Roland Barthes and the Value of Closets – Tablet Magazine
But although neutrality does not have behind it the great philosophical or spiritual pedigree of sundering, violent announcements that life is, as Nietzsche says, a school of war, we do in fact find ourselves constantly, albeit usually unconsciously or incoherently, seeking relief from intolerable conflicts and intolerant claims. We find ourselves saying that assertions to moral and political authority are opinions to which all have a right (as if they were not true or false, good or evil, and in any case having some effect in the world). We step quietly away from interlocutors efforts to enroll us in their polemical campaigns, politely taking the missionaries pamphlet or demurely murmuring hmm to a moralizing friend. As we pursue these personal tactics of opacity, resisting the demand to be transparently with or against whoever is summoning us at this very moment to make stark and immediate choices, we dream of places where the imperatives of prophets and politicians can be deferred or forgotten in the sharing of enjoyments with chosen others. No one understood these longings better than Roland Barthes.
Hmmmm.