Neuterre 1972 H. C. Cixous, Barthes, and the Potentialities of the Neutral
Neuterre 1972 H. C. Cixous, Barthes, and the Potentialities of the Neutral

Summary/Abstract: This essay reconsiders Hélène Cixous’s Neutre (Neuter) alongside Roland Barthes’s seminar on The Neutral from the angle of their different relation to time, futurity, and non-linear potentials of time. Both works address futurity in non-teleological terms, to bifurcate in the direction of other, queerer versions of time as developed in Gilles Deleuze’s The Logic of Sense (Aion versus Chronos) and, more recently, in De Toleda et al.’s Potentialités du temps. Both texts address an ‘à venir’ rather than a future. With greater insistence on Cixous’s Neutre in French and in translation, this article attempts to show how in post-Blanchot fashion, Cixous and Barthes call for a ‘people to come’, for a peuple, for a new or neu- multilingual tongue, some of whose syllables can be heard, before their time, in Neuter and The Neutral.

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