Abstract

The notion of épochè, ‘suspension’, as developed by the Greek Skeptics, refers to the suspension of judgment that makes one neither affirm nor deny anything. In The Neutral, Roland Barthes takes this suspension as an ethical principle. Whereas discursive logic fosters the making of clear choices between alternative positions on something formulated as an issue, Barthes' suspension of judgment counteracts this push toward taking up positions. Barthes' term for this refusal to judge is ‘the Neutral’, which manifests itself in an array of techniques and attitudes that defer, frustrate, or subtilize judgment and thus create room for drifting, relaxation, nuance, and tact. Barthes comes to think of the Neutral as a matter of intensity, of gradient degrees, rather than of the ‘zero degree’. Such gradients allow one to minimize one's interface with the world's arrogance. Barthes' ideas, for his time as much as ours, form a utopian desideratum: that of waylaying the assertiveness that language perversely encourages in its users.