A LOVER'S DISCOURSE

We've been reading A Lover's Discourse! Described as "an anatomy of desire", a "re-creation of a lover's fevered consciousness", a "lover desperate to interpret the dire ambiguities" and a "speculative and melancholy book". 


Here are some words explored by Barthes that particularly intrigued us:


I am engulfed, I succumb (to be engulfed)
"sometimes I have a craving to be engulfed"
"I am dissolved, not dismembered" 


Adorable! (adorable)
"not managing to name the specialty of his desire for the loved being, the amorous subject falls back on this rather stupid word: adorable"
"adorable is the futile vestige of a fatigue- the fatigue of language itself"
"I adore you because you are adorable. I love you because I love you"


The Intractable (affirmation) 
"the subject affirms love as a value"
"although I listen, to all the arguments...to demystify, to limit, to erase...to depreciate love, I persist"
"everything I do has meaning (hence I can live without whining)"


Waiting (waiting)
"there is a scenography of waiting: I organise it, manipulate it, cut out a portion of time in which I shall mime the loss of the loved object"
"I decide to 'take it badly', I release the anxiety of waiting"
"am I in love? - Yes, since I am waiting. The other never waits"


The heart (heart)
"the heart swells, weakens etc., like the other sexual organs"
"I alone have my heart"
"the heart is what I imagine I give"
"the heart is what remains of me, once all the wit attributed to me and undesired by me is taken away"


What is to be done?(behaviour)
"I immediately grow baffled: should I telephone or shouldn't I? ...for it is precisely this permission I don't know how to handle."
"suspend the play of causality" 


Talking (declaration)
"language is a skin: I rub my language against the other"
"my language trembles with desire"
"no one wants to speak of love unless it is for someone"

The dedication (dedication)

"The gift is contact, sensuality: you will be touching what I have touched, a third skin unites us"

"The gift is not an excrement, but it has, nonetheless, a vocation of waste"

Inexpressible love (to write)

"What obstructs amorous writing is the illusion of expressivity"

"To try and write love is to confront the muck of language: the region of hysteria where love is both too much and too little, excessive and impoverished"

I love you (I-love-you)

"i-love-you has no usages. Like a child's word, it enters into no social constraint; it can be a sublime,solemn, trivial word, it can be an erotic, pornographic word. It is a socially irresponsible word."

"I-love-you is not a sentence: it does not transmit a meaning, but fastens onto limit situation...it is a holophrase"

"So do I is not a perfect answer"

Tenderness (tenderness)

"there is not only need for tenderness, there is also need to be tender for the other"

"If I receive the tender gesture within the field of demand, I am fulfilled: is this gesture not a kind of miraculous crystallisation of presence?"