bathmology

English

Noun

bathmology (uncountable)

1. The science/study of the interplay of "degrees" - or, levels of linguistic self-referentiality - in discourse
   • 1975, Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes:

     Every discourse is caught up in the interplay of degrees. We might call this interplay bathmology. A neologism is not superfluous if it gives us the notion of a new science: that of the degrees of language.

   • 2006, Philippe Roger, The American Enemy: The History of French Anti-Americanism, →ISBN:

     The qualitative distances separating love, hate, and indifference are what we could learn from a science of degrees, a “bathmology” like the one Barthes dreamed of for the gradations of language.

   • 2012, Tiqqun (Collective), Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl, →ISBN, page 27:

     When it addresses itself distinctly to the Young-Girl, the Spectacle is not above a bit of bathmology.

   • 2019, Lucas Hollister, Beyond Return:

     While bathmology is not the master key for unlocking the enigma of return, we can think the different positions stake out by the writers in this book as following a trajectory that leads from anti-modernist resumption or rehabilitation (a willful regression that positions itself as a post-critical progression) through 'bathmological' meta-discursive gestures (a critical repetition that changes the meaning of conventions and forms) and finally to spectral poetics which blur the very possibility of defining a clear discursive position or literary self-identity.

Translations

bathmology

• French: bathmologie (fr) f