Customer Reviews

The Neutral: Lecture Course at the College de France (1977-1978) (European Perspectives: A Series in Social Thought and Cultural Criticism)

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Here Barthes snips his way free from binary wire. He has long been a partisan of freedom.

He writes: "the Neutral (I will be more brief) is not 'social' but lyrical, existential: it is good for nothing."

No hype needed, nor much explanation. This is another extended example of Barthes thinking carefully about a plain, ordinary, daily amazement, one that left Pyrrho darn near speechless. The Neutral. Neither either nor or.

This book is a sequence of very well prepared lectures, delivered over four months. I read them slowly, separating chapters by reading one a week. It helped get me through a wretched winter. By the last week I had gone back to previous chapters frequently and liked them more with every trip.

Barthes took me back to several sections of Blanchot's INFINITE CONVERSATION, which he often cites. Other companion texts are Bacon's ESSAYS, Baudelaire's FLEURS DU MAL, Kakuzo on tea, and Suzuki on Zen.

The book is beautifully designed and printed. The translation by Rosalind E. Krauss and Denis Hollier should earn them a thousand five-star reviews. I was often thankful that the notes by Thomas Clerc are thorough and abundant. But take your pencil to the index; it has many mistakes, none of which detract a whit from what Barthes has to say.