Roland Barthes' A Lover's Discourse Pt. 1

“Adorable! there is no residual quality, but only the everything of affect. Yet, at the same time that adorable says everything, it also says what is lacking in everything; it seeks to designate that site of the other to which my desire clings in a special way, but this site cannot be designated; about it I shall never know anything; my language will always fumble, stammer in order to attempt to express it, but I can never produce anything but a blank word, an empty vocable, which is the zero degree of all the sites where my very special desire for this particular other (and for no other) will form.”

Adorable!

This choice, so rigorous that it retains only the Unique, constitutes, it is said, the difference between the analytical transference and the amorous transference; one is universal, the other specific. It has taken many accidents, many surprising coincidences (and perhaps many efforts), for me to find the Image which, out of a thousand, suits my desire. Herein a great enigma, to which I shall never possess the key: Why is it that I desire So-and-so? Why is it that I desire So-and-so lastingly, longingly? Is it the whole of So-and-so I desire (a silhouette, a shape, a mood)? And, in that case, what is it in this loved body which has the vocation of a fetish for me?

"I am fascinated." Having attained the end of language, where it can merely repeat its last word like a scratched record, I intoxicate myself upon its affirmation: is not tautology that preposterous state in which are to be found, all values being confounded, the glorious end of the logical operation, the obscenity of stupidity, and the explosion of the Nietzschean yes?”

Fascinate: to attract and hold attentively by a unique power, personal charm, unusual nature, or some other special quality; enthrall.

It’s not the end of the logical operation it’s because logic can’t hold a fascinating object because it’s unique. To say yes is merely to go beyond oneself to an area people will not go. Fascination means maybe I can’t explain what’s different or difficult to understand but I know there is something there. Putting language to it is a bold thing especially since no one is likely to agree with you at first glance. Logic, in Nietzsche’s view, is boiled down to the status of an amoeba: a connection or a metaphor for things. An amoeba’s fascinating only because it can split and become itself.

This stubbornness is love's protest: for all the wealth of "good reasons" for loving differently, loving better, loving without being in love, etc., a stubborn voice is raised which lasts a little longer: the voice of the Intractable lover.

I affirm, beyond truth and falsehood, beyond success and failure; I have withdrawn from all finality, I live according to chance (as is evidenced by the fact that the figures of my discourse occur to me like so many dice casts). Flouted in my enterprise (as it happens), I emerge from it neither victor nor vanquished: I am tragic. (Someone tells me: this kind of love is not viable. But how can you evaluate viability? Why is the viable a Good Thing? Why is it better to last than to burn?

Is not wishing someone luck reserved for the animals who have no control over their reality? To wish a man luck for a time might be to wish him into the trap of believing in something that’s fleeting. This society nowadays wants people to believe in their luck and push it to the end. To know how you push you luck means pushing along at the lowest point until you realize where your luck really is. Then you can know that flouting just will not pass as work. Often writing cannot care about its success or its failure because it cannot evaluate it. But deep down these writers do really care, they just can’t always.

I say yes to everything (blinding myself). There foIlows a long tunnel: my first yes is riddled by doubts, love's value is ceaselessly threatened by depreciation: this is the moment of melancholy passion, the rising of resentment and of oblation. Yet I can emerge from this tunnel; I can "surmount," without liquidating; what I have affirmed a first time, I can once again affirm, without repeating it, for then what I affirm is the affirmation, not its contingency: I affirm the first encounter in its difference, I desire its return, not its repetition. I say to the other (old or new): Let us begin again.

Similarly, it seems, for the lover's anxiety: it is the fear of a mourning which has already occurred, at the very origin of love, from the moment when J was first "ravished." Someone would have to be able to tell me : "Don't be anxious any more-you've already lost him/ her."

A colorless object is placed in the center of the stage and there adored, idolized, taken to task, covered with discourse, with prayers (and perhaps, surreptitiously, with invectives); as if she were a huge motionless hen huddled amid her feathers, around which circles a slightly mad cock. Enough that, in a flash, I should see the other in the guise of an inert object, like a kind of stuffed doll, for me to shift my desire from this annulled object to my desire itself; it is my desire I desire, and the loved being is no more than its tool. I rejoice at the thought of such a great cause, which leaves far behind it the person whom I have made into its pretext (at least this is what I tell myself, happy to raise myself by lowering the other): I sacrifice the image to the Image-repertoire. And if a day comes when I must bring myself to renounce the other, the violent mourning which then grips me is the mourning of the Image-repertoire itself: it was a beloved structure, and I weep for the loss of love, not of him or her.

This image of love as something dancing around wildly endlessly producing desire reminds me of the place music and sports have in my life. It could be just destiny that brings my mind again forever to these things.

I had had, two or three times, occasion to read in his eyes an expression of such an innocence (no other word) that I persisted, whatever happened, in setting him, so to speak, aside from himself, outside of his own character. At that moment, I was exonerating him from all criticism or commentary. As innocence, atopia resists description, definition, language, which is maya, classification of Names (of Faults). Being Atopic, the other makes language indecisive: one cannot speak of the other, about the other; every attribute is false, painful, erroneous, awkward: the other is unqualifiable (this would be the true meaning of atopos)

It is the originality of the relation which must be conquered. Most of my injuries come from the stereotype: I am obliged to make myself a lover, like everyone else: to be jealous, neglected frustrated, like everyone else. But when the relation is original, then the stereotype is shaken, transcended, evacuated, and jealousy, for instance, has no more room in this relation without a site, without topos-without what in French we call, colloquially, "topo"-without discourse.

The mind is completely enamored with the uniqueness of relations. It is something very difficult to discuss why you feel one way about a thing that’s different from others. However, I think that originality in thought is necessary quite often because we need something crazy to get closer to reality. Our minds can usually accept or reject ideas based on evidence but pure relations are impossible to really know the truth about. This is a potential explanation for the mystery of consciousness which is a topic I plan on writing something serious about. I think that our sense of self comes from feeling that we have our own relationship to objects then we call that consciousness because consciousness is unique to us alone. There is also here the beginning of violence: to force yourself to be a certain way. The gentleness of love and the image of delicacy in love reflects a mind that finds its own pure purpose in rearranging its facts wildly and faithfully. Love, religion, and consciousness all seem to share these two qualities.

I am waiting for an arrival, a return, a promised sign. This can be futile, or immensely pathetic: in Erll'Grllfng ( Wailing) , a woman waits for her lover, at night, in the forest; I am waiting for no more than a telephone call, but the anxiety is the same. Everything is solemn: I have no sense of proporlions.

There are proportions in life that can be completely blown out of proportion and yet no one will notice. There is no sense of space in the mind because it is daunting. If our relations become intentionally confused they get manipulated like Orwell’s doublespeak. Again, consider Jesus as quite unproportioned, yet the cross is the perfect symbol of proportionality. Part of the mystery of consciousness is that it’s able to summon images that seem the same as ever before and infuse meaning into experiences that wasn’t there. We rely on love to give us this too.

Waiting is an enchantment: I have received orders not to move. Waiting for a telephone call is thereby woven out of tiny unavowable interdictions to infinity: I forbid myself to leave the room, to go to the toilet, even to telephone (to keep the line from being busy); I suffer torments if someone else telephones me (for the same reason);

Waiting is overcome not through calmness but thoughtfulness.

The lover's fatal identity is precisely: I am the one who waits.

The truth of having to know what’s real and lasting. People don’t respect this aspect of love at all.

How is it that the sistemati around me can inspire me with envy? From what, seeing them, am I excluded? Certainly not from a "dream," an "idyll," a "union”: there are too many complaints from the "pigeonholed" about their system, and the dream of union forms another figure. No, what I fantasize in the system is quite modest (a fantasy all the more paradoxical in that it has no particular vividness) : I want, I desire, quite simply, a structure (this word, lately, produced a gritting of teeth: it was regarded as the acme of abstraction). Of course there is not a happiness of structure; but every structure is habitable, indeed that may be its best definition. I can perfectly well inhabit what does not make me happy; I can simultaneously complain and endure; I can reject the meaning of the structure I submit to and traverse without displeasure certain of its everyday portions (habits, minor satisfactions, little securities, endurable things, temporary tensions); and I can even have a perverse liking for this behavior of the system (which makes it, in fact, habitable): Daniel Stylites lived quite well on top of his pillar: he had made it (though a difficult thing) into a structure. To want to be pigeonholed is to want to obtain for life a docile reception. As support, the structure is separated from desire: what I want, quite simply, is to be "kept," like some sort of superior prostitute.

Structure or love allows for more than being kept in a place it allows for you to bask in the glow of a feeling. To truly carry it with you in your memory which works at its best when relaxed. Truly love is an engendering of memories. That is one way to constantly amaze someone you’ve known forever.

Cicero, and later Leibnitz, opposes gaudium to laetitia. Gaudium is "the pleasure the soul experiences when it considers the possession of a present or future good as assured; and we are in possession of such a good when it is in such a way within our power that we can enjoy it when we wish." Laetitia is a lively pleasure, "a state in which pleasure predominates within us" (among other, often contradictory sensations).

My concept is like Gaudium except it’s not definitely assured. We enjoy ourselves and never exactly know if it will hold for some future instance and yet something within us holds onto it. Love should include those moments and make past connections all the while telling ourselves: this might happen again.

This is a lunatic project, for the Image-repertoire is precisely defined by its coalescence (its adhesiveness), or again: its power of association: nothing in the image can be forgotten; an exhausting memory forbids voluntarily escaping love; in short, forbids inhabiting it discreetly, reasonably. I can certainly imagine procedures to obtain the circumscription of my pleasures (converting the scarcity of frequentation into the luxury of the relation, in the Epicurean fashion; or again, considering the other as lost, and henceforth enjoying, each time the other returns, the relief of a resurrection), but it is a waste of effort: the amorous glue is indissoluble; one must either submit or . cut loose: accommodation is impossible (love is neither dialectical nor reformist.

Love really is mad. I’m jealous of this Roland Barthes who can never leave the bonds of love, or memory, or glue. This is the all or nothing: I choose you or I don’t. And yet, the things we’ve chosen in life continue to have repercussions in the rest of our lives, positive or negative. Love is mad because we’ve explored every inch of ourselves already and want someone who will love us already desperately yet also, I think, who will give experiences new meanings infuse life with “more life.”

"Now, take all the delights of the earth, melt them into one single delight, and cast it entire into a single man-all this will be as nothing to the delight of which I speak." Thus fulfillment is a precipitation: something is condensed, streams over me, strikes me like a lightning bolt. What is it which fills me in this fashion? A totality? No. Something that, starting from totality, actually exceeds it: a totality without remainder, a summa without exception, a site with nothing adjacent ("my soul is not only filled, but runs over”)

This is fulfillment of desire or a new meaning of experience. The quote to me means that though you are the master of your soul you will never master it. It means a single delight, no matter how large, cannot amount to one of variety. Fulfillment means following your pathway and seeing what comes of it. It leaves you indebted to the world because of everything that’s happened to you.

What do I think of love? -As a matter of fact, I think nothing at all of love. I'd be glad to know what it is, but being inside, I see it in existence, not in essence. What I want to know (love) is the very substance I employ in order to speak (the lover's discourse) . Reflection is certainly permitted, but since this reflection is immediately absorbed in the mulling over of images, it never turns into reflexivity: excluded from logic (which supposes languages exterior to each other), I cannot claim to think properly. Hence, discourse on love though I may for years at a time, I cannot hope to seize the concept of it except "by the tail": by flashes, formulas, surprises of expression, scattered through the great stream of the Image-repertoire; I am in love's wrong place, which is its dazzling place: "The darkest place, according to a Chinese proverb, is always underneath the lamp.”

Repression: I want to analyze, to know, to express in another language than mine; I want to represent my delirium to myself, I want to "look in the face" what is dividing me, cutting me off. Understand your madness: that was Zeus' command when he ordered Apollo to turn the faces of the divided Androgynes (like an egg, a berry) toward the place where they had been cut apart (the belly) "so that the sight of their division might render them less insolent." To understand-is that not to divide the image, to undo the I, proud organ of misapprehension?

The truth is, our minds probably have to go through confusion to reach anything resembling a unique purpose. No one will tell you what your purpose is you must find it yourself. This is mad advice but true.

I want to change systems: no longer to unmask, no longer to interpret, but to make consciousness itself a drug, and thereby to accede to the perfect vision of reality, to the great bright dream, to prophetic love.

You love Charlotte: either you have some hope, and then you will act; or else you have none, in which case you will renounce. That is the discourse of the "healthy" subject: either / or. But the amorous subject replies (as Werther does) : I am trying to slip between the two members of the alternative: i.e., I have no hope, but all the same . .. Or else: I stubbornly choose not to choose; I choose drifting: I continue

From the lover's point of view, the fact becomes consequential because it is immediately transformed into a sign: it is the sign, not the fact, which is consequential (by its aura). If the other has given me this new telephone number, what was that the sign of? Was it an invitation to telephone right away, for the pleasure of the call, or only should the occasion arise, out of necessity? My answer itself will be a sign, which the other will inevitably interpret, thereby releasing, between us, a tumultuous maneuvering of images. Everything signifies: by this proposition, I entrap myself, I bind myself in calculations, I keep myself from enjoyment.

This is close to what love demands of us. We have to hold onto everything to be ready for anything. But we can’t be bored or disinterested when everything plays out in obvious fashion. How do we manage that duality? Things get ingrained into our subconscious and we act in certain ways and ask ourselves why to no avail. We forget the signs are there telling us what to do and have to look back through them to act rightly.

I am not the man of mere "acting out"-my madness is tempered, it is not seen; it is right away that I fear consequences, any consequence: it is my fear-my deliberation-which is "spontaneous."

Karma is the (disastrous) concatenation of actions (of their causes and their effects) . The Buddhist wants to withdraw from karma; to suspend the play of causality; he wants to vacate the signs, to ignore the practical question: what is to be done? I cannot stop asking it and I sigh after that suspension of karma which is nirvana. Hence the situations which happen to impose no responsibility for behavior upon me, however painful, are received in a sort of peace; I suffer, but at least I have nothing to decide; the amorous (imaginary) machinery here operates all by itself, within me; like a workman of the electronic age, or like the dunce in the last row of the classroom, all I have to do is be there: karma (the machinery, the classroom) functions in front of me, but without me. In misery itself, I can, for a very brief interval, devise for myself a little corner of sloth.

Karma works on the animal level. It works on the unconscious level. It’s a problematic doctrine because it’s extremely vague. People commit false judgments a lot and they never see the light of day. Karma attempts (I think) to say that good and bad judgements and consequences are born into every choice but, like love, there is no way to say anything specific about it without being trivial. It helps us understand a trivial level but it’s used on a global scale. Trivial things can reveal the truth within us, like love. And maybe love can be petty when it touches something within us and we must succumb.

Bustling gossip, all jealousy suspended, around this absent party whose objective nature is reinforced by two converging visions: we give ourselves over to a rigorous, successful experiment, since there are two observers and since the two observations are made under the same conditions: the object is proved: I discover that I am right (to be happy, to be injured, to be anxious).

Jealousy is an equation involving three permutable (indeterminable) terms: one is always jealous of two persons at once: I am jealous of the one I love and of the one who loves the one I love. The odiosamato (as the Italians call the "rival") is also loved by me: he interests me, intrigues me, appeals to me.

You can see how jealousy is merely a word, merely a sign, of being deprived of love by another person.

Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire. The emotion derives from a double contact: on the one hand, a whole activity of discourse discreetly, indirectly focuses upon a single signified, which is "I desire you," and releases, nourishes, ramifies it to the point of explosion (language experiences orgasm upon touching itself); on the other hand, I enwrap the other in my words, I caress, brush against, talk up this contact, I extend myself to make the commentary to which I submit the relation endure.

(To speak amorously is to expend without an end in sight, without a crisis; it is to practice a relation without orgasm. There may exist a literary form of this coitus reservatus: what we call Marivaudage.)

"To that god, 0 Phaedrus, I dedicate this discourse ." One cannot give language (how to transfer it from one hand to the other?), put one can dedicate it-since the other is a minor god. The given object is re absorbed in the sumptuous, solemn utterance of the consecration, in the poetic gesture of the dedication; the gift is exalted in the very voice which expresses it, if this voice is measured (metrical) ; or again: sung (lyrical) ; this is the very principle of the Hymn or Anthem. Being unable to give anything, I dedicate the dedication itself, into which is absorbed all I have to say: To the beloved, the beautiful being who fills my heart with light, to the angel, the immortal idol.

(Love is mute, Novalis says; only poetry makes it speak.) Song means nothing: it is in this that you will understand at last what it is that I give you; as useless as the wisp of yarn, the pebble held out to his mother by the child.

This I think is the real issue. When Whitman said it’s great audiences that make a great poet this is what he meant. Our society has become so bad at listening because they think it’s really the quality of the song that matters. Do we ask ourselves what makes a song quality? It’s like no one can agree on the meaning of the song. We’re obsessed with identity and agreement because we think we can find ideal love there.

Writing is dry, obtuse; a kind of steamroller, writing advances, indifferent, indelicate, and would kill "father, mother, lover" rather than deviate from its fatality (enigmatic though that fatality may be). When I write, I must acknowledge this fact (which, according to my Image-repertoire, lacerates me): there is no benevolence within writing, rather a terror: it smothers the other, who, far from perceiving the gift in it, reads there instead an assertion of mastery, of power, of pleasure, of solitude. Whence the cruel paradox of the dedication: I seek at all costs to give you what smothers you.

"Exuberance is Beauty. The cistern contains, the fountain overflows." Amorous exuberance is the exuberance of the child whose narcissistic scope and multiple pleasure nothing (as yet) Constrains.

Exuberance is constant desire and beauty, for some, is the reassurance that existence (Barthes’ term) can be completely and thoroughly filled with love. Beauty can be attained through persistence and we imagine an exuberant person tends to accomplish “beautiful works.” This is part of the mystery of love. Beauty comes naturally to the body that is active. But everyone is uniquely beautiful.

"I leaf through a book of reproductions of a painter I love; I can do so only distractedly. I admire this work, but the images are frozen, and this bores me."

Painting that involves interpretation is necessary.

1 experience reality as a system of power. Coluche, the restaurant, the painter, Rome on a holiday, everything imposes on me its system of being; everyone is badly behaved. Isn't their impoliteness merely a plenitude? The world is full, plenitude is its system, and as a final offense this system is presented as a "nature" with which I must sustain good relations: in order to be "normal" (exempt from love), 1 should find Coluche funny, the restaurant J. good, T.'s painting beautiful, and the feast of Corpus Christi lively: not only undergo the system of power, but even enter into sympathy with it: "to love" reality? What disgust for the lover (for the lover's virtue)! It would be like Justine in the Monastery of Sainte-Marie-des-Bois. So long as I perceive the world as hostile, 1 remain linked to it: I am not crazy. But sometimes, once my bad temper is exhausted, 1 have no language left at all: the world is not "unreal" (1 could then utter it: there are arts of the unreal, among them the greatest arts of all), but disreal: reality has fled from it, is nowhere, so that 1 no longer have any meaning (any paradigm) available to me; I do not manage to define my relations with Coluche, the restaurant, the painter, the Piazza del Popolo. What relation can I have with a system of power if I am neither its slave nor its accomplice nor its witness?

This forms Barthes’ critique of society. “Love reality?” What disgust I have! The thing about our world is we have become witnesses and can see systems of power but still cannot discuss them because we’re so far from them still. When I think of sports, the system is actually so complex that once something pops up, reveals itself as true, it becomes forgotten. Each bit of information is hardly related to the other. Everything has its own set of unique circumstances that we have to understand in order to know reality. Reality has fled, everything is disreal.

The events of amorous life are so trivial that they gain access to writing only by an immense effort: one grows discouraged writing what, by being written, exposes its own platitude: "I ran into X, who was with Y" "Today X didn't call me" "X was in a bad mood," etc.: who would see a story in that?

Enamoration is a drama, if we restore to this word the archaic meaning Nietzsche gives it: "Ancient drama envisioned great declamatory scenes, which excluded action (action took place before or behind the stage)." Amorous seduction (a pure hypnotic moment) takes place before discourse and behind the proscenium of consciousness: the amorous "event" is of a hieratic order: it is my own local legend, my little sacred history that I declaim to myself, and this declamation of a fait accompli (frozen, embalmed, removed from any praxis) is the lover's discourse.

Praxis-act of engaging, applying, exercising, realizing, or practicing ideas.

My expressive needs oscillate between the mild little haiku summarizing a huge situation, and a great flood of banalities. I am both too big and too weak for writing: I am alongside it, for writing is always dense, violent, indifferent to the infantile ego which solicits it. Love has of course a complicity with my language (which maintains it), but it cannot be lodged in my writing.

What obstructs amorous writing is the illusion of expressivity: as a writer, or assuming myself to be one, I continue to fool myself as to the effects of language: I do not know that the word "suffering" expresses no suffering and that, consequently, to use it is not only to communicate nothing but even, and immediately, to annoy, to irritate (not to mention the absurdity). Someone would have to teach me that one cannot write without burying "sincerity" (always the Orpheus myth: not to turn back). What writing demands, and what any lover cannot grant it without laceration, is to sacrifice a little of his Image-repertoire, and to assure thereby, through his language, the assumption of a little reality. All I might produce, at best, is a writing of the Image-repertoire; and for that I would have to renounce the Image-repertoire of writing-would have to let myself be subjugated by my language, submit to the injustices (the insults) it will not fail to inflict upon the double Image of the lover and of his other.

Throughout life, all of love's "failures" resemble one another (and with reason: they all proceed from the same flaw). X and Y have not been able (have not wanted) to answer my "demand," to adhere to my "truth"; they have not altered their system one iota; for me, the former has merely repeated the latter. And yet X and Y are incomparable; it is in their difference, the model of an infinitely pursued difference, that I find the energy to begin all over again.

The true act of mourning is not to suffer from the loss of the loved object; it is to discern one day, on the skin of the relationship, a certain tiny stain, appearing there as the symptom of a certain death: for the first time I am doing harm to the one I love, involuntarily, of course, but without panic.

Then, too, on the telephone the other is always in a situation of departure; the other departs twice over, by voice and by silence: whose turn is it to speak? We fall silent in unison: crowding of two voids. I'm going to leave you, the voice on the telephone says with each second.

I am alarmed by everything which appears to alter the Image. I am, therefore, alarmed by the other's fatigue: it is the cruelest of all rival objects. How combat exhaustion? I can see that the other, exhausted, tears off a fragment of this fatigue in order to give it to me. But what am I to do with this bundle of fatigue set down before me?