Albert Camus

coffee

being suicidal

existentialism

Valentine's Day

absurdism

sisyphus

suicide

trolley problem

nihilism

Jacques Lacan

Jean-Paul Sartre

Pablo Picasso

appearance

Christmas

Christmas tree

is representative of a kind of degree-zero writing, a sort of anti-realist anti-literary strategy to produce a sort of colorless, neutral, degree-zero writing that goes beyond Literature to a sort of basic speech, equally far from living languages and from literary language proper.

This, however, Barthes argues, is a revolutionary writing that can only lead to silence, to a ‘complete abandonment of communication’ (RL: 63). This tendency relates to another strategy, which is the one which gives Barthes’s book its title. Barthes refers to authors who attempt to produce a ‘colourless writing, freed from all bondage to a pre-ordained state of language’. ‘The aim here’, he goes on, ‘is to go beyond Literature by entrusting one’s fate to a sort of basic speech, equally far from living languages and from literary language proper’ (RL: 64). This writing, which achieves an almost ‘ideal absence of style’, is exemplified for Barthes by Camus’s novel L’Étranger (The Outsider/The Stranger), originally published in 1942. Taking a term from linguistics, Barthes describes this kind of writing as ‘neutral’, ‘inert’ or the ‘degree zero’ of writing and states that it ‘remains wholly responsible, without being overlaid by a secondary commitment of form to a History not its own’ (RL: 64). In other words, this kind of zero-degree writing avoids the contamination of Literature.

Albert Camus, n.All

Albert Camus