bathmology

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.

1975, Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes

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.

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

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.

2019, Lucas Hollister, Beyond Return