JOURNAL ARTICLE

Barthes's Detours: Deceleration and the Ethics of the Neutral.

  • Published In: Diacritics, 2025, v. 53, n. 1. P. 10 1 of 3

  • Database: Academic Search Ultimate 2 of 3

  • Authored By: Chen, Yongyu 3 of 3

Abstract

This essay traces the figure of detour through Roland Barthes's late work—from Camera Lucida to the lectures on "the Neutral"—where it serves as a conceptual hinge between the reimagining of relational ties and the pursuit of a suspended, decelerated mode of experience. Placing Barthes alongside queer accounts of self- and worldmaking, I argue that his sense of deceleration as a retexturation of agency—and its concomitant ethics grounded in oscillation—offers a way to inhabit such fashioning apart from demands for the sovereign subject's flexibility. The essay ultimately reframes Barthes as a theorist of complicity: an oblique mode of inhabitation that retextures, rather than intensifies, agency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Additional Information

  • Source:Diacritics. 2025/01, Vol. 53, Issue 1, p10
  • Document Type:Literary Criticism
  • Subject Area:History
  • Publication Date:2025
  • ISSN:0300-7162
  • DOI:10.1353/dia.2025.a986641
  • Accession Number:192824506
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