Hieronymus Bosch's winged triptych, The Garden of Earthly Delights (ca. 1490–1500), plays a key role in Roland Barthes’ late lecture course on The Neutral that took place at the Collège de France over thirteen weeks in 1978 (Figure 7.1). More specifically, the two grisaille outer panels from the triptych, painted grey on grey, are the focus of week four's session on the ‘figure-word’ Color and its relationship to grey/grisaille as the colour of the colourless Neutral and, along with a personal incident involving the spilling of a bottle of Neutral Tint (Teinte Neutre), sets the ‘tone on tone’ (ton sur ton) for the entire course (Figure 7.2). I want to bear down on Barthes’ engagement with grisaille as the fantasy of an aesthetic, ethics and politics of indifference that colours his late work. This might seem like a difficult claim to make, as Barthes’ very notion of the Neutral is what he calls a ‘diaphoralogy’ (diaphoralogie), based on the Greek word diaphora, which means difference (or that which distinguishes one thing from the other), and which Barthes simply translates as ‘nuance’. Diaphoralogy is Barthes’ neologism for what he calls a science of nuance, shimmers or scintillation, which he contrasts with adiaphoria, or indifference (indifférence), the latter defined as an absence of both passion and difference – a condition seemingly at odds with his ‘desire for the neutral’. But it is precisely in his discussion of grisaille – and the relationship of colour to the colourless – where a ‘slight difference’, and ‘dialectic of intensities’, is generated by a grey on grey that is not only an expression of his ‘desire’ for the Neutral, but rather its very drive and jouissance.

Spilled Ink and the Stained Soul of The Neutral

Before launching directly into a discussion of Bosch's triptych, Barthes introduces the relationship of colour to the Neutral with a ‘personal incident’, thus carrying out a promise he made in his inaugural lecture at the Collège that each course he taught there would derive from a personal fantasy. As such, this personal incident not only sets the tone for this session on Colour, and its relationship to the colourless, but for the entire course as such.

The Failed Atheism of Jean-Paul Sartre

In the year following Sartre's death, Simone de Beauvoir published in Adieux a series of interviews she conducted with the philosopher in August and September of 1974. Toward the end of the final interview, Sartre says that his career as a professional educator helped him produce the publications through which he had hoped to achieve immortality—a kind of “quasi-survival” he imagined in the form of his literary reputation. De Beauvoir uses this opportunity to shift the conversation from the figurative immortality Sartre hoped to achieve in his writings to the topics of religious belief, the immortality of the soul, and Sartre's own impending death. “[T]here is still one question that I should like to ask you,” she says. “Has the idea of the survival of the soul, of a spiritual principle in us, a survival such as the Christians think of, for example—has that ever crossed your mind?” Sartre replies to de Beauvoir that he expects there will be “nothing after death,” but—intriguingly, and in spite of his atheism—he also admits that he has retained something akin to religious belief, a commitment to moral absolutes that, in Sartre's opinion, can only exist in a universe created and governed by a divine being. “In the moral field,” he states, “I’ve retained one single thing to do with the existence of God, and that is Good and Evil as absolutes. The usual consequence of atheism is the suppression of Good and Evil. It's a certain relativism.” In a divinely governed universe, it would appear that moral absolutes are built into the metaphysical nature of being, not simply as axiological beliefs imposed on creation from above, but as an essential part of material reality itself. Arguably, this is why there are no moral absolutes in a world without God. The material nature of reality depends on a divine creator whose absence results—according to Sartre—in a morally neutral universe.