of the pigment “Neutral” ties Barthes’s domestic and scholarly activities together in a way that is both amusing and intellectually suggestive. More seriously, his thoughts on the consequences of the death of his mother depict a writer who is well aware that postmodern playfulness is not unbounded by the basic conditions of human existence. For someone so closely associated with the idea that authors are in some sense “dead,”The Neutral’s autobiographical episodes serve as a salutary reminder that “the death of the author” is a figurative concept rather than a literal one.

Barthes continues by examining twenty-three “figures,” various conceptual and behavioral terms that he suggests might also be thought of as “traits” or “twinklings,” which to some degree seem to embody aspects of the neutral. He explains that these were chosen in no particular order but rather set down as they came to him, with the idea that this would keep him from imposing some preexisting meaning on the material of the course. Although a suspicious reader might suspect that there is in fact some secret significance hidden within the organization of these figures-traits-twinklings, it is more likely that Barthes’s audience will be charmed as well as disarmed by a sequence that begins with such rather homely notions as “Benevolence,” “Weariness,” and “Silence,” follows “Tact” with the somewhat surprising “Sleep” and “Retreat” with the even more surprising “Arrogance,” and concludes by setting up the bisexual figure of “The Androgyne” as an ambiguous combination of male and female binaries that results in something neutral. There is a sense in which The Neutral consists of Barthes taking an extended meander through a wide range of miscellaneous topics and in the process demonstrating the ubiquity of the neutral through its manifestation in such a remarkable variety of forms.

During this deliberately discursive journey, Barthes, in addition to indulging in passages of autobiographical reflection, exchanged notes and letters with the students in the class and provided some more formal “supplements” concerning matters that arose during class discussions. Despite this apparently haphazard methodology, however, The Neutral does not seem disorganized or disjointed; its eclecticism in fact operates as a kind of inductive validation of its author’s hypothesis that the neutral appears in many different forms and guises, much as a random number table ensures the widest possible representation of the material within a delimited domain. Barthes’s ability to make convincing connections between the most apparently disparate “figures” also contributes much to the book’s coherence, as does its uniformly engaging tone of congenial conversation about a varied but related series of significant ideas and actions that seem to partake of the neutral.

Turning to the figures themselves, “Tact” serves as an appropriate characterization of his discourse as well as the occasion for some eloquent as well as persuasive analysis. Defining tact as “elegant and discreet flight in the face of dogmatism,” Barthes demonstrates that this seemingly innocuous form of social politeness is capable of both suspending and postponing the dogmatic speech of an interlocutor, which in turn creates a sensation of pleasure in those who employ it and thus further reason for the continuation of a state of neutrality. A strict deconstructionist view of this situation would identify dogmatism and tact as the, respectively, dominant and subordinate poles of a binary opposition and would interpret his defensive use of tact as a reversal of this polarity that highlights the social dynamics operating in such conflicts. Barthes, however, building on his observation that suspension and postponement increase in prominence as tact continues to parry dogmatism, convinces one that there are in fact places in which such figures of the neutral come to occupy positions that are outside the control of binaries.

His examples range from the everyday to the metaphysical: The Japanese tea ceremony, and its salient characteristics of the prolonging of the tea-making experience and the assigning of different meanings to each successive cup of tea, clears a domestic space for the elaboration of the neutral. In contrast, the Daoist doctrine of the immortality of the bodyin which, through proper thought, the body’s material organs are over time replaced by immortal substitutesresults in the cultural practice of substituting a sword or cane in the deceased’s coffin in order to signify the immortal body’s passage elsewhere. Thus it creates a spiritual realm that likewise harbors a form of the neutral in its refusal to choose either the life or death poles of one of the most basic binary oppositions.

The figure of “The Adjective” is another instance in which a seemingly unpromising concept is developed in a way that reveals to the reader a remarkably complex and suggestive world of possibilities. Here Barthes’s characteristic concern with the functions of language, and particularly with its structuration of the situations that people encounter as individuals, is readily apparent in the grammatical analysis that he performs upon adjectives and their place in the syntax of sentences. Unlike the postponement of conflict between binaries that occurs when one exercises “Tact,” refinements of description employing adjectives create new, complex terms that operate as “conflictual Neutrals” which complicate rather than suspend the discourse of binary oppositions. Adding “good” or “bad” to the property of having “heat” or “cold,” for example, creates new binaries (“good heat” versus “bad heat,” “good cold” versus “bad cold”) that can be made even more complex through the addition of other adjectives. One might evade such ensnarement by the operations of language, Barthes playfully suggests, if one purged one’s discourse of adjectives. This would, however, “pasteurize to the point of destruction” the content of what people have to say to one another, and so the acceptance of this conflictual form of the neutral seems to be a condition of preserving one’s ability to describe and discriminate.

The editorial team responsible for the translation and presentation of The Neutral has done an excellent job of organizing Barthes’s lectures into a coherent volume, and the supporting notes and bibliography are particularly extensive and helpful. In terms of its significance for its author’s work, The Neutral is perhaps best thought of as a useful corrective to the common misconception that Barthes was some sort of fellow-traveling deconstructionist who applied the more rigorous ideas of Jacques Derrida and others to less respectable topics drawn from popular or mass culture. There is certainly no lack of intellectual rigor exemplified in these pages, but they are also continuously invigorated and supplemented by a style of presentation that blends wit, verbal dexterity, and an impressive range of references into a powerfully effective text. There is nothing “neutral,” in other words, about this sophisticated exploration and elaboration of what is meant by “the Neutral,” and anyone interested in experiencing a fresh approach to language and literature should appreciate its mature and considered wisdom.