Barthes's Detours: Deceleration and the Ethics of the Neutral

This essay traces the figure of detour through Roland Barthes's late work—from Camera Lucida to the lectures on "the Neutral"—where it serves as a conceptual hinge between the reimagining of relational ties and the pursuit of a suspended, decelerated mode of experience. Placing Barthes alongside queer accounts of self- and worldmaking, I argue that his sense of deceleration as a retexturation of agency—and its concomitant ethics grounded in oscillation—offers a way to inhabit such fashioning apart from demands for the sovereign subject's flexibility. The essay ultimately reframes Barthes as a theorist of complicity: an oblique mode of inhabitation that retextures, rather than intensifies, agency.