Home > Work > The Neutral: Lecture Course at the Collège de France, 1977-1978

The Neutral: Lecture Course at the Collège de France, 1977-1978 QUOTES

The Neutral: Lecture Course at the Collège de France, 1977-1978 QUOTES

1 " As a general rule, desire is always marketable: we don’t do anything but sell, buy, exchange desires. . . . And I think of Bloy’s words: “there is nothing perfectly beautiful except what is invisible and above all unbuyable. "

― Roland Barthes , The Neutral: Lecture Course at the Collège de France, 1977-1978

2 " If I had to create a god, I would lend him a “slow understanding”: a kind of drip-by-drip understanding of problems. People who understand quickly frighten me. "

― Roland Barthes , The Neutral: Lecture Course at the Collège de France, 1977-1978

3 " Language is neither reactionary nor progressive; it is quite simply fascist; for fascism does not prevent speech, it compels speech. "

― Roland Barthes , The Neutral: Lecture Course at the Collège de France, 1977-1978

4 " Don’t bleach language, savour it instead. Stroke it gently or even groom it, but don’t “purify” it. "

― Roland Barthes , The Neutral: Lecture Course at the Collège de France, 1977-1978

5 " 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. "

― Roland Barthes , The Neutral: Lecture Course at the Collège de France, 1977-1978

6 " Today, information: pulverized, nonhierarchized, dealing with everything: nothing is protected from information and at the same time nothing is open to reflection -> Encyclopedias are impossible -> I would say: the more information grows, the more knowledge retreats and therefore the more decision is partial (terroristic, dogmatic) -> “I don’t know,” “I refuse to judge”: as scandalous as an agrammatical sentence: doesn’t belong to the language of the discourse. Variations on the “I don’t know.” The obligation to “be interested” in everything that is imposed on you by the world: prohibition of noninterest, even if provisional . . . . "

― Roland Barthes , The Neutral: Lecture Course at the Collège de France, 1977-1978

7 " Today there is no symbolic compensation for old age, no recognition of a specific value: wisdom, perceptiveness, experience, vision. "

― Roland Barthes , The Neutral: Lecture Course at the Collège de France, 1977-1978

8 " Il m’importe peu de savoir si Dieu existe ou non ; mais ce que je sais et que je saurai jusqu’au bout, c’est qu’il n’aurait pas dû créer en même temps l’amour et la mort. Le Neutre, c’est ce Non irréductible : un Non comme suspendu devant les endurcissements de la foi et de la certitude et incorruptible par l’une et par l’autre. "

― Roland Barthes , The Neutral: Lecture Course at the Collège de France, 1977-1978