Barthes neutrality … Laozi 無爲 Wúwèi

by Xin Wei Sha
To record an exchange from PSF

Muindi: In light of our talk about institutions that play the role of neutral facilitator in geopolitics and individuals who play the role of neutral facilitators in games and play scenarios, I wanted to share with you all some quotations from Roland Barthes' lectures on The Neutral, a book which I am very, very fond of and that I think would make great reading for the PSF group, alongside his lectures on How to Live Together. I send this because I think that Roland Barthes has a lovely way of talking about neutral party as a passionate figure rather than a dispassionate one. What's more, Barthes phrase "outplay the paradigm" (rather than "playing into the paradigm") could be a very useful phase to empower a facilitator within the context of types of games and play scenarios that we were discussing. (edited) 
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In a related timbre, Stefano Franchi, Niklas Damiris, and Helga Wild wrote a deep book on Passivity, which exists only as an unpublished ms.  A source for these diverse Western turns away from modernity: Bathes,  passivity, Heidegger’s standing in reserve, and Merleau-Ponty’s notion of constitution is Laozi’s Daodejing.  Here’s an introduction by Steve Coutinho to the daoist concept of wúwèi:
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