"A passion of neutral": Relations between neutral and subjectivity

Abstract

In his inaugural lecture of Semiology Literary chair of the Collège de France, Roland Barthes states that an education as practiced by the institution should always admit a fantasy. In his second course, entitled The Neutral (1977-1978), Barthes reaffirms the commitment to put the lesson always in order to desire: "Remember inaugural class: promise that each year the course, the research, clearly starts of a personal fantasy. In short: I desire the Neutral, then I postulate the Neutral. Who wants postulates (hallucinates) "(Barthes, 2003, p. 30). Now, as desire (neutral’s desire), the neutral presupposes a subject that, a priori, perhaps, could deny it, preventing it to establish itself as neutral, given that the way Barthes postulates it, the neutral would be the suspension of any paradigm (any arrogant imposition of sense, even linked to a subjective building). The definition of neutral as desire does not exclude, however, the presence of the subject. Thus, the paper aims to investigate how neutral and this subject that desires it are related, what implications this entails for the postulation of the "object" made by Barthes during the course and how this neutral is present (or how it desires to be present) in the life of the subject itself.