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.