Abstract

If political engagement is to take seriously the complexity and subtlety of power’s mechanisms, it must extend to the level of language to destabilize the binary systems that undergird hegemonic power. Within the ideosphere, the dialectical and conflictual modes of discourse result in the establishing of doxa as a seemingly natural law for the parameters of meaning. For Roland Barthes, the difficulty of confronting such binarisms is that attempts to problematize result in an aporia of language, whereby the positing of interrogation and doubt towards the assertive, attributive structure of language automatically reinstates another opposition, thus reverting to the very paradigm it seeks to overcome. In Barthes’s The Neutral, a lecture series delivered towards the end of his life, he offers the theoretical foundations for a third way beyond the paradigm. The Neutral is the liminal plane of relativity that will suspend meaning in order to allow for a reassessment of the relation of the base to the superstructure. In this paper, I offer a hermeneutic exposition of the veritable power and benevolent persuasion of Barthes’ method and introduce three figures of the Neutral, Silence, Answer, and the Wou-wei, as possible ideal means of resistance. Ultimately, I argue that the novelty of The Neutral lies in its more subtle and sophisticated methodologies that can offer us hope when attempts of subversion through dialectical critique, demystification, and revolutionary protest fall short.