view that one can speak of preciosity.

c. Sweetness. Last (Provisional) Word on Tact r. In all, or almost all, our examples, a constant: the behaviors

marked by the principle of tact: kinds of active protests or unexpected parrying against reduction, not of the individual (it is not a matter of a philosophy of individualism) but of individuation (= the fragile moment of the individual, cf. Deleuze IRCAM) 17 __,.each time that in my pleasure, my desire, or my distress, the other's discourse (often well meaning, innocent) reduces me to a case that fits an all-purpose explanation or classification in the most normal way, I feel that there is a breach of the principle of tact. 2. I would suggest calling the nonviolent refusal of reduction, the parrying of generality by inventive, unexpected, nonparadigmatizable behavior, the elegant and discreet flight in the face of dogmatism, in short, the principle of tact, I would call it, all being said: sweetness. Thus, as far as I am concerned, I do not find it the least surprising that one of the philosophical "orientations" that presents the most affinity with the Neutral, to wit, Pyrrhonism, was at some point defined by gentleness: "Sweetness is the final word of Skepticism,'' 18 and Diogenes Laertius: "According to some authorities the end proposed by the Sceptics is insensibility [apatheia]; according to others, gentleness [praotes]." 19 3. One can foresee the following aporia: I "analyzed" a "principle" that in fact aims to outplay analysis (not as metaphor [cf. tea] but as "generality"). I did it because there is a residue: residue =nothing more to say than the fact itself: that which one can posit, state, say, tell: we enter the discourse of the anecdote. I will thus end the figure of tact (or of sweetness) with an anecdote, the meaning of which is: "impossible to put it better": Diogenes Laertius: Bias (one of the seven wise men): "This was the manner of his death. He was pleading in defense of some client in spite of his great age. When he had finished speaking, he reclined his head on his grandson's neck. The opposing counsel made a speech, the judges voted and gave their verdict in favor of the client of Bias, who, when the court rose, was found dead in his grandson's arms." 20 __,. "Dead in the child's arms," such is the title that I would wish to give to this figure, because such is, perhaps, the death one would wish for oneself.

Individuation Invincible

Pyrrho Brochard, 73

Diogenes Laertius

Neck of the child

36


Sleep 1. The Neutral Awakening

I already wrote about my interest in a certain type of awakening: the white, neutral awakening: 21 for a few seconds, whatever Care {Souci}22 one felt when one went to sleep, pure moment of Carelessness, forgetfulness of evil, vice 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. This suspended-time(= a definition of the Neutral as such): like an airlock, not perhaps between two worlds (dream ,c awake) but between two bodies. ~Time that borders on "nature," a kind of groping between the immortal (or close to death) body and the anxious (involved in "life," in the activist sense of the term, which is perhaps life-dream, as so many poets have said) body~ Gide dying: "I am always asleep; I need time to wake up, to understand"; and his witness (the Petite Dame): "Most often he understands with a great delay." 23 The belatedness in understanding: not to be blamed disdainfully on physical decay, as if it were "good" and "normal" to understand quickly, immediately ~ perhaps: time to understand, a kind of divine time: just (delicate, slow, benevolent) passage from one logic to another, from one body to another. If I had to create a god, I would lend him a "slow understanding": a kind of drip-bydrip understanding of problems. 24 People who understand quickly frighten me. In reality, this neutral awakening-precious, rare, fragile, briefrelates back to the substance of sleep: it is like a readable (perceptible, verbalizable) version of 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 can't speak of it except as a fantasy: sleep that can only be inferred from some privileged awakenings, so fragile that they are heart-rending.

Gide, 242 (in 1950)

To understand

2. The Utopia of Sleep A.

Dream is not part of this sleep. The equation sleep =dream is something else. The utopia of sleep is dreamless.

37


r. Am I allowed to mention my personal experience? I don't like to dream (or to recall that I've dreamt); if it was a bad dream, it darkens my awakening; if it was sweet, it tears me to pieces when it stops: I could never imagine a sleep utopia filled with dreams, with sweet dreams. 2. Incompetent in etymology, and no desire to glue myself to researching it, but perhaps I should: Latin: sleep = somnus (masculine, because agent, god, son of Erebus and the Night), cf. hupnos < Indo-European root: svap _.., sopio: causative (sopor, -oris, force that puts to sleep, falling asleep) "' dormio (no substantive) < "· drem. True, I would have liked that ' · drem > dream, 25 which would allow us to oppose somnus, dreamless sleep, to dream, as well as (prophetic) dream {songe) < somnium to reve (dream) < esver, to wander, exvagus; too bad it's pure etymological fantasy. But what is possible and significant for me is to underscore the difference between sopio (somnus), causative, and dormio, durative (because of them), as if there were two sleeps: one associated with falling asleep, the other with losing consciousness (= pioneer {turn into a "pawn"}, 1828, slang < piausser (contaminated by ronfler {snore}) < piau, peau {pad, skin)--blanket, bed, "pieu" {"sack"}). 26 3. "Utopian" sleep is indeed dreamless, but it is not, however, a fall into nothingness (I am still talking about a utopian sleep inferred from a neutral awakening): one could even project into it the fantasy of a hyperconsciousness ("' oneirism); distinction known to the Greeks (cf. A Lover's Discourse): onar: vulgar dream"' hupar:27 the grand clear (prophetic) vision; the utopian sleep, the falling asleep would be aligned with hupar: 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 of the will-to-live.

Etymology

Sopio/dormio

Onarlhupar

B.

A notation that rings true in relation to the dying Gide: "Since yesterday, Gide has been in a kind of torpor, as if he inhabited only certain parts of himself. " 28 Sleep divides the subject, not because of antagonisms but because of selections: his components, his features, his "wavelengths" obey another staging.

Division Gide, 233

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c. The idea of sleep-as-dream = caught up in a mythology of productivity, of work: "dream-work": sleep is useful for something; not only does it restore, "regain," "recuperate," it also transforms, labors: it is productive, rescued from the disgrace of the "good for nothing." (Psychoanalysis instituted the idea of the producing dream, material for analysis. Ideology of work: one doesn't dream "for nothing") ;: utopian sleep (dreamless), falling asleep: unproductive: is even defined by the fact that it is a kind of unconditional expenditure(= the very essence of "perversion": all in all, it would be a perverse sleep):

Psychoanalysis

r. Affinity with drugs, since, in both cases (Aldo Rescio on Wal-

ter Benjamin and H), it is a matter of "immersing one's important thoughts into a long sleep," 29 into a "no-place," into the "fatherless" (but obviously not the "motherless": (worn out!) theme of the fetal sleep). 2. Affinity with the theme of immortality, through the figure of suspended time. Recall a frequent theme of the iconography of Greek vases or reliefs: night distributes its poppies, which are like the plant of immortality. 30 Diogenes Laertius tells a very beautiful story about Epimenides (one of the seven wise men): "He was a native of Knossos in Crete, though from wearing his hair long he did not look like a Cretan. One day he was sent into the country by his father to look for a stray sheep, and at noon he turned aside out of the way, and went to sleep in a cave, where he slept for fifty-seven hours. After this he got up and went in search of the sheep, thinking he had been asleep only a short time. < ... > So he became famous throughout Greece, and was believed to be a special favorite of heaven. < ... > He lived one hundred and fifty-seven years." 31 To take note of (at least in my view):

Drogue, 117

Nataf, 124 Immortality

Diogenes Laertius, 1: 115

a. Selective suspension of time: his body ages, but his memory does not: he looks for his sheep; interestingly enough, I believe, since memory is not an act of pure recollection of the past, as if it were external to time the better to grasp it: memory is itself submitted to time, to its injustices -"' cf. process of writing that I have called anamnesis: 32 erratic, chaotic recall: the anamnesis, it is the

Memory

Anamnesis

39


-sheep of the Cretan, "as if it were yesterday," but in an aged body. ;e Myth of Sleeping Beauty: cruder since it's the whole setting of life that is frozen and then restarts: immortality by means of ice: freezing of the past as a whole (cf. cryothanatology: present-day sect that freezes corpses, because they believe that in several years science will have found new means of bodily survival). Greek myth more beautiful: sleep somehow more alive, more "warm," because it separates (cf. above): lets the body (hair and face) age but suspends the time of memory. b. A certain thought of immorality, since the Greeks think that a sleep of this kind is a gift of the gods: longevity as a stretching out of life; not the mathematical, "stupid" immortality (never to die, without taking the trouble to fantasize about what such an infinite life would be, what of our real life it would prolong, at what age it would lock us) but idea of the subject as set of traces (waves) recast according to different wavelengths. c. Finally, notice that even for the Greeks the idea of an unproductive time triggers a resistance. True: Diogenes Laertius, Greek of the third century after Christ. Laertius: Cilicia, Anatolia. "Some are found to maintain that he did not go to sleep but withdrew himself for a while, engaged in gathering simples": 33 he didn't sleep, he did something that, by the way, can relate to immortality, drugs.

3. Sleep, love, Benevolence As a utopia, to finish, sleep has to be linked not to one but to two: there can be no solipsistic utopia. r. Form of this sleep utopia: to sleep together {a deux). That's to say: recall of dreamless sleep: one doesn't dream as a twosome {a deux) ;e the dream separates, solipsizes: it's the archetype of the soliloquy. To sleep as a couple: in an essential way-if not in its contingent occurrence-dreamless sleep (since dream is narcissistic) _,. utopia of sleeping as a couple could be desired as absolute act of love and, whatever its realization, as a golden fantasy. Why: sleep thoroughly woven of trust. To sleep: mobilization of trust. Cf. to sleep on both ears {dormir sur ses deux oreilles}: on the ear of the other and one's own ;e to sleep with one ear open. To sleep together-utopically-implies that the fear of one's image being surprised is abolished: little matter that I be seen while sleeping_,. Albertine's sleep observed by the Narrator: 34 act of falling in love (of love-passion), not of love, because the gaze sets oneself apart. 40


In a more general way, sleep: the very act of trust: _.,. to grant sleep to someone = to give him the power to be utterly confident = the very act of benevolence. Epitaph of Hipponax: "Here lies the bard Hipponax. If you are a rascal, go not nigh his tomb; but if you are a true man of good stock, sit you down and welcome, and if you choose to drop off to sleep you shall" 35 _.,.Beautiful notation, quite paradoxical: in general the (moral) law wants us to keep watch over the dead; here, it's the deceased who conveys the gift of sleep: summum of benevolence. 2.

Theocritus, 377

Inscriptions {NO 1.136}

Affirmation I list here (to list "' to treat: to indicate blanks to be filled in) an essentially philosophical file: that of the consequences arising from the assertive nature of language.

1. Language and Discourse Perhaps there are still people who recall it (since he definitely fell out of fashion): Saussure sharply marked the language/speech opposition: clear and subtle dialectic of the speaking subject and the speaking mass. Since then, Saussure has been, if not attacked, at least "evacuated" by different waves of research: Chomsky (competence/performance),36 Derrida, Lacan (the lalangue). 37 For my part, I believe that, in this opposition, something remains unshakable: the need for two places, two spaces in dialectical relation to each other: (r) a reservoir, where the linguistic laws of a community are guarded (a kind of tabernacle); (2) a moment of actualization, choice of the subject, withdrawals from the reservoir (unimportant for us what the modalities of determination of this choice are). _.,. (r) Language. (2) Discourse(> Speech). Therefore: r. Language: "this by means of what, wanting, not wanting, I am spoken," strict rules of combination: syntax. These rules are laws, they permit communication (cf. safety, or driving rules for the citizen) but in exchange (or on the other hand) impose a way of being, a subjecthood, a subjectivity on one: under the weight of the syntax, one must be this very subject and not another (for example: one must by necessity determine oneself, as soon as one speaks, in relation to masculine/feminine, to vous {you)ltu {you)): the catego-

41


--ries of language are coercive laws, which force one to speak __,,. in this sense, I could speak of a "fascism" of language. 38 2. Discourse: "what, within certain social, ideological, neurotic limits, I speak" (what I am "free" to speak). Rules of combination: "worldly" rules (logic, conventions, dialectic, but under the ear of the other, play of images, etc.).

2. Affirmation and Language

If there is a universal model for the very idea of paradigm (let's recall that the subject of our course, the Neutral, is what baffles the paradigm: the paradigm is the law against which the Neutral rebels), it is the yes/no (+/-) model. 39 The paradox, the "limping" (= the "scandal") =the yes (the affirmation) is implicitly inscribed in all of language, while the no requires a special mark at each occurrence. Put otherwise (old problem well known to philosophy), language is naturally assertive: 40 to utter a word is immediately to affirm its referent; if I say "the table," the table exists by right; to unmake its existence, a supplement, a mark is needed. As well, every proposition is assertive (constative), and the modes of doubt, of negation, must be signaled by special marks-while none is needed for affirmation. In borrowing the expression from theology (saint Thomas, Eckhart), we could say that language is collatio esse, conferment of being. 41 To go back to yes/no: the "limping" that follows from the collatio esse can be found in the "history" of the words oui {yes}/ non {no} (Latin, French):our language 42 (inquiry to be made, of course, with regard to other languages) right away had a simple and seemingly primitive word for the non: a kind of mark arisen fully armed from the linguistic ungrund43 " but a kind of resistance against linguistic formulation of the yes, since it is already de facto inherent in the whole field of language as such. In fact, non: unique and clearly limited form: ne-unum: non(" ne): negation of the reality mode, of the indicative, and of the principal proposition(" ne = dubitatives, conditionals, imperatives, etc.), which clearly shows the collusion among indicative, principal proposition, and "reality," a collusion that to be unmade requires a brutal particle: non " oui.

Collatio esse Lossky, 44

Yes/no Etymology

r. In Latin, no specific word: an open series of approximative expressions, as if the yes were in search of itself, trying out without ever having found the adequate form: ita, etiam, verum, vero, scilicet, admodum, maxime, sic. Many possible forms but no single topical one.

42

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Even more flagrant in French: oui (yes} < oilloc (the two languages) hoc(> o) ille (> il) (fecit) (fecit: all-purpose verb that replaces every verb in the question: "Did he come (Est-ce qu'il est venu}?" "He did (Ila fait cela}" ____.,. oui). This, in Old French: o-je. Oui had become unanalyzable as early as the sixteenth century. Notice that being in reality a proposition by itself, the oui is redundant with regard to the antecedent proposition that it takes up, confirms, redoubles ¢ non: is not redundant: it's another (pro )-position. 2.

3. Affirmation and Discourse

The assertive constraint moves from language to discourse, since discourse is made of propositions that are naturally assertive. Which implies that, in order to withdraw, to preserve the discourse from affirmation, in order to nuance it (toward negation, doubt, interrogation, suspension), one must ceaselessly fight against speech, raw material, "law" of discourse. This leads to permanent, insistent consequences for us who speak and who, by and in language, have to assume responsibility for our imago in front of others (language: the problem is not to make oneself understood but to make oneself recognized); our image (provided by language) is "naturally" arrogant. This appears clearly when discourse is set up on a negative intention and when, nevertheless, it ends up being recuperated by affirmation ____.,. squaring of the circle, aporia, despair of language: its impotence to allow the subject the perfection (the respite) of the negative. It's how I interpret the following quotation from Pascal: "Discourses of humility are a source of pride in the vain, and of humility in the humble. So those on skepticism cause believers to affirm. Few men speak humbly of humility, chastely of chastity, few doubtingly of skepticism. " 44 As far as I am concerned, I would even go further (and I believe that such is the movement of Pascal's quotation): it is impossible to speak (let's insist on the performance, for after all it remains possible not to speak) of humility humbly, etc. Indeed what is interesting: "positions" targeted by Pascal (humility, chastity, Pyrrhonism): they are about "negativities," "diminutions," "inadequacies," "abstentions," etc.: attitudes that are defined by a negative quantum (an "electron") and that-crucial paradox-have to confront-or to deal with-the linguistic affirmative (the proton). This "negative" is ceaselessly "straightened up" into a positive as soon as one begins

From speech to discourse

Reversal Pascal Imago

Arrogance

Pascal, Pensees, frag. 377

43

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l

I

to speak: the humble, as soon as they speak, turn into the proud, the Pyrrhonians, as soon as they speak, turn into the dogmatic (this is why Pyrrho didn't speak). I said: discourse should "do battle" with language, when it wants to unmake its natural assertiveness. For it is a matter of a ceaseless struggle, of a test of strengths: here we reencounter the paradox of the Neutral: thought and practice of the nonconflictual, it is nevertheless bound to assertion, to conflict, in order to make itself heard ~there is in language (here let us take the word in its generic meaning, encompassing language and discourse) a dramatic disposition: whether discourse takes responsibility for the arrogance of the assertion or wants to oppose it~ in both cases, tension, play, linguistic ups and downs. Cf. Bachelard's thesis: prevalence and praise of the discontinuous ~ importance of dramatic thought in the fixation of our memories: "We retain only what has been dramatized by language; any other judgment is fleeting." "Language always dramatizes the simplest judgments." (Jerusalem) 45 ~it is not only memory that is dramatized by language: it's the whole relation to the Other, which is to say the entire subject, throughout, that becomes dramatic, for oneself, for others, by means of language, by means of assertion-as if there were in language as such a drive toward hysteria-or toward affirmative hallucination.

Dramatization

Bachelard, 62

4. Drags, Dodges, Hollow Corrections

Everything about the Neutral is about sidestepping assertion (= the subject of the whole course).~ I won't do more here than raise the principle of a "file" about ways of sidestepping affirmation that occur right at the level of language (sidestepping suggests the idea that here negation-or denial-doesn't undo assertion but counters it: it is itself assertion of the no, arrogant affirmation of the negation. I will propose three points of reflection (but the file is infinitely open):

Sidestepping

r. Philosophical critique of the "it is" {c'est) (a mere mention here, for it supposes a whole philosophical technique): I refer, for the position of the problem, to Hegel (Lectures on the History of Philosophy): "These determinate modes of opposition, whereby the withholding of assent comes to pass, the Skeptics called tropes (tropoi), which are turned upon everything that is thought and felt in order to show that it is not what it is 'in itself,' but only in relation to an other": 46 ten classical tropes (Aenesidemus) (early Skeptics)+

Hegel, 346

44


five new tropes (attributed to Agrippa): for Hegel, the five new ones are more interesting because more "cultivated" (less "trivial"), opposing scientific categories, the determination by means of concepts of the being-thought of the sensible: essentially directed against the form "it is." 2. The (philosophical) critique of "it is"_.,. the "secular,'' nonphilosophical, "trivial" (as Hegel would say) fear of the assertive mode of language. _.,.

"It is"

a. Systematic aspect, Gide: "I no longer write an affirmative sentence without being tempted to add: 'perhaps"' 47 And in the register of comportments (a "comportment" is an affirmation, verbalized as such: the decision): Walter Benjamin and the experience of H: "It's with a weak enough perhaps that everything began. " 48 All that: difficult to ground a discourse of the perhaps (may-be). b. Trivial empiricity of discourse. The writing subject feeling the statutory arrogance of language-discourse is tempted to relativize his sentences in a coded way: it's the "oratorical precaution": "in my humble opinion,'' "it seems to me,'' "for my part,'' "I believe that ... " Of course (I understood this very quickly), this doesn't change anything to anything: the assertion, the arrogance remains intact, for the only thing the precaution does is satisfy the imaginary of the speaking subject, who tolerates his image more easily if he dampens down its "superb" (that obviously depends on his ethics, on his education, on his neurosis). 49 In fact, writing is fundamentally assertive: the best remains to accept it stoically, "tragically": to speak, to write, and to hold still about the wound of affirmation.

"Maybe" Gide, Journals, 1941

Rescio, Drogue

Oratorical precaution

3. Now we understand where the Neutral leads (I don't say: "what it is," because that would be definitional dogmatism; rather: to discover a region, a horizon, a direction). Blanchot: "The exigency of the neutral tends to suspend the attributive structure of language: <"it's this, that">, the relation to being, implicit or explicit, that is immediately posed in language as soon as something is said. " 50 Because it radically focuses on the relation of being and language, the Neutral cannot be satisfied with the modes (modalities) that officially code the attenuation of the affirmative within language: negation, dubitation, the conditional, interrogation, wish, subjectivity, etc. Ideally, discourse in the Neutral shouldn't even be a discourse in the subjunctive: for the modes are still a dimension of being. The (linguistic) problem would be to suspend all categories, to put what comes to language beyond mode, whether constative or

Neutral Blanchot, Conversation,

386

45

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-subjunctive: or, better, to be more precise, to speak in implying, in making understood that every paradigm is badly put, which by itself would pervert the very structure of meaning: each word would become non-pertinent, im-pertinent. Perhaps to approach the forms of very modern writing in this light ;e the thetic. 51

46



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 topicality from what wants to be incorporated into it retrospectively: whether by thoughts posterior to its verbal presentation {esprit de l'escalier} or because small events in my weekly life resonate with what was said. I believe that it is important to let such things happen and to admit this, 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 then accept the word "course" without bad feelings: its connotation being bad mostly if the "course" is "magisterial." While, after all, course < cursus: what runs, what fiows (course of a river): I330: estudier a cours: 1 "without interruption"; I would say: without the present being interrupted. Concerning "Tact." I return to "Tact" because I have the persistent feeling that I haven't really explained the reason why I gave so much importance to all the sophisticated protocols of Japanese tea. I thus return to "Twinklings," "Minutia." Going out, evenings at dusk, sharply receiving tiny, perfectly futile details of street life: the menu written in chalk on the windowpane of a cafe (chicken mashed potato, I6 francs 50-kidneys creme frafrhe, I6 francs IO), a tiny priest in a cassock walking up the rue Medicis, etc., I had this vivid intuition (for me, the urban dusk has a great power of crispness, of activation, it's almost a drug) that to fall into the 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 awareness of it: the utterly pure taste of life, the pleasure of being alive __,. of course, one must agree on what one means by "life," all-purpose word__,. life: (I) as power, will-topossess, will-to-pleasure: life has nothing to do with tact, it has contempt for it, suppresses it as siding with the decadent, the deliquescent, the exhausted, of what is on the verge of dying; (2) but also life as lived time {dun~e}: 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 the very grain of this vital duration __,. tact = fabric of life. 47

-Concerning "Af-firmation." I said: writing is in and of itself af-firmative (more so than speech): unfortunately, it doesn't help to add rhetorical caveats as softening devices ("in my humble opinion," "it seems to me," "according to me," etc.). However, a typically arrogant sentence I read in the newspaper this week made me miss the presence of a "softener" -"" it could have been about politics, but no: about music-"" Telerama, March I I, I978: "Do you remember? It's not so distant; eighteen years ago. When the greatest French pianist of this century died, June IJ, I962, there was, as one would say, 'a feeling of unease"' = it's Cortot -"" three remarks: a. The reader is himself responsible for the arrogance as well: I don't -find that Cortot is the greatest French pianist of the century; 2 besides, this type of improvised rating is unacceptable: in art, no "greatest," because, as a subject, I can always disagree, and no criteria of ranking on which to agree. b. I had the impression to discover that, curiously, but in an interesting way, the arrogance of the judgment comes in large part from the obliqueness with which the syntax smuggles it in: "Cortot is the greatest pianist of the century" =altogether more a provocation than an arrogance; but the incident clause naturalizes the af-firmation: it goes so much without 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. "3 c. Unbearable arrogance, perhaps precisely because it is not really writing: it's fake writing (journalistic writing): no use of the "I" (an egotistical writing is not arrogant) and yet a kind of verbal fat ("Do you recall?" "as one would say," etc.). To study one day this journalistic 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 (Sennelier4 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 knock one over: in sponging up, I make a new mess: little domestic complications . ... And now, I am 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 opened this bottle -first to see what kind of color was this Neutral about which I am going to be speaking for thirteen weeks). Well, I was both 48

S ES S I 0 N 0 F MARCH 11 , 1 9 7 8

punished and disappointed: punished because Neutral spatters and stains (it's a type of dull gray-black); disappointed because Neutral is a color like the others, and for sale (therefore, Neutral is not unmarketable): the unclassifiable is classified~ all the more reason for us to go back to discourse, which, at least, cannot say what the Neutral is.

Color 1. The Colorless: Two References Two references, among many others, on which I will linger for an instant, since it is quite obvious that what interests me is the (mythical) correspondence of the colorless and the Neutral ("neutral colors"). 5 I. Lao-tzu: Portrait of Lao-tzu by Himself: "I am as if colorless < ... > neutral as the newborn who has not yet felt his first emotion, as if without project and without goal." 6 (a) The baby without emotion? The metaphor doesn't work today: the baby is stuffed with intense, searing emotions, but what Lao-tzu might perhaps be saying: these are not "cultural" emotions, coded by the social. (b) Without project and without goal = without willto-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 and back (inside/outside) __,. opposition of color and grisaille (monochromes: values of gray). Thus: the closed wings of The Garden of Earthly Delights: monochrome gray-landscape circumscribed by a transparent sphere (the crystal ball of the seers).

Tao, Grenier, 36

Color

Values of Gray

2. Interpretations Let's try to see the values invested in the opposition between colorful and colorless.

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 the great nobles who gave a good tip 49


to the guardian ___,,. color = festival, riches, upper class "' grisaille, monochrome, "neutral" = quotidian, social uniformity: cf. presentday China: impression of Neutral (in the clothing, uniforms), social indistinction ___,,.festival, color ___,,. "emblems" of politics, of the "people" as dominant entity (banners). 7 (Altarpieces: disappeared at the beginning of the sixteenth century, when the church was no longer commissioning. In a general way: place of color within the economy. In the Middle Ages, vivid colors: financial investment, luxury, like spices.) ___,,. The Neutral is mythically associated if not with poverty, at least with no-money, with the non-pertinence of the riches/poverty opposition.

China

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 ___,,. the Neutral 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 of fake cloth, front rich, back [unseen] poor). The Neutral = the back, but a back that shows without attracting attention: doesn't hide but doesn't show(= very difficult): in short, something like The Purloined Letter ___,,. problem for us: is the Neutral really a breachable, peelable surface, behind which richness, color, strong meaning hide? (Cf. the unconscious, is it really what hides behind the conscious?)

Front/back

The hidden

c. Origin Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights: 8 wings of the triptych, when closed (reverse side): gray monochrome; this monochrome "is used" to represent a panoramic landscape, bounded by a stretch of water, with heavy clouds = the third day of Creation, according to Genesis: time of the first rain, first trees and bushes. And we recall Lao-tzu: colorless and undefined, "like the newborn who hasn't yet felt his first emotion." ___,,. Neutral: time of the not yet, moment when within the original nondifferentiation something begins to be sketched, tone on tone, the first differences: early morning; Daltonian space (the Daltonian can't oppose red and green, but he perceives surfaces of different lightness, intensity); cf. silere: the bud, the egg not yet hatched: before meaning.

Origin

Nondifferentiation

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d. Shimmer

The grisaille, figure that could be called the "color of the colorless," points to another way of thinking the paradigm as the great principle of organization. Model of the paradigm: the opposition of primary contrasted colors (blue/red): it's the opposition par excellence, the very motor of meaning (phonology). Now, the monochrome (the Neutral) substitutes for the idea of opposition that of the slight difference, 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 the surface, as in the landscape of the triptych) that in a way skips the paradigm: this integrally and almost exhaustively nuanced space is the shimmer (already spoken of in various earlier courses): 9 the Neutral is the shimmer: that whose aspect, perhaps whose meaning, is subtly modified according to the angle of the subject's gaze.

Nuance

e. lndistinction

In the Fashion System, 10 the signifying opposition doesn't pass between such and such color but massively between the colorful and the colorless: colorless here meaning not "transparent" but precisely: unmarked color, "neutral,'' "indistinct" color: whence the paradox: black and white are on the same side (that of marked colors) and what comes to oppose them is gray (the muffled, the faded, etc.): colors follow a semantic principle of organization (marked/ unmarked).11 --? Thus we see that in the end the ultimate opposition, the one that both fascinates and is the most difficult to think about to the extent that it self-destructs in its very statement is that between distinction and indistinction, and this is what is at stake in the Neutral, the reason the Neutral is difficult, provocative, scandalous: because it implies 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 negative mystics (Eckhart) clearly saw it: "The distinction between the indistinct and the distinct is greater than all that could separate two distinct beings from one another. " 12 Thus it is logical that Bosch would entrust to monochrome, to Neutral, the "representation" of the early steps of Creation, when Creation was still very close, still clouded by originary indistinction, that is with the God-matter. Think here, with a slight modification, of the lines by Angelus Silesius:

Fashion

Lossky, 261

51


---Lose all form and you will be like God, For yourself your own sky in a quiet rest. 13

Angelus, 90

Thought that brings us back to Lao-tzu's declaration: "I am as though colorless and 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 nonlanguage, the noncolor (but not the absence of color, transparency) __,. language and 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 facts of grammar. It's because for me--that's something I firmly believe in, with all the obdurate strength of my feelings-language is pathetic: I struggle with grammar; I pleasure through it: through it a dramatic existence comes to me (cf. fascism of language).14

1. Adjective and Neutral A.

From the point of view of value (evaluation, foundation of values), i.e., in relation to the desire for Neutral that is the basis of this course, the status of the adjective is ambivalent: r. On the one hand, as a "qualifier," it sticks to a noun, to a being, it "enstickens" {"poisse" a) 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 it up in a kind of death (epithema: top, tomb ornament). 15 In this regard, it is a powerful counter-Neutral, the anti-Neutral par excellence, as though there were a constitutional antipathy between the Neutral and the adjective. 2. On the other hand and on the exact opposite, in the Greek philosophical tradition, the adjective forms an alliance with the Neutral (by means of the article: to) 16 to express being; frequent in Heraclitus: the dry, the humid, etc.; taken over constantly by Romance languages (with articles): the true, the beautiful, etc.: see below, "the neutral gender"-and very well highlighted by Blanchot when he started to theorize the Neutral.17 In short, when languages

Blanchot

52


(with articles) want to express the Neutral insofar as it bears on a substance, they don't use the substantive but the adjective, which they disadjectivize by means of an article in the neutral: they counter the adjective with the substantive (established through the article) and the substantive (what follows the article) with the adjective.

B.

The stake of this ambivalence: the predicate, the relation between Neutral and predication _,,. the Neutral would be like a language with no predication, where themes and "subjects" would not be filed (put on file cards and nailed down) by means of a predicate (an adjective); but, on the other hand, in order to deconstruct the subject/predicate paradigm, language has recourse to a hybrid grammatical entity, the substantivized adjective: a type of category whose very form resists predication: difficult "to file" the humid if not under humidity _,. the Neutral wallows in a (as much as possible) nonpredicable form; in short, the Neutral would be exactly that: the nonpredicable. Hence we might possibly stretch the object "adjective" out to substantives, if they are theorized by the speaker as kinds of absolute and nonpredicable qualities (Boehme's qualitas). And we'll reencounter, mixed, braided together, the good and the bad adjective: the one that is on the side of the Neutral and the one that is on the side of arrogance.

Predicate

Boehme

2. Quality as Energy

The qualitas (roughly: article + adjective: example: the acrid): a strong theory among the Renaissance hermetists: Paracelsus (14931541) and above all, later, Boehme {about whom we will often speak: 1575-1624).

a. Foundation of the Thing, of the Name

The qualitas is what falls onto "the things" (in their state of indistinction) and imprints itself on them like a force of distinctiveness, of specification, of nomination: it's what founds the thing by means of its name. Paracelsus: "Everything corporeal, plants, trees, animals, belongs to a same essence, but each differs insofar as, at the beginning, the verb "fiat imprinted a quality on it." 18 _,. This

Paracelsus, Hutin, 59

Boehme, 88

53


imprinted (by God) quality = the signature (theory of the signatures, of Paracelsus, then Boehme). Boehme's vision of qualitas is less transcendent (the fiat landing sovereignly onto things), more vehement, more "gutsy": qualitas rises out of things like a force, the imprint 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 for us) nuance: quality is a theater of battling forces: nothing irenic; in modern terms, one would be tempted to say: it is an intensity (thus entering a game, a dialectic of intensities, a shimmer of forces).

b. Quality as Desire

Being a good mystic, Boehme is Cratylian, he believes in "true" etymology. Thus qualitat < quelle, spring, surging force, soaring fountain (we have encountered this usual meaning with Paracelsus), but < quaal, suffering, torture: "In each quality there is an element of anger, of suffering and furor, since each quality suffers from its isolation, its limitation and tries to overflow, to be united with other qualities. " 19 ____,. Dynamic, loving battle of the qualities among themselves and of the two sides, the good and the bad, of a single quality:

Boehme, 88

The hot-light: good, sweet, joyful; ardor: burns, devours, destroys. The cold-freshness: good; furious and incensed form: freezing, which gels. 20 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 the A and B of the NB paradigm: complex term (;e Neutral: neither A nor B). (Let me remind you once more: I am "Saussurian" =not a "faith" but a willingness to borrow Saussurian models in order "to understand" [to speak]. [r] Model of the paradigm and of the syntagm + [2] Brondalian (Hjelmslevian) model: NB; A + B; neither A nor B; complex degree, zero degree, neutral.) 21 Thus, in Boehme: acrid/sweet____,. bitter.22 The acrid: this is not a sensuous quality = power of abstraction, of coagulation, of condensation. Gives birth to hardness and cold. Like a salt = salinity.

Boehme, 132

54

S E SS I 0 N 0 F MARCH 11 , 1 9 7 8

The sweet: victory over the acrid. Quality of water that dilutes and attenuates salt. Without sweetness, all bodies as though petrified, in an absolute hardness = bodies in which life would be impossible. Principle of fluidity. The bitter: 23 trembling, penetrating. A tendency to raise itself up. Interpenetrating movement of the acrid and the sweet. Notice that in Boehmian energetic (it's a purely paradigmatic thought): the relation of two terms (acrid/sweet) is never defined by juxtaposition, discourse, narration, syntagm (cf. Jakobson's conception of poetry: an extended paradigm), 24 the dialectical relation (combinatory: cf. myth, the story for Levi-Strauss) 25 occurs, however, within the limits of the paradigm, by means of the invention of a complex term. 26 This, important 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-"storyied" essences. What type of thought of the Neutral is implied in such a system? = reflects the ambivalence alleged at the outset:

Paradigm

r. = thought of things as nonpredicable, since the object fades

away to the profit of the quality: world of qualities, not of qualified, predicated substances. It's thus the thought of a certain Neutral. 2. But this Neutral remains conflictual, sensitive to the struggle of angry forces that stand against each other: the overcoming of the conflictual doesn't occur through suspension, abstention, abolition of the paradigm, but through invention of a third term: complex term and not zero, neutral term. 27

Neutral

3. Aggression Through the Adjective

A. Not to be forgotten: the adjective is a commodity. In a good many domains, (market) value of an object, of a service is debated and calculated as a function of the adjectives that one is able to attach to it, or at least one should study the fields where the adjective comes first: a painting by Klee? No, but a movie star, yes. And political ratings are inseparable from adjectives, manifestation of the image. Telerama, March 4, p. 22. 28 If, leaving these historical, mystical (Boehme), and sociological regions, I move to the way, subjectively, I am affected by, the way I feel the adjective (I believe, as you know, in the pathetic structure of

55


language), I will still have to deal with some aspects of the conflictual energy, of the "anger" that defines the Boehmian quality: for I always receive the adjective badly, as an aggression, and I do so in all cases, no matter which value is attributed to it by the figure under which it is addressed to me.

B. a. The Deprecating Adjective

I (like everyone) sometimes hear myself qualified (as a writer) with intentionally depreciative adjectives: accusation of "preciousness," of "theoretical coquetry," of muffling, etc. The aggression (the unpleasantness) doesn't only arise from the (depreciative) intention but from this: r. The adjective that comes from outside me upsets the Neutral

in which I find 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, who doesn't force him into an assessment?): subjectively, as a subject, I never feel myself adjectivized, and it's on this mode of adjectival anesthesia that the postulation of the Neutral is grounded in me. 2. The adjectival interpellation throws me back like a ball (a stake) into the vertigo of reciprocal images: by adjectivizing me as "precious,'' the other puts himself in a paradigm, he adjectivizes himself as "plain,'' "direct," "frank,'' "virile"; and to this paradigm (I-bad/he-good) there responds the symmetrical and reversed paradigm: I can adjectivize myself not as precious but as subtle-delicate and henceforth adjectivize him as hick, crude, stubborn, victim of the virility lure __.,. formally both value paradigms have entered some kind of deal, "work" like a turnstile: ego +!alter-, in which ego and alter oscillate according to the source of the utterance __.,. endless walk, two-termed dialectic, vertigo without respite, because the turning excludes respite, suspension, the Neutral. I am caught in the weariness of the paradigm.

Neutral

Adjectival anesthesias

b. The Laudatory Adjective: The Compliment

Do laudatory adjectives appease me at least? How does the Neutral man behave when faced with "compliments"? The compliment pleases, it doesn't appease, it doesn't bring rest __.,. in the received

Compliments

56


compliment, there is for sure a moment of narcissistic tingle; but (quickly) past this first instant, the compliment, without wounding (let's not exaggerate!), makes one uneasy: the compliment puts me in apposition to something, 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 from a boundless narcissism, which equates the subject to a god: Paul Valery ("M. Teste's Logbook"): "A compliment-what an insult! He dares praise me! Am I not beyond all qualification? That is what a Self would say, if it dared!" 29 Moralistic demystification (very much like La Rochefoucauld) justified only if one doesn't use it to harden the ego into an essence. Hypernarcissism like a blushing that passes: followed by the desire not to be above all qualification but to be outside it. Narcissus knows no rest-and ultimately, what I fundamentally want is to rest. Yet, for my part, I pay compliments, I distribute adjectives: Why? How? A type of reaction prompted by the (frequent) situations where abstention is taken as negation: not to "compliment"= too negative a meaning, which I don't want ____,,also, "my" compliments, in a certain way, are embarrassed: not because of insincerity but because of a kind of compromise between the good that I think and the antiadjective principle that makes it impossible for me to say it: I am trapped by language ____,, apparent lack of conviction, luke-warmth, noncredibility. 30 We thus understand the damage an excessive compliment can cause. The nature of this compliment: it compromises (which is what all adjectives do). A grandiose example of this assassination through compliments (the dithyramb, the unconditional apologia): Joseph de Maistre and the pope: the pope panicked by the avalanche of dithyrambic arguments. Cioran (excellent introduction): "de Maistre, as skilled at compromising what he loves as what he detests" 31 ____,,ultimately: to inspire fear in the one you extol.

Maistre, 11

c.

The Refusal of the Adjective

Do not confuse the refusal of the adjective with the suspension of adjectives (see below). Refusal of the adjective = moral practice, suppression of the adjective that we call de rigueur for more than a question of "attitude": in general, "scientific" attitude, which suppresses the adjective, not because it wounds but because it is hardly compatible with objectivity, truth. Someone even went so far as to connect this refusal on the part of science to the question of pleasure: Lucien Israel on hysteria: "pleasure difficult to describe

Science

Pleasure Israel, 87

57


--scientifically, because only adjectives can describe pleasure. " 32 To tell the truth, I don't believe this: thousands of adjectives applied to pleasure won't describe it: the only linguistic approach to pleasure is, I believe, metaphor or more precisely catachresis: "lirr{ping" metaphor in which the denotated term doesn't exist in language (the arms of a chair); but metaphor has none of the "dangers" of the adjective: it is not apposition, epithet, complement, but slippage (which is what its name means). 33

Metaphor Catachresis

4. To Dismiss Adjectives

Refusal, suppression, censorship of adjectives "' abolition, lapse, obsolescence, erasure: preparation for experiments in linguistic abolition: they are to be found in the borderline languages (and not in the endoxal3 4 language). I will flag four of these experiments that share the attempt at this superhuman project: to put into question +to exhaust predication(= adjectives):

a. The Lover's Discourse

On the one hand, the loving subject covers the other with laudatory adjectives (a polynymy well known to theology or to religious practice; for example: litanies to the Virgin); but also, or finally, unsatisfied by this rosary of adjectives, feeling the rending lack from which predication suffers, he comes to seek a linguistic way of addressing this: that the totality of imaginable predicates will never reach or exhaust the absolute specificity of the object of his desire: he moves from polynymy to anonymy _.,,. to the invention of words that are the zero degree of predication, of the adjective. The "Adorable!" the "je ne sais quoi," the "it," the "something," 35 etc. (In linguistic culture, two objects seen as beyond predication either in horror or in desire: the corpse [Bossuet]3 6 and the desired body).

b. The Sophists Sophistes, 25

Here is an intellectual (nonmystical) treatment of predication: Antisthenes' argument 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 individual exists: I see the horse, not horsiness _.,,. predication becomes impossible, because the subject is irreducible to the predicate _.,,. therefore two contradictory discourses

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S ES SI 0 N 0 F M ARCH 1 1 , 1 9 7 8

r don't contradict each other; they simply bear on different objects: there can never be anything false because one cannot say of a given subject anything other than the subject. 37 Notice the social strength of this paradox (in relation to society, to social practices of discourse): if the paradox were to be retained, generalized subversion. r. Contradiction would no longer be a weapon that defeats the enemy; the true 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 individual would be reducible to another --;. absolute individuation; on the other hand, every individual being incomparable (for the adjective, the predicate is the middle term that allows for the comparison), no generality would be possible, and, notably, no science; and if we recall that, according to Kierkegaard, language is general (and hence moral), to block, to evacuate all generality, is truly to carry oneself to the limit of language, to the edge of its impossible.

Invincible

c. Negative Theology This is the exemplary field of the suspension of the adjective, since the whole mystical experience consists precisely in not predicating God. But, as in the lover's discourse (and we know the affinities between the lover's discourse and mystical discourse), this "suspension" occurs in two phases; or by two degrees: r. Affirmative method, or cataphasis: affirmation through po-

lynymy: divine names, numerous and voluminous: God considered as universal cause; names correspond to the various effects of this cause, the determination, the operations of God aimed ad extra 38 -;. 2. Then, negative method or apophasis: 39 anonymy: brief method: aims at the divine essence by denying it, first its furthest names, then its most proximate names; thus goes beyond the plane of causality.40 (Notice again that the abolition of predication upsets, erodes all scientific and endoxal logic: "outmodes" contradiction and proposes a world [a language] that does without causality, without determination__,. "mad" attitude.)

lossky, 41 Denys, 34

d. East

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

59


a. In India, way followed by Shankara and his school. Universal being defined in a negative manner: neti ... neti: it is neither this nor that 41 "'visible things: in fact "you are that" :42 what the mirror says (Lacan), 43 inauguration of the image. (It's pure negative theology.) b. The Tao is unknowable because, were we to know it, we would enter the domain of the relative and it would lose its quality of absoluteness. ___,, "One cannot say anything about it, because, if one said something about it, it would be subjected to affirmation and to negation." 44 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 Tao and the "God" of mysticism (above all, the negative) merge on the way to apophasis, to the rejection of predication, which is captured so well in this verse of Angelus Silesius:

Grenier, 118

14

"If you love something, you love nothing. God is neither this nor that. Give leave to the something. " 45

Angelus Silesius, p. 47

5. The Time of the Adjective

Suppress the adjective? First of all, this is not "easy" (to say the least!), and then, in the end, it would suppose an ethics of "purity" ("truth"/ "absoluteness") to which should be opposed a more dialectic ethics of language (that's what's at stake in this course: an ethics of language): A friend points out to me: "to say of someone that he's handsome is to imprison him in his beauty"! I say: yes, it's true, but all the same: not too fast! let's not go too fast! It's beautiful, it's free, it's human. It might end up being necessary to let go {faire son deuil} of desire (that's what psychoanalysis tells us), but let's not do it right away: pleasure of desire, of the adjective: so that "truth" (if there is any) not be immediate: pleasure of the lure: the sculptor Sarrasine died from truth (Zambinella was nothing but a castrato), but he got pleasure from the lure (Zambinella was an adorable woman): 46 without the lure, without the adjective, 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, thus to confine {affirmer, done enfermer}. But at the same time to evacuate adjectives from 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 a member of the tribe died.

Ethics of language

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S E S S I 0 N 0 F MARC H 1 1 , 1 9 7 8

Don't bleach language, savor it instead. Stroke it gently or even groom it, but don't "purify" it. We can prefer lure to mourning, or at least 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 a moment: a time.

61



Supplement Ill In this course, there are too many listeners (split up into different rooms, some of which are "blind") for it to be possible for one or another among you to have a dialogue with me in public: 1 on the one hand, it would introduce a theatrical (psychodramatic) practice of jousting within the course (a form essentially antipathetic to the Neutral); on the other hand, most of the time, I am unable to respond to a question, to a comment, on the spot, and it's precisely because I claim the right of not knowing how to answer, because I hope to put the very idea of reply in question, that I utter with such insistence a desire for Neutral---;;. the echo needs time to develop: to what is said to me, I can only give an echo, not an "answer," and the richer, the more pertinent the stimulus, the more this echo needs a silence before being returned. Thus I thank those of you who are nice enough to write to me, to share observations with me either by means of letters or by coming to see me: I thank them for helping me, in so doing, to maintain alive in myself (and perhaps for all) a course that feeds on the present without falling into the immediacy (of the reply). I think that such a practice is homogeneous with the very object of the course, and I want to thank everyone for understanding it. That being said, I will, therefore not "answer" but give an echo, a drift, to certain things that were said or written to me since last Saturday. I give them in the order in which I received them: 1.

Color. I have been reminded that the opposition very colorful/Neutral, dull, faded is to be found in nature: in certain animal species, the male is brilliantly colored, the female is of neutral color. I have neither the competence nor the desire to open this very rich ethological file for the moment. But the suggestion turns on an anthropomorphic impulse (a metaphor) in me, which is very bad but which I will indulge all the same, the time of two short "reveries": a. In nature, the roles of display are inverted in relation to our society: it's the male who makes himself the object of seduction, the 62

r !

female being there, in the position of the Neutral, to look at him: it's as if, with us, the man were to primp, dress up, deck himself with colors, jewels, perfumes, feathers, as the women of the nineteenth century did to seduce, to capture the man: the Neutral and the female = some kind of place of power, of decision (this is a "reverie," since of course I know nothing of the "psychology," of the motivations of animals) __,.. an American sociologist remarked, 2 which is obvious, that, in the capitalist bourgeois West (nineteenth century), the distribution of vestimentary roles followed ideological-economic constraints: the man wears a severe suit, undifferentiated, dull, derived by way of Anglophilia from the Quaker model (we are all dressed like Quakers): by means of this piece of clothing, he signifies, on the one hand, work-value (the man works and wears a work uniform): simple (without ornamentation that would restrict movement), hard to dirty (because spots can't be seen on the Neutral-but the Neutral, as you have seen, can stain); on the other hand, it signifies a democratic decision: there is no social difference between citizens: at least at the level of clothing: workers and others, all classes united, from the little clerk to the mighty banker: class difference is only reintroduced at the level of the "detail," of the fashion detail, of the fads 3 (tie, scarf, style of wearing them, etc.) __,.. production of the "distinguished" (well put) man __,..man thus can no longer advertise his status through his clothing, he has sacrificed display (which he still had in the eighteenth century) __,.. the woman is thus made (in the nineteenth and still today) to advertise the status (money) of the man: furs, jewels, colors, expensive dresses, haute couture __,.. display has changed sides; but this is a strictly historical stage. Basically, we could sketch it with the following rough chart (just a springboard for the hypothesis). This chart has at least the interest (alibi) of reintroducing a little bit of semiology into the subject! Men

Animals Ethnographic societies

63

Women

Adorned

Neutral

Adorned

Neutral

+

0

0

+

(festivals)

Aristocratic societies

+

0

+

0

Bourgeois democratic societies

0

+

+

0

Revolutionary democratic societies

0

+

(except at the

0

SES SI 0 N 0 F MARCH 1 8, 1 9 7 8

theater and opera)

+

b. Another, briefer remark: the (ethological and probably ethnographic) assimilation of the female, of the woman to the Neutral4 -"' one should look among the various myths of femininity: femininity as matrix, mother, origin, original undifferentiated state: materia prima out of which the -finite will arise (woman and water}: Asian myths and in a certain way romantic myth, notably in Michelet. 5

2. Second, altogether different observation: a female listener, having reservations about the seemingly uninformed way I spoke about mysticism, brought to my attention, in reference to the matter of the -figure "Tact," that when Buddha silently gives a flower to his disciple to signal to him that he is transmitting his heritage to him, it is in no way a matter of tact: the flower is the flower of knowledge. I didn't know it, I learned it, and for that I thank her, but this observation reveals a misunderstanding about the way I proceed when I "cite" (I call) 6 a knowledge (here the knowledge of Buddhism) -"' four quick observations: a. It's obvious that knowledge enters the course by means of very fragmented bits, which can seem offhand: this knowledge is never cohesive. It is never mobilized as a doctrinal knowledge: I know nothing and do not pretend to know anything about Buddhism, about Taoism, about negative theology, about Skepticism: these objects, insofar as they are doctrinal, systematic, historical bodies, such as one might -find in histories of thought, of religions-these objects are altogether absent from my discourse -"' pushed to the limit: when I cite from Buddhism or from Skepticism, you must not believe me: I am outside mastery, I have no mastery whatsoever, and, to make it clear, I have no other choice than (Nietzsche) to "lose respect for the whole'':7 for the master is the one who teaches the whole (the whole according to himself}: and I don't teach the whole (about Buddhism, about Skepticism). My aim= to be neither master nor disciple but, in the Nietzschean sense (thus with no need for a good grade), "artist." b. According to the same listener, there is a primacy of the referent, and the referent of the Buddha's gesture is the coded meaning of the flower, knowledge not tact -"' of course, I never thought that the historical meaning of the Buddha's gesture, what it really meant, was tact. I even think that Buddha was naturally too tactful 64


-to have the slightest idea that tact needed to be signified: ultimately, I am deeply convinced that it is tactless to speak of tact (unfortunately, it is what I am doing). c. I would say, paradoxically but firmly-and it is the same for all the historical facts that I cite, for example, the death of Bias in the arms of the child 8- I never interpret. If I interpreted, my interpretation would be false and my listener would be right to object to it ___,. I try to create, to invent a meaning from independent materials, which I liberate from their historical, doctrinal "truth" ___,. I take the referential bits (in fact, bits of reading), and I submit them to an anamorphosis: a process known to all mannerist artists. d. In the episode of the flower, it wasn't a question of Buddha: Buddha is only a name, like the name of a character from a novel. It could have been myself, I could have said: when I decide to transmit my legacy (although I don't have any), I'll take a rose and offer it publicly to a friend (for example, during my last course in r98 5 !) ___,. if I chose Buddha, it's, if I dare say so, to do him a favor {faire une fleur}! Because I like Buddha. But is the best way of loving Buddha to speak him according to History or according to my present? According to his life or according to my life?

3. Third observation: concerning the adjective. A female listener suggests that there is a category of "active" adjectives that do not imprison the subject-the present participles-and that this category could very well have a privileged relation to the Neutral. I would love things to be so and for there to exist liberated adjectival forms, which would allow one to speak about a subject without "I.D.-ing" it {le "ficher"}, imprisoning it within the passivity of a thing. But in reality our present participles used adjectivally, even if they originate in the verb, are pure and simple adjectives: "shining," "stimulating," "overwhelming": in the lived and immediate experience of speech, nothing in them recalls the verb. (Perhaps different in English: like a vibration of the "in the course of doing, of being done"?) As for the relation between present participle and the Neutral, it is indeed striking in Greek philosophy, wholly based since Aristotle on the concept of the essence of the thing (the thing in itself), to on: Neutral + present participle; unfortunately, here the verb is the very verb of the passive: the Neutral reinforces the desexualized, passive inertia of the thing ___,. that's not at all the Neutral that (in 65


my desire for Neutral) I am trying to reconfigure. Nothing to do, despite the generosity of our listener who wanted to give us a peaceful grammatical category (and once again I must thank her for it): nothing to do: in language, nothing realizes the Neutral, our Neutral, and above all not the Neuter: nothing in language but perhaps in the "discourse," in the "text," in the "writing," whose function perhaps is to make up for the injustices, to soften the fatalities of language? _,. The writing of the Neutral, I think it exists, I have encountered it. Where? I will say it at the end (June 3), this will be the little bit of suspense of the course.

4.

Final observation: a listener writes (I only quote a part of his letter}: 9 Herve Dubourjal It is not easy to speak; every kind of speech, even the most serene, is recuperated, used for aims that were not its own. However, that's indeed where the essential is at stake: all theoretical elaboration implies, as a corollary, practical requirements. As for your own speech, it is articulated in another sphere despite the insurmountable problem: speech as act, locus of a choice, "of an ethics," as if to say, speech-practice. The desire for neutral is thus caught off guard, perhaps against its will; its sphere of elsewhere remains nonetheless a fixed sphere, that of speech that, in transforming itself into writing and despite the extreme richness of meanings to be found there, allows itself several minutes of pause. Unbearable pause that freezes it for capture. Faced with this, two questions that have bothered me from the start of your course at the College; don't be mistaken about them, it's not a matter of asking you to take a stand, as much for fear of wearying you as for the great respect that your discourse arouses in the listener. You can't be unaware that the positions of Jacques Lacan are in conflict with those of Deleuze. Your discourse, despite that, explicitly refers to the two of them. How can that be understood, or, rather, how do you deal with such a contradiction? It is clear that the question itself is aware of its own ridiculousness, your references to Eastern culture as well as to ours clearly show that the choice (the good one) is not bearable. Here the question cancels itself as if beheaded by the evidence of your unstable project, evidence of play (in the Nietzschean sense, "the child-

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player") that perhaps constitutes the essence (an improper word, needless to say) of your past research on forms and signs, to have the meanings climax against each other, to extract their substance out of them (we know that it hides, confines itself in an impossible place, and that the words hardly signify, here I am thinking of the Tao), and, from that, to give consistency to a discourse that is hard to pin down (which explains the awkwardness of this letter) because it is unclassifiable. The other "question," as difficult to avoid as the first. During your inaugural lecture, you argued that all speech was fascist, a place of power, and that the strength of literature was to baffle this place of mastery. It's where the shoe pinches the most. I believe that even your desire for Neutral, being despite itself perhaps a stance taken in front of a lack (the neutral), flirts with the game of power. Of course, no slogan has called for it until now, but, in calmly claiming this desire, you generate a watchword. To be Roland Barthes and to say "I desire the Neutral" may not impose anything except that a large part of the audience will say: "One must desire the neutral." As if a fatal flaw subjected the neutral to discussion, to opposition, and, despite everything, fully reinserted it into an inescapable paradigm. Desire doesn't escape recognition; it is desire that the Other recognize my own desire for neutral, and such necessity of communicating this desire cheats the game: "In order for it to be true, you should have kept it to yourself," so to speak. Here's how I take this observation: I feel (and it's also the opinion of the listener) that I don't have to "respond," to "reply," which is to say, to "protest" ("But not at all, I don't impose anything," etc.): that would be useless and of no interest. I receive what is said to me here as something that is said on my behalf, that I tell myself, but on the basis of which, since it is said to me by an other, I can more easily drift: the other's speech (benevolent: and this is decisive) helps me to decenter myself, to open up onto an elsewhere of my discourse that I had not thought through: "the other thinks in my brain, "ro That's true dialogue, which doesn't need actual theater. In what is addressed to me here, two things affect me: Desire. That by stating my desire (for Neutral), I inflect the other's desire. "Show me who, what to desire" is how we all proceed (cf A Lover's Discourse). Nothing to do: one can't speak withI,

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out desire ___., no course without desire (decision of the inaugural lecture) 11 and thus without that desire becoming law. Thus it's not a question of the topic of the course. No other solution but to stop speaking of one's desire, which means to renounce the course ___., imaginable? Why not? But that raises other problems than of desire, problems of reality (I already spoke of "Renouncing writing"). Thus for the time being, we continue and, on this point, here is how I drift: in making the Neutral into the topic of a course, I make it into an explicit center: what is listened to. But by the same stroke, I imply something off center, lateral, indirect: what's heard: don't listen, just hear, and understand by way of hearing ___., if central, the Neutral is no longer the essential of the course ___., the essential is in the indirect. The indirect of desire, of the Neutral, what is it? a. Desire is nothing but a passage. I pass through the Neutral. Perhaps tomorrow another desire. This passage of the Neutral could be uttered otherwise: for the moment, in me, the desire for the Neutral is purely reactive: it's a reactive desire (in the Nietzschean sense): a desire of the feeble, of the slave? Eight days ago I received a book by someone whom I don't know (very normal); yesterday, this someone called me to ask me what I think of his book. At that very moment, there arises in me the desire for Neutral: the desire not to read the book, to think nothing of it, to be unable to say what I think of it: the right not to desire: is there a power of exemplarity (of law) in the desire for nondesire? The Neutral is not an objective, a target: it's a passage. In a famous apologue, Zen makes fun of people who mistake the pointing finger for the moon it points to 12 ___.,, I am interested in the finger, not in the moon. b. Being in central (and thus inessential) position, the Neutral is perhaps a figure, a mask, a painted screen (a symptom?) that takes the place of something else. Of what? Perhaps, for example, of a political anxiety or a relational anxiety? It's not for me to tell, since, in giving an interpretation, I would do nothing but give a new interpretandum. But we can meditate on it, without drawing a conclusion. A second thing that moves me and helps me clarify. In a benevolent way, the listener creates an aporia in me ("logical difficulty with no resolution"): either I speak of the Neutral and I make it into a law; or I don't construct a law from it, but then I don't speak of it (and the whole course falls apart). This aporia is real: the listener's intervention allows me to polish it, to sharpen it. But at the same time, it turns the course upside down: perhaps what I'm indirectly and obstinately speaking about, is aporia; one could notice (if 2.

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I were to make myself into my own commentator) that almost all the -figures (up to this point) stage an aporia: Benevolence: humid or dry, never "right"; Weariness: endless process of ending; Silence: becomes, willing or not, its own sign; Sleep: unable to feel its own emptiness; Affirmation: language forces me to assert, even if I don't want to; Color: the Neutral is colorful (and it stains!}; Adjective: creator of images, it can't be eliminated from language. To these aporias, we could add (I am speeding) a rhetoric of the thing ceaselessly posited, asked for, and ceaselessly eluded. The -files, for example, the types of discourse: never exploited, never inventoried. Then, perhaps, the active would appear next to the reactive: the course: step by step: how to recognize the world as a tissue of aporias, how to live until death by going (painfully, pleasurably) through the aporias, without undoing them by a logical, dogmatic blow of force? Which is to say: how to live aporias as creation, which is to say, by the practice of a text-discourse that doesn't break the aporia but floats it as a speech that tangles itself in the other (the public) lovingly (to borrow again a word from Nietzsche)? I said it (inaugural lecture) in another way: literature or writing (in which I locate myself, without any presumption of value) = the representation of the world as aporetic, woven of aporia 13 + the practice that induces a catharsis of the aporia, without undoing it, which is to say, without arrogance. (I realize that if I drift too complacently, soon there will no longer be a course, nothing but supplements. Supplements to nothing: that's the ideal Neutral! Nevertheless, we will return to these -figures of the Neutral. which we still have to traverse for eight more weeks.)

Images of the Neutral 1. Depreciative Images

Except for certain philosophers and for Blanchot, which is to say everywhere in the doxa, the Neutral has a bad press: the images of the Neutral are depreciative. Each bad image is locked into a bad adjective (once again the negative role of the adjective). Here are some of these bad adjectives:

a. Thankless

Blanchot: "The neutral does not seduce, does not attract." 14 Being in no way seductive = unrewarding; an unengaging child: a child

Blanchot, Conversation,

311

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who doesn't seduce, contrary to all the rules of childhood; awkward {ingrat) age = between childhood's seduction and that of adolescence = not lovable and seems not to love.

b. Shirking

Subject in the Neutral: said to flee one's responsibilities, to flee conflict, in a word, most defamatory: to flee. Indeed, doxa = lives comfortably within the paradigm (the conflictual opposition): only way to respond (to correspond to a term): to contest it. Does not imagine that there could be another response: to slip, to drift, to escape: defamatory mark that rests on a logical sophism: not to oppose, means to be complicit. The escape: third term, unthinkable for the doxa. I don't like accounts of dreams (and I don't like dreams), but this one interested me because it stages a logical scandal: scenery of the supermarket type; ordinarily escape (in dreams): anguishing= nightmare. Here, exceptionally: escapes, parryings, shifts in direction: successful, light, jubilant, triumphant (cf. Marx Brothers or Chaplin in a department store), as if that came to me from a reversal of the (overwhelmed, discredited, astray) Neutral into sovereign Neutral.

c. Muffled The Neutral: affinity for the muffled. Applied to a person: contemptuous notion: mixture of dullness, of hypocrisy, of the taste for narrow convenience. And here we could bring the signifier into play: the closed ce is rare in French: as an ending: bleu {blue}; before a pronounced consonant: euse, etc. + a few isolated words: meule {haystack}, veule {spineless}, meute {pack}, feutre {felt}, and neutre {neuter, neutral}. 15 The rhyme neutrelfeutre (is it the only one?): exemplary: truth (here mythical) of rhyme.

Charles Bruneau, Manuel

de phonetique pratique (Berger-Levrault), p. 109

d. Limp

Fichte (seventh lesson): disdainful description of the Skeptic who doesn't want true knowledge:

Fichte, 218

In this fake being, limp, distended, multiple, there are a crowd of antitheses, of contradictions that live peaceably side by side. Nothing in him is either distinct or separated, but everything is mixed, everything is interlaced. The men in question hold nothing for true and nothing for false, they love nothing, they hate nothing. They neither love nor hate because for grati70


tude, for love, for hatred, for each feeling, there must be this energetic concentration of which they are incapable, because it requires that one distinguish and separate within the diversity, and that one choose the single object of one's gratitude and one's affection. 16 Very endoxal idea that to love is to choose, to eliminate, and thus to destroy "the remainder" + assimilation of the multiplicity of desires to indecision and, from there, to softness, to the "limp" = vitalist idea: what lives is only alive if it destroys what is around itself. (To which we could object that, to the contrary, to assume the Neutral would represent an extreme concentration of energy, if only the energy one needs to take responsibility for the image [false but inevitable] of the limp!)

e. Indifferent r. According to Fichte, 17 five great eras in the history of man-

kind. I: state of innocence; II: beginning of sin, transformation of the instinct of reason into an authority that constrains from the outside; Ill: state of perfect sin, constituted by indifference to all truth, by contempt for the instinct of reason and for all authority = the present-day world: life in and for the The principle of such a conduct is the lack of love, even of the most vulgar love, the love of oneself." 18 (Love doesn't have to be confused with the will-to-possess.) (In fact, there are many indifferences; see below.)

Fichte, xvi

Fichte, lesson 11, p.

321-322

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f. Vile

(I understand by vile what is opposed to "noble.") Very obvious split of value on the subject of silence (silence: at first glance, privileged form of the Neutral). Now, Kojeve (in fact repeating Hegel's verdict): two silences, a good and a bad one:

Kojeve, 20

I.

Good silence: Parmenides and Heraclitus:

a. Parmenides: reduces discourse to silence (as do the Skeptics); but the "absolute" silence is not an "uncertainty,'' or a "doubt,'' or an "abstention"; to the contrary, it's the silent "certainty,'' the silent knowledge of the ineffable absolute; instead of abstaining from speaking, Parmenides speaks "up to the end,< ... > he speaks in order to reach definitive silence in a sure or necessary way, a silence within which and thanks to which nothing remains doubtful any longer." 19 b. Heraclitus: like the Skeptics: discourse is self-contradictory, with neither beginning nor end = as such, precisely, it is truth, because it relates to a world that corresponds to it, whose essence (physis, nomos) 20 is constituted by contrary elements, which coexist and follow each other with neither beginning nor end "' bad silence, vile silence.

Silence

Skepticism properly speaking (bad embodiment of the Neutral) lacks the nobility of Eleatism or of Heraclitism, because it gives up speaking about the concept, that is, gives up the path that leads to philosophy: "(Theoretical) Skepticism completely ignores < ... > Philosophy, which is the (specifically philosophical) Question of the Concept. " 21 -"' Also, Skepticism, "philosophically noble" only if Parmenidean or Heraclitean; otherwise banal doubt, fault, non dignus intrare (into philosophy through the narrow door of the concept). The Neutral would only be saved if it is philosophical; otherwise, bad image: the Skeptical Neutral refuses to recognize the throne of the concept, to kiss the feet of the concept, to let itself be had by it. 2.

Concept Kojeve, 24

2. The Neutral as Scandal

It is not hard to see what the common ground of these bad images is. Let's recall: historically, the "official" space of the neutral is Skepticism, i.e., Pyrrho's disciples: Zetetics (always looking), 22 Skeptics (examining without finding), Ephectics (suspending their judgment), Aporetics (always looking); 23 thus, always images of failure or impotence. -"'the Neutral suffers the weight (the shadow) of grammar: =

Brochard, 56

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what is neither masculine nor feminine, or (verbs) neither active nor passive (= deponents) = what is subtracted from genitality, what is neither virile nor attractive (feminine); we know it, mythically, endoxally, indelible infamy. ____,. We don't need to take sides against this image (or, then, it's the course as such that is this opposition in its entirety; one doesn't protest against an image, that is useless). What can be done is to drift by displacing the paradigm.____,. For "virility," or for the lack of virility, I would be tempted to substitute vitality. There is a vitality of the Neutral: the Neutral plays on the razor's edge: in the will-to-live but outside of the will-to-possess ____,. I am thinking of the end of the already cited poem by Pasolini (Poesia in forma di rosa [Garzanti, 1964], chapter 5, stanza 9):

Masc./Fem.

"My god, but then what can be said in your favor? ... " "Me?" -(nefarious stammering I didn't take the aspirin, my trembling voice that of a sick boy.)" Me? A desperate vitality. " 24

Pasolini, "Vitality"

(Action poetique, no. 71 [October 1977])

[Dio mio, ma allora, cos'ha lei all'attivo? Io?-(un balbettio, nefando, non ho preso l'optalidon, mi trema la voce di ragazzo malato.)Io? Una disperata vitalita.]

Anger To speak of this figure, we need words that don't exist or that exist badly in French: state (which we will nevertheless use willy-nilly) is too abstract: a way of being? That refers to something more exterior (style, silhouette): habitus. Affects? That's a bit strong, a bit devastating, a bit "primitive" ____,. the most interesting word, if we give it back its Greek (and not French) being, is to pathos = what one feels, as opposed to what one does, and also as opposed to he pathe: passive state. ____,. to pathos: in the neutral: both active and affected: withdrawn from the will-to-act but not from "passion" ____,. I don't believe I am forcing the word; in philosophy: ta pathe = the events, the changes that occur in things ____,. to pathos: shimmering field of the body, insofar as it changes, goes through changes. What wouldn't be too bad: kinesthesia. 25 (Thus reversal that pleases us:

The word Pathos

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the opposite of the connotation by the signifier: clumsy {pataud), or by the signified: sentimental heaviness.)

1. States a. Anger

Mythologically, the Neutral is associated with a weak, unmarked "state" (pathos). It breaks away from, is distanced by every strong, marked, emphatic state (which is, by the same token, allied with "virility") ----;. anger is an example of a strong state of marked pathos: it functions perfectly as an anti-Neutral. I know three "versions" of anger:

Anger

r. Anger as escape. I refer here to Sartre's Theory of Emotions. 26 Cf. fainting. Anger is in fact a type of fainting, a loss of consciousness, thus of responsibility, through excess. Moreover, it would be interesting to draw the map of our angers: anger as "patheme" (to pathema: event that moves one): what are our "pathemes"? (As for myself, whose angers are rare, probably from fear of the effects of reprisal, of the guilt that follows, a probable "patheme": waiting----;. angers in the cafe, in the restaurant. Why? Probably: humiliation, "royal" fantasy: "Make me wait? Me!": refusal of the transferential situation: to wait = to turn oneself over passively to a power, to a mastery: "at the discretion of": doctors, dentists, banks, airports, professors?) 2. Anger as hygiene. Utterly commonplace idea, endoxal: the fit of anger as a bleeding that does one good ----;. ineluctable, natural release of humor (physical word). Bacon: "To seek to extinguish Anger utterly is but a bravery of the Stoics " 27 ----;. whence an ethics of temperance: to control one's anger, and above all its duration, its ending. Bacon: to abstain from any extreme bitterness of words, from any too excessive and too personal "aculeate"; to restrain oneself from revealing a secret in a fit of anger ----;. concept of useful anger: to be in control of a show of noncontrol, to theatricalize one's anger, to manipulate it as one piece in a test of force. And, above all, to know how to end it: wisdom, formulated by Scriptures (quoted by Bacon): "Be angry, but sin not. Let not the sun go down upon your anger." 28 3. Anger as fire. Here I think of Boehme's very beautiful conception, mystical and cosmogonical. Boehme, with regard to the world and even to God (as jealous father), often uses the words: base, grimmig; now this doesn't mean, properly speaking, ill, evil, bad ----;.

p. 36, Anger, Flight Sartre

Anger-hygiene

Bacon, Essays Civil and

Moral, 142

Boehme, 94

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t" it refers to an energy (to a desire) = an irritated and anxious ardor; something close to anger, fury, wrath = ira, orge 29 = devouring fire (whence the wrath of God, like a fire that falls over men): it's the paradox of the ignited water, of the water-fire: the fire running in the veins: quality of the regal water 30 or vitriol (vitriol: Alchemy = arcanum, mysterium: liquid fire; vitriolum

Roland Barthes - The Neutral

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