Towards a Non-hierarchical Space of Thought: Reading Roland Barthes’ The Neutral

• Authors: Myk, Małgorzata

Abstracts

EN

The article is devoted to The Neutral: the 1977-1978 lecture course developed and taught by Roland Barthes at the Collège de France. I argue that The Neutral is firmly rooted in the tradition that Brian Massumi defined as “nomad thought” in his foreword to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism & Schizophrenia. The essay traces the genealogy of this tradition and the term of the neutral, beginning with Maurice Blanchot’s work and his own concept of the neutral and ending with Barthes’ so far largely unexplored engagement with the texts of Deleuze. Elusive as the neutral figure is meant to remain, it emerges as a theorist’s effort to exercise a form of non-dualistic and non-hierarchical thinking.

Keywords

EN

nomad thought; neutral; space of literature; non-dualistic thinking; writing

• Publisher: Uniwersytet Łódzki. Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego
• Journal: Analyses/Rereadings/Theories: A Journal Devoted to Literature, Film and Theatre
• Year: 2015
• Volume: 3
• Issue: 2

Dates

published

2015

Contributors

author

Myk, Małgorzata

other

University of Łódź

other

Dr Małgorzata Myk is an Assistant Professor at the Department of American Literature. In the years 2005-2008 she studied American literature and gender studies at the Department of English, University of Orono, Maine (M.A. degree in literature). She also worked for the National Poetry Foundation (University of Orono, Maine) as an Editorial Assistant of the journal Paideuma: Studies in American and British Modernism. She published in Poland and in the U.S. on the work of such authors as Bret Easton Ellis, Louise Erdrich, Virginia Woolf, Italo Calvino, Nicole Brossard, Joanna Russ, Thalia Field, as well as writers associated with Language poetries (Lyn Hejinian, Carla Harryman, and Leslie Scalapino). In 2013 she co-edited (with dr Kacper Bartczak) a book Theory That Matters: What Practice After Theory. She is a member of the International American Studies Association (IASA), Contemporary Women‘s Writing Association (CWWA) and Society for the Study of American Women Writers (SSAWW)

Identifiers

URI

http://hdl.handle.net/11089/21798