Alexandru Matei

Translating Barthes’ Le Neutre into Romanian attempts to re-introduce Barthes to a Romanian readership used to identifying Barthes as a dry structuralist theorist or a dilettante essayist. Le Neutre is the name of an affect (an “affective” ideal) the later Barthes tried to define, and in this book he attempts to describe the circumstances permitting its experience. Le Neutre is a book of an agnostic leftist’s “spiritual exercises”.