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戀人絮語 / A Lover's Discourse: Fragments
Paperback. Pub 2010 07 272 Traditional Chinese Business Weekly Publishing Roland Barthes in 1975 to open discussion class at the Ecole Normale Superieure course to the German writer Goethe's masterpiece juvenile Werther as the text. and the young students who explore love attitudes of Young Werther's love story where Bart dismantling into all sorts of situations jealous. crazy. confused. anxious. no solution. despair. Acacia intolerable relapse. suicidal idea and so on ...... it has also become a chapter title. Lover's Discourse door romance discussion class. the focus is not literary classics. but lovers pour and whisper carrier. Two years later. Bart financial casting their own emotional trajectory and journey to develop into a new stylistic paid into a book in 1977. and immediately swept the Western literary translation nearly ...
272 pages, Perfect Paperback
First published April 1, 1977
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October 7, 2022
Possibly the best book Roland Barthes ever wrote. It's certainly my favourite, having read most of his work. An irrefutable and intense read where, with the recreation of the lover's fevered consciousness, he goes about deconstructing love, to write the the most grandiose, the most detailed and painstaking anatomy of desire that we are ever likely to see. Simply put, these are his thoughts on love in the form of short essays, each one covering the many different aspects of the romantic life. Whether falling in, painfully letting go, or being completely smitten, head over heels in love, Barthes covers it.
After each scene is formulated, Barthes subjects it to a philosophical battering of vigorous analysis, that constantly adds references from literary sources such as Goethe, Nietzsche, Freud, and Rilke, whilst throwing psychological and linguistic perspectives into the mix as well. Although flowing for the most part with a stream-of-consciousness, that does feel dense, and a little self indulgent, there can be no doubt as to its effectiveness throughout. There was an emotional power to his prose, that, for anyone that ever loved, may be reminded, and forced to face up to moments from their own intimate past.
Although this does require much mental effort that really sends one's grey matter into overdrive (especially for those not accustomed with philosophical writings) Barthes strikes a cord deep within with a study of love that is subtle, rich in insight, penetrating the heart as well as the head. Barthes breaks down the human experience of love so effortlessly, but I'm not sure this led me to better understand love, as everyone has their own ways of perceiving it. This was a beautiful and thought provoking read though, that was a pure delight to explore.
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August 3, 2025
You ever fumble a real one? It’s okay, you can raise your hand. I’ve done it, we’ve all done it. Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all and all that shit, right? While many have tried to analyze love from our flirtatious frivolities to our foolhardy follies, Roland Barthes attempts to simulate love across the fragments of his A Lover’s Discourse. Hey, easy, I mean simulate the experience of being in love not simulating love making, pervs. Anyways, these 80 non-linear fragments have a narratorial approach that harnesses the complexities and chaos of love in a meditative way that transcends the singular into the universal to open a route towards assessing the emotional, psychological, abstract and linguistic components of being in love. That’s right: linguistic. Barthes is a philosopher and this is nerdy as hell. And I love it.
No, not romantically like the text is about but you get the idea. When Barthes writes his ‘language trembles with desire’ and these fragments are bound to send you careening down a cavern of memories—amorous, anxious, atrocious, etc. et al—to be emphatically nodding along or cringing in remembrance. Yet it is through the language that we begin to make sense of the tempest of emotions. ‘To try to write love is to confront the muck of language: that region of hysteria where language is both too much and too little, excessive.’ It is why love inspires poetry that shoots up through the stratosphere with emotion or the lack thereof can drop us in sharp descent of sorrow and destruction. He addresses the thematic elements of love like waiting, projection, and suffering as one becomes ‘engulfed’ by love and looks at struggles around power imbalances or that one may project an idealization over the actuality of the lover. Following through a dramatization of the entire arc of love as if effecting a dictionary of lover’s emotional states, A Lover’s Discourse makes for a riveting and thought provoking read teeming with emotion and epiphanic insight.
‘I encounter millions of bodies in my life; of these millions, I may desire some hundreds; but of these hundreds, I love only one.’
Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke once wrote ‘Love consists of this: two solitudes that meet, protect and greet each other.’ Across Barthe’s fragments, told in a jumble of internal monolugues not unlike the way our heart ricochettes between emotions in loves early onset, we find two solitudes that meet and begin the interplay of romance and entwining solitudes. But, as James Baldwin warns ‘Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.’ Once love is in grasp, it can often be the hardest to hold onto and Barthe’s traces the language of this through moments that hit hard and may bruise the reader when it kicks your memory in the shin. I’ve always felt love was not the easy moments, but the hard moments when you must pour love into the cracks to keep them from crumbling. That flaws are an opportunity to love harder. Or, as William Faulkner wrote ‘you don’t love because: you love despite; not for the virtues, but despite the faults.’ Yet this book wouldn’t be of much value without plunging us into the despair of loss thrashing about the void of the lover’s absence under the ruins of love. Following each fragment, Barthes steps in to pummel it which philosophical investigation and shake it upside down until all the insights come tumbling from its pockets. He employs analytics from thinkers like Friedrich Nietzsche, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Sigmund Freud and others in explorations on time, identity and power.
‘First best is falling in love, second best is being in love. Least best is falling out of love. But any of it is better than never having been in love.’
—Maya Angelou
This book hits with wave after wave of poetic emotion. There are the highs: ‘I cannot get over having had this good fortune: to meet what matches my desire.’ But there are also the lows: ‘The lover's fatal identity is precisely this: I am the one who waits.’ It is a painful march towards romantic decay and much pain comes from not knowing how to properly love the other. In this we see Barthe’s first major conundrum around love with the lover projecting onto the beloved. It’s like when your friend has a crush and describes them as some mythical being who can do no wrong and you realize they perhaps love “the idea” of the person instead of the actual person, who inevitably contains foibles and flaws. ‘The subject suddenly realises that he is imprisoning the loved object in a net of tyrannies,’ sees the beloved as an idea that is not their true identity and is thereby loving something that does not exist. We must, as Robert Frost wrote, ‘love the things we love for what they are.’ And in projecting themself, upon discovering the foolishness of the projection and losing it, they in turn lose themselves.
Which is a real tragedy that, in love, when you lose yourself, you tend to lose your lover. ‘It is my desire I desire, and the loved being is no more than its tool,’ the subject realizes, and in this they also realize the lover has been objectified under their language.
‘I can do everything with my language but not with my body. What I hide by my language, my body utters. I can deliberately mold my message, not my voice. By my voice, whatever it says, the other will recognize "that something is wrong with me".’
Often one loses themself out of fear for losing the lover and we see Barthes’ subject strangle their relationship with jealousies and anxieties. It is an examination on how dependency functions and how an obsessive relation straps all sense of self worth into the dependency.
This sort of obsessive, jealous relationship reveals how it is a sense of wanting to possess the lover as opposed to authentically loving them. Barthes looks at how the language shows a ‘will-to-possess’ which is an erratic desire where ‘ the adult is superimposed upon the child,’ as in, it is a childlike behavior undertaken by adults engaged in adult interpersonal power imbalance. ‘Realising that the difficulties of the amorous relationship originate in his ceaseless desire to appropriate the loved being in one way or another, the subject decides to abandon henceforth all “will-to-possess” in his regard,’ he writes. The lover must abandon the desire to possess in order to be able to understand a fulfilling love, or love the object of their love. We’ve all seen this happen!
‘The imperfect is the tense of fascination: it seems to be alive and yet it doesn't move: imperfect presence, imperfect death; neither oblivion nor resurrection; simply the exhausting lure of memory.’
There is a constant struggle between possession and freedom, creating a power imbalance. But also that lovers must struggle for a balance with who waits, with vulnerability, dependency, etc. or an asymmetrical power structure in the relationship forms. Such a structure tends to break and plunge the subject into absence.
Barthes shows how in the absence of a lover (especially after an obsessive, jealous relationship) the subject is left in a void and shot through with psychological trauma to the extent that they contemplate suicide. They put their whole self into the relationship and without it, lack a self. ‘I cannot write myself. What, after all, is this "I" who would write himself?’ And here is where we can finally dive into the language of love.
‘Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other.’
Barthes doesn’t mean the 5 Love Languages (mine is Quality Time) but the actual language we use around love and what its linguistic qualities reveal. ‘The lover's discourse stifles the other, who finds no place for his own language beneath this massive utterance.’ As earlier the subject discovers they cannot ‘write myself’ without the other, he also bemoans the loss of loves language when love disintegrates. Language decays too:
The phone won’t ring with your lovers name anymore. You won’t hear your own name from their voice–at least not affectionately. The language of love is intrinsically linked to the lovers identity and the linguistics unravel along with love. Barthes also comments too on how often the phrase ‘I love you’ can seem like a ‘blank and meaningless statement’ as a factor of how language can destroy language when the term cannot actually touch upon the actuality of love.
‘Love has two affirmations. First of all, when the lover encounters the other, there is an immediate affirmation (psychologically: dazzlement, enthusiasm, exaltation, mad projection of a fulfilled future: I am devoured by desire, the impulse to be happy): I say yes to everything (blinding myself). There follows 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 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.’
Roland Barthes A Lover’s Discourse is a dense yet endlessly readable and accessible work bursting with emotion and insight. It may open a lot of old wounds, but by reading it you may also address the past with fresh eyes and, guided by his philosophical musings, put bad memories to rest, accept them, or heal from it. A bit slow and ponderous, feeling at times like a textbook on love and at others like the most emotive poetry you can imagine, A Lover’s Discourse is at all times profound and a very worthwhile read.
4.5/5
‘To be engulfed: outburst of annihilation which affects the amorous subject in despair or fulfillment. At its best, when it’s fulfillment, it’s a kind of disappearance at will. An easeful death. Death liberated from dying.’
No, not romantically like the text is about but you get the idea. When Barthes writes his ‘language trembles with desire’ and these fragments are bound to send you careening down a cavern of memories—amorous, anxious, atrocious, etc. et al—to be emphatically nodding along or cringing in remembrance. Yet it is through the language that we begin to make sense of the tempest of emotions. ‘To try to write love is to confront the muck of language: that region of hysteria where language is both too much and too little, excessive.’ It is why love inspires poetry that shoots up through the stratosphere with emotion or the lack thereof can drop us in sharp descent of sorrow and destruction. He addresses the thematic elements of love like waiting, projection, and suffering as one becomes ‘engulfed’ by love and looks at struggles around power imbalances or that one may project an idealization over the actuality of the lover. Following through a dramatization of the entire arc of love as if effecting a dictionary of lover’s emotional states, A Lover’s Discourse makes for a riveting and thought provoking read teeming with emotion and epiphanic insight.
‘I encounter millions of bodies in my life; of these millions, I may desire some hundreds; but of these hundreds, I love only one.’
Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke once wrote ‘Love consists of this: two solitudes that meet, protect and greet each other.’ Across Barthe’s fragments, told in a jumble of internal monolugues not unlike the way our heart ricochettes between emotions in loves early onset, we find two solitudes that meet and begin the interplay of romance and entwining solitudes. But, as James Baldwin warns ‘Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.’ Once love is in grasp, it can often be the hardest to hold onto and Barthe’s traces the language of this through moments that hit hard and may bruise the reader when it kicks your memory in the shin. I’ve always felt love was not the easy moments, but the hard moments when you must pour love into the cracks to keep them from crumbling. That flaws are an opportunity to love harder. Or, as William Faulkner wrote ‘you don’t love because: you love despite; not for the virtues, but despite the faults.’ Yet this book wouldn’t be of much value without plunging us into the despair of loss thrashing about the void of the lover’s absence under the ruins of love. Following each fragment, Barthes steps in to pummel it which philosophical investigation and shake it upside down until all the insights come tumbling from its pockets. He employs analytics from thinkers like Friedrich Nietzsche, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Sigmund Freud and others in explorations on time, identity and power.
‘First best is falling in love, second best is being in love. Least best is falling out of love. But any of it is better than never having been in love.’
—Maya Angelou
This book hits with wave after wave of poetic emotion. There are the highs: ‘I cannot get over having had this good fortune: to meet what matches my desire.’ But there are also the lows: ‘The lover's fatal identity is precisely this: I am the one who waits.’ It is a painful march towards romantic decay and much pain comes from not knowing how to properly love the other. In this we see Barthe’s first major conundrum around love with the lover projecting onto the beloved. It’s like when your friend has a crush and describes them as some mythical being who can do no wrong and you realize they perhaps love “the idea” of the person instead of the actual person, who inevitably contains foibles and flaws. ‘The subject suddenly realises that he is imprisoning the loved object in a net of tyrannies,’ sees the beloved as an idea that is not their true identity and is thereby loving something that does not exist. We must, as Robert Frost wrote, ‘love the things we love for what they are.’ And in projecting themself, upon discovering the foolishness of the projection and losing it, they in turn lose themselves.
‘I have projected myself into the other with such power that when I am without the other I cannot recover myself, regain myself: I am lost, forever.’
Which is a real tragedy that, in love, when you lose yourself, you tend to lose your lover. ‘It is my desire I desire, and the loved being is no more than its tool,’ the subject realizes, and in this they also realize the lover has been objectified under their language.
‘I can do everything with my language but not with my body. What I hide by my language, my body utters. I can deliberately mold my message, not my voice. By my voice, whatever it says, the other will recognize "that something is wrong with me".’
Often one loses themself out of fear for losing the lover and we see Barthes’ subject strangle their relationship with jealousies and anxieties. It is an examination on how dependency functions and how an obsessive relation straps all sense of self worth into the dependency.
‘If I acknowledge my dependency, I do so because for me it is a means of signifying my demand: in the realm of love, futility is not a "weakness" or an "absurdity": it is a strong sign: the more futile, the more it signifies and the more it asserts itself as strength.’
This sort of obsessive, jealous relationship reveals how it is a sense of wanting to possess the lover as opposed to authentically loving them. Barthes looks at how the language shows a ‘will-to-possess’ which is an erratic desire where ‘ the adult is superimposed upon the child,’ as in, it is a childlike behavior undertaken by adults engaged in adult interpersonal power imbalance. ‘Realising that the difficulties of the amorous relationship originate in his ceaseless desire to appropriate the loved being in one way or another, the subject decides to abandon henceforth all “will-to-possess” in his regard,’ he writes. The lover must abandon the desire to possess in order to be able to understand a fulfilling love, or love the object of their love. We’ve all seen this happen!
‘The imperfect is the tense of fascination: it seems to be alive and yet it doesn't move: imperfect presence, imperfect death; neither oblivion nor resurrection; simply the exhausting lure of memory.’
There is a constant struggle between possession and freedom, creating a power imbalance. But also that lovers must struggle for a balance with who waits, with vulnerability, dependency, etc. or an asymmetrical power structure in the relationship forms. Such a structure tends to break and plunge the subject into absence.
‘Absence is the figure of privation; simultaneously, I desire and I need. Desire is squashed against need: that is the obsessive phenomenon of all amorous sentiment.’
Barthes shows how in the absence of a lover (especially after an obsessive, jealous relationship) the subject is left in a void and shot through with psychological trauma to the extent that they contemplate suicide. They put their whole self into the relationship and without it, lack a self. ‘I cannot write myself. What, after all, is this "I" who would write himself?’ And here is where we can finally dive into the language of love.
‘Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other.’
Barthes doesn’t mean the 5 Love Languages (mine is Quality Time) but the actual language we use around love and what its linguistic qualities reveal. ‘The lover's discourse stifles the other, who finds no place for his own language beneath this massive utterance.’ As earlier the subject discovers they cannot ‘write myself’ without the other, he also bemoans the loss of loves language when love disintegrates. Language decays too:
‘Isn’t the most sensitive point of this mourning the fact that I must lose a language — the amorous language? No more ‘I love you’s.’
The phone won’t ring with your lovers name anymore. You won’t hear your own name from their voice–at least not affectionately. The language of love is intrinsically linked to the lovers identity and the linguistics unravel along with love. Barthes also comments too on how often the phrase ‘I love you’ can seem like a ‘blank and meaningless statement’ as a factor of how language can destroy language when the term cannot actually touch upon the actuality of love.
‘Love has two affirmations. First of all, when the lover encounters the other, there is an immediate affirmation (psychologically: dazzlement, enthusiasm, exaltation, mad projection of a fulfilled future: I am devoured by desire, the impulse to be happy): I say yes to everything (blinding myself). There follows 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 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.’
Roland Barthes A Lover’s Discourse is a dense yet endlessly readable and accessible work bursting with emotion and insight. It may open a lot of old wounds, but by reading it you may also address the past with fresh eyes and, guided by his philosophical musings, put bad memories to rest, accept them, or heal from it. A bit slow and ponderous, feeling at times like a textbook on love and at others like the most emotive poetry you can imagine, A Lover’s Discourse is at all times profound and a very worthwhile read.
4.5/5
‘To be engulfed: outburst of annihilation which affects the amorous subject in despair or fulfillment. At its best, when it’s fulfillment, it’s a kind of disappearance at will. An easeful death. Death liberated from dying.’
December 10, 2014
A textual conversation between Roland Barthes (RB) and his friend X.:
RB: hey
X: hey Rolly, what's up
RB: went on a date last night, still reeling
X: oh? how'd it go?
RB: I don't know! he said I was adorable. "adorable"!
X: huh?
RB: why would he say that?
RB: like he couldn't think of anything better about me?
RB: god, what a muck of discourse!
X: right.
X: so what did you guys do anyway?
RB: that's the worst of it
RB: we went to dinner at l'Chateau B---
RB: can you believe it?
X: oh I heard that place is great, how was it?
RB: horrible. he ordered us a bottle of Bordeaux, can you believe it?
X: but you love Bordeaux.
RB: that's not the point.
X: I don't get it
RB: oh you're impossible
a little while later with his friend Madame Y:
Y: Rollo, how was the date? he looked smoking!
RB: don't get me started on the smoking. it's like he was trying to alienate me with the mass produced image of masculinity at the expense of human exploitation in North Africa
Y: oh
Y: Well how was it otherwise?
RB: you know, there's no way to tell
Y: well, did he ask you for a second date?
RB: well sure he did
RB: I mean, there's the expectation
RB: I don't even know if I would want to go
RB: and he hasn't even called me yet, you know?
RB: It's been HOURS, Y--.. HOURS
RB: wait, is that the phone, h/o
RB: nope just Susan following me on twitter, ugh
RB: Y--? you there?
A month later, with X:
X: hey Roland, haven't seen you in a while
RB: oh hi
RB: yea I've been busy
X: oh? new book?
RB: you could say that
RB: the book of LA COEUR
X: oh?
RB: I'm in love
X: congratulations! :)
RB: congratulations? don't you understand the kind of torment this is? X: huh?
RB: love is torture.
RB: like prometheus, I steal some fire, some love, and am forever forced to die and be reborn, to have my heart pecked out to death and then replenish for renewed torment!
X: seems like a bit of an overreaction
X: do you guys get along?
RB: of course we GET ALONG. WE ARE IN LOVE!
RB: but I wonder if he loves me more than I love him?
RB: you've met him once, what do you think?
X: oh, I don't know, it was a while ago!
X: I haven't seen either of you in a while
RB: oh?
RB: I wonder if it is TORMENTING him that I haven't called?
RB: see I said I would call
RB: but I'm just waiting for him to call me
X: why?
RB: you don't get it
RB: I wonder why he hasn't called me?
RB: maybe there's something wrong with my landline?
RB: ... ttyl gotta make a call
and:
RB: ma cherie
Y: Roland!
RB: long time, my dear!
Y: yes! we should get tea!
RB: I'm actually super busy. love. you know how it is.
RB: anyway
RB: so last night he texted me "can't make it sunday. sorry."
RB: WHAT THE HELL DOES THAT EVEN MEAN!?
Y: well seems like he can't make it on sunday
RB: ugh, you don't get it
RB: like can't MAKE it? "MAKE"?
Y: ??
RB: why "make"?
RB: and don't get me started on "sorry."
RB: SORRY PERIOD
RB: do you believe that?
RB: do you think there is someone else?
RB: can you get tea with him tomorrow and ask him if he is mad at me?
RB: but subtly, you know
RB: I don't want him to think that I think he is mad at me
RB: I'd appreciate it
RB: btw did I hear you were divorced? sorry to hear it
RB: you think you could do me this little favor though?
RB: Y---?
RB: hey
X: hey Rolly, what's up
RB: went on a date last night, still reeling
X: oh? how'd it go?
RB: I don't know! he said I was adorable. "adorable"!
X: huh?
RB: why would he say that?
RB: like he couldn't think of anything better about me?
RB: god, what a muck of discourse!
X: right.
X: so what did you guys do anyway?
RB: that's the worst of it
RB: we went to dinner at l'Chateau B---
RB: can you believe it?
X: oh I heard that place is great, how was it?
RB: horrible. he ordered us a bottle of Bordeaux, can you believe it?
X: but you love Bordeaux.
RB: that's not the point.
X: I don't get it
RB: oh you're impossible
a little while later with his friend Madame Y:
Y: Rollo, how was the date? he looked smoking!
RB: don't get me started on the smoking. it's like he was trying to alienate me with the mass produced image of masculinity at the expense of human exploitation in North Africa
Y: oh
Y: Well how was it otherwise?
RB: you know, there's no way to tell
Y: well, did he ask you for a second date?
RB: well sure he did
RB: I mean, there's the expectation
RB: I don't even know if I would want to go
RB: and he hasn't even called me yet, you know?
RB: It's been HOURS, Y--.. HOURS
RB: wait, is that the phone, h/o
RB: nope just Susan following me on twitter, ugh
RB: Y--? you there?
A month later, with X:
X: hey Roland, haven't seen you in a while
RB: oh hi
RB: yea I've been busy
X: oh? new book?
RB: you could say that
RB: the book of LA COEUR
X: oh?
RB: I'm in love
X: congratulations! :)
RB: congratulations? don't you understand the kind of torment this is? X: huh?
RB: love is torture.
RB: like prometheus, I steal some fire, some love, and am forever forced to die and be reborn, to have my heart pecked out to death and then replenish for renewed torment!
X: seems like a bit of an overreaction
X: do you guys get along?
RB: of course we GET ALONG. WE ARE IN LOVE!
RB: but I wonder if he loves me more than I love him?
RB: you've met him once, what do you think?
X: oh, I don't know, it was a while ago!
X: I haven't seen either of you in a while
RB: oh?
RB: I wonder if it is TORMENTING him that I haven't called?
RB: see I said I would call
RB: but I'm just waiting for him to call me
X: why?
RB: you don't get it
RB: I wonder why he hasn't called me?
RB: maybe there's something wrong with my landline?
RB: ... ttyl gotta make a call
and:
RB: ma cherie
Y: Roland!
RB: long time, my dear!
Y: yes! we should get tea!
RB: I'm actually super busy. love. you know how it is.
RB: anyway
RB: so last night he texted me "can't make it sunday. sorry."
RB: WHAT THE HELL DOES THAT EVEN MEAN!?
Y: well seems like he can't make it on sunday
RB: ugh, you don't get it
RB: like can't MAKE it? "MAKE"?
Y: ??
RB: why "make"?
RB: and don't get me started on "sorry."
RB: SORRY PERIOD
RB: do you believe that?
RB: do you think there is someone else?
RB: can you get tea with him tomorrow and ask him if he is mad at me?
RB: but subtly, you know
RB: I don't want him to think that I think he is mad at me
RB: I'd appreciate it
RB: btw did I hear you were divorced? sorry to hear it
RB: you think you could do me this little favor though?
RB: Y---?
April 27, 2018
در این کتاب، فیلسوف فرانسوی و منتقد ادبی، رولان بارت، تلاش میکند تا یکی از قویترین احساسات انسانی را مورد تحلیل قرار دهد: عشق.
بارت ادعا میکند که جامعهی مدرن از فقدان یک زبان برای تحلیل مساله عشق رنج میبرد. به عقیده بارت، بدون وجود یک سیستم تحلیلی و تفسیری از عشق، قادر به رهایی از فرمهای غیر سالم و غیر بازتابی از عشق نخواهیم بود. و این نکته میتواند صدمات روانی زیادی برای طرفین درگیر ایجاد کند.
بارت مدعی است که در یک رابطه عاشقانه درست، عشق میتواند منبع الهامات و امیدبخش باشد. در حالی که در یک فرم ناسالم، عشق میتواند منبع دردهای دردهای روانی، علتی برای خودکشی یا زخمهای عمیقی باشد که شاید برای همیشه، دو طرف را درگیر کند.
به عنوان یکی از پیشروان پساساختارگرایی، رویکرد بارت در مورد بحران روابط عاشقانه تا حد زیادی منحصر به فرد و یگانه است. این کتاب در واقع از تعدادی زیادی از قطعات تشکیل شده، که نویسنده در هر قطعه، یکی از مسائلی را که یک عاشق پروتاگونیست در رابطهاش با معشوق با آن روبروست، از بودن در آغوش معشوق، تا تشویش و بیقراری از یک تعلیق زمانی و حتی تماسهای تلفنی را مورد بررسی قرار داده است.
کتاب در واقع آمیزهای از فلسفه و روانشناسی با طعم زبانشناسانه است. که نثری غنی و وضوحی نفوذپذیر دارد. در سراسر متن، بارت ارجاعات جالبی به منابع ادبی و فلسفی همچون گوته، لاکان، نیچه، فروید، ریلکه و استاندال داده است. البته برای مطالعه کتاب، نیاز جدیای به آشنایی اولیه با آثار این اندیشمندان نخواهید داشت.
دههها بعد از نگارش اولین نسخه این اثر، سخن عاشق کماکان یکی از تکاندهندهترین آثار در این زمینه است. و البته در جایگاه ویژهی کتابخانهی من قرار دارد.
بارت ادعا میکند که جامعهی مدرن از فقدان یک زبان برای تحلیل مساله عشق رنج میبرد. به عقیده بارت، بدون وجود یک سیستم تحلیلی و تفسیری از عشق، قادر به رهایی از فرمهای غیر سالم و غیر بازتابی از عشق نخواهیم بود. و این نکته میتواند صدمات روانی زیادی برای طرفین درگیر ایجاد کند.
بارت مدعی است که در یک رابطه عاشقانه درست، عشق میتواند منبع الهامات و امیدبخش باشد. در حالی که در یک فرم ناسالم، عشق میتواند منبع دردهای دردهای روانی، علتی برای خودکشی یا زخمهای عمیقی باشد که شاید برای همیشه، دو طرف را درگیر کند.
به عنوان یکی از پیشروان پساساختارگرایی، رویکرد بارت در مورد بحران روابط عاشقانه تا حد زیادی منحصر به فرد و یگانه است. این کتاب در واقع از تعدادی زیادی از قطعات تشکیل شده، که نویسنده در هر قطعه، یکی از مسائلی را که یک عاشق پروتاگونیست در رابطهاش با معشوق با آن روبروست، از بودن در آغوش معشوق، تا تشویش و بیقراری از یک تعلیق زمانی و حتی تماسهای تلفنی را مورد بررسی قرار داده است.
کتاب در واقع آمیزهای از فلسفه و روانشناسی با طعم زبانشناسانه است. که نثری غنی و وضوحی نفوذپذیر دارد. در سراسر متن، بارت ارجاعات جالبی به منابع ادبی و فلسفی همچون گوته، لاکان، نیچه، فروید، ریلکه و استاندال داده است. البته برای مطالعه کتاب، نیاز جدیای به آشنایی اولیه با آثار این اندیشمندان نخواهید داشت.
دههها بعد از نگارش اولین نسخه این اثر، سخن عاشق کماکان یکی از تکاندهندهترین آثار در این زمینه است. و البته در جایگاه ویژهی کتابخانهی من قرار دارد.
July 29, 2013
"Love" seems to me something which is impossible to define, to grasp. Centuries of authors, of philosophers, have tried to do so in vain. There is always something left to be said. As in death, love is a topic of infinite discourse. As Tolstoy echoes in the mouth of Anna Karenina's titular heroine: "'I think... if there are as many minds as there are men, then there are as many kinds of love as there are hearts.'" Love is infinite in it's permutations, and therefore cannot be defined. What Barthes offers is not a definition of Love, but what it is to be a Lover. Barthes, like his predecessors Proust, Shakespeare, Ovid, Baudelaire, Goethe, Stendhal, etc., is a troubadour of the pains of jealousy disguised as the joys of love. A Lover's Discourse is a masterful fugue of personal experience, literary precedence, and theoretical musing, which evokes emotion in the same pitch as a novel, but elicits introspection with the intellectual skepticism of Hamlet.
As a piece representative of the Barthesian oeuvre, A Lover's Discourse straddles the duality of speech and meaning, of what it means to be a lover, but also the very discourse of love. The book itself is divided pell-mell into short fragments related to the amorous phraseology: "s'abîmer...," "cœur," "casés..." etc. It is the layered language of love which interests Barthes: what do we say when we are in love? - is what we intend what we say? - what does what we say really mean, what does it signify? Though the semiotic approach to love seems distant and cold, it is the inverse which we feel when reading Barthes, whose very language moves the reader to a shudder of feeling:
What does it mean to be in love? It is a notion idealized and raised on high by all men, it is the apparent culmination of our lives. But with Love comes pain. For Barthes Love is inseparable from Jealousy: if we are not jealous, it diminishes our love, it negates it. We can never be happy in love, never truly happy, never complaisant. The lover is always waiting, he must ever have his love validated, requited, and won. Every win in love is a Pyrrhic victory, every favor won is hours, days, of agony paid for. This is the view which Barthes takes, but it is not his argument. His view of love is a flavor of A Lover's Discourse, but it is not the entire course. What do we mean when we declare the object of our love "adorable"? What do we mean when we affirm our love? These are the concerns of Barthes. "What do we mean when we are in love?" no "what do we mean when we say 'I am in love'?"
The question of A Lover's Discourse is not "how does one define love?" but rather, more fundamentally, how does one even begin to discuss it? When we read the Romantics, Byron, Keats, Shelley, we are presented with a view of Love that seems too large, too incompatible with feeble man: something more withheld from man for his imperfections, something which is manifest as a remote deity. Contrarily, when we discuss it in the quotidian tongue, it seems to us too pale a light: it lacks the allure of passion, something is missing. Despite his apotheosis of Language, even Barthes feels its inadequacy in front of the edifice of Love:
As a piece representative of the Barthesian oeuvre, A Lover's Discourse straddles the duality of speech and meaning, of what it means to be a lover, but also the very discourse of love. The book itself is divided pell-mell into short fragments related to the amorous phraseology: "s'abîmer...," "cœur," "casés..." etc. It is the layered language of love which interests Barthes: what do we say when we are in love? - is what we intend what we say? - what does what we say really mean, what does it signify? Though the semiotic approach to love seems distant and cold, it is the inverse which we feel when reading Barthes, whose very language moves the reader to a shudder of feeling:
Am I in love? --yes, since I am waiting. The other one never waits. Sometimes I want to play the part of the one who doesn't wait; I try to busy myself elsewhere, to arrive late; but I always lose at this game. Whatever I do, I find myself there, with nothing to do, punctual, even ahead of time. The lover's fatal identity is precisely this: I am the one who waits.Perhaps this book, novelistic essay or essayistic novel, must be read in one's prime, when one is in the throes of passion, to feel the full emotional impact - I do not know if this is the case. As a young man I am always on the precipice of romantic disaster, only in utter solitude, removed from all passionate enterprises, do I feel free from the pharmacopoeia (half-poison, half-remedy) of love. Bliss and misery are the Janus faces of life, in love, in solitude, we cannot have one without the other, even if they only look at us in turns.
The world subjects every enterprise to an alternative; that of success or failure, of victory or defeat... Flouted in my enterprise (as it happens), I emerge from it neither victor nor vanquished: I am tragic.Love, life, and death, are infinite, they are the lands of contradictions, beyond the capacity of language. What is both bliss and misery? What is the concatenation of victory and failure? How does die and yet endure? At these interstices of language lies the fundamental truths of Love.
What does it mean to be in love? It is a notion idealized and raised on high by all men, it is the apparent culmination of our lives. But with Love comes pain. For Barthes Love is inseparable from Jealousy: if we are not jealous, it diminishes our love, it negates it. We can never be happy in love, never truly happy, never complaisant. The lover is always waiting, he must ever have his love validated, requited, and won. Every win in love is a Pyrrhic victory, every favor won is hours, days, of agony paid for. This is the view which Barthes takes, but it is not his argument. His view of love is a flavor of A Lover's Discourse, but it is not the entire course. What do we mean when we declare the object of our love "adorable"? What do we mean when we affirm our love? These are the concerns of Barthes. "What do we mean when we are in love?" no "what do we mean when we say 'I am in love'?"
The question of A Lover's Discourse is not "how does one define love?" but rather, more fundamentally, how does one even begin to discuss it? When we read the Romantics, Byron, Keats, Shelley, we are presented with a view of Love that seems too large, too incompatible with feeble man: something more withheld from man for his imperfections, something which is manifest as a remote deity. Contrarily, when we discuss it in the quotidian tongue, it seems to us too pale a light: it lacks the allure of passion, something is missing. Despite his apotheosis of Language, even Barthes feels its inadequacy in front of the edifice of Love:
To try to write love is to confront the muck of language; that region of hysteria where language is both too much and too little, excessive (by the limitless expansion of the ego, by emotive submersion) and impoverished (by the codes on which love diminishes and levels it).In front of Love, language is reduced to muck, it is inadequate. Barthes is torn between the deities of Eros and Logos - Love and Language. As a humbled votary genuflecting to the altar of Language, he is prostrate before the temple of Love.
October 27, 2022
I want to cast language out of my body, there's no space for it in me anymore - not even in the little crevices between my joints and in the folds of my skin. Why do I need language anyway, when my body betrays me at every turn, in resonance with every tick of the clock? I want to put my mind in a plaster cast, I no longer want to be language-mad.
I alternatively unrealize and disrealize. I am incapable of looking at anything head-on and I refuse to be looked at head-on. I aesthetize everything. What is gentleness? Come, exchange an impulse with me.
I want to be both charismatic and chaotic. Someone is squeezing my heart, clenching it tight between their fingers and not letting go.
Let me utter everything and nothing. Let me utter love. Let me make the pronouns skid. I want to make love in the night of non-meaning, and let the night illuminate the night. I am vulgar because I am sentimental. I am banalized by literature, by words. I am obscene. I am repressive. I am a lover. And therefore, I cannot be the hero. I cannot have the last word, even though I always want to.
There is a Hindu mythological story about a God who ate soil as a child. On being reprimanded and asked to open his mouth by his mother, he showed her the whole of the universe. Ask me to open my mouth and you will see Barthes' contradictory yet simultaneous existence of language-abyss and language-excess.
I alternatively unrealize and disrealize. I am incapable of looking at anything head-on and I refuse to be looked at head-on. I aesthetize everything. What is gentleness? Come, exchange an impulse with me.
I want to be both charismatic and chaotic. Someone is squeezing my heart, clenching it tight between their fingers and not letting go.
Let me utter everything and nothing. Let me utter love. Let me make the pronouns skid. I want to make love in the night of non-meaning, and let the night illuminate the night. I am vulgar because I am sentimental. I am banalized by literature, by words. I am obscene. I am repressive. I am a lover. And therefore, I cannot be the hero. I cannot have the last word, even though I always want to.
There is a Hindu mythological story about a God who ate soil as a child. On being reprimanded and asked to open his mouth by his mother, he showed her the whole of the universe. Ask me to open my mouth and you will see Barthes' contradictory yet simultaneous existence of language-abyss and language-excess.
December 11, 2025
“‘Am I in love? —Yes, since I’m waiting.’ The other never waits. Sometimes I want to play the part of the one who doesn’t wait; I try to busy myself elsewhere, to arrive late; but I always lose at this game: whatever I do, I find myself there, with nothing to do, punctual, even ahead of time. The lover’s fatal identity is precisely: I am the one who waits.”
(Not a review; just working some stuff out. I haven’t even finished the book yet. [Update: finished.] To be honest, I don’t like Barthes all that much.)
A brief and pathetic love episode
We’re lying together naked, but not yet as lovers. He’s twenty-two. His body is so long and lean against mine. His hair is a long lion’s mane of thick brown curls (he’s a white guy, by the way), matching his short beard and spreading across the pillow, and his eyes are as brown and soft as a spaniel’s. His lips are curved in a tender smile. I’m lying naked on his hairy chest, my chin resting on top of my hands.
“So,” I say, “what do you do?”
“I work on a flower farm.”
“That’s interesting. What did you study in university?”
“I never went to university.”
“Ever been in a relationship?”
“Not really.”
“Why not?”
“I just don’t think I have the capacity to worry about someone else.”
“But you would have someone to worry about you.”
“Yeah, I guess so.”
“Any siblings?”
“A sister.”
“Older or younger?”
“Older.”
“Do you like her?”
“I like her a lot.”
“Any hobbies?”
He’s silent for a moment and then says, smiling, “Flowers.”
(I look up at that to-die-for face of his and decide that life is definitely not fair. Why does someone so gorgeous have to be so simple? We have nothing in common.)
He lifts himself up on one elbow and stares at me. “I like you,” he says, giggling.
“I-like-you-too.”
“I think I really like you.”
I’m taken aback. “I-think-I-really-like-you-too.”
*
A few weeks later we go out for coffee. He tells me about his father, who died when he was very young. In a car crash. He tells me about his brother, who died a few months ago. Of an overdose. “I’m so sorry,” I say pathetically. “You’ve experienced so much loss for someone so young.” He replies, “It’s all right,” and tells me he believes that being exposed to death at a young age has made it easy for him to live in the now, and appreciate the moment.
He drives me to the farm where he sometimes works. I’ve never thought of myself as having a green thumb, or anything else, or as even sentimental about nature, but I’m fascinated by all that he knows about these flowers. There must be a dozen greenhouses filled with them—marigolds, zinnias, daisies, chrysanthemums, asters. My favorite are the dahlias, which seem to come in all shades and colors—pinks, corals, lavenders, purples, white. I ask him what his favorite color is, and he says it’s salmon, picking out a dahlia with salmon petals. (My favorite is blue, which he explains rarely occurs in nature.) I like the goofy way he walks with his hands in his pockets, the way he tilts his head when he smiles. He’s so at home with his fingers in the dark soil, and pulls out a tuber for me to see. “You should see this place in the spring,” he says. “Right now, everything is dying away…”
His image is encased in the shimmering “envelope” of “a devout, orthodox discourse”: the lover’s discourse.
*
We become boyfriends. I sketch him one night, naked and asleep, filling in the contours and curves of his body with careful detail. (The Other’s Body) I show him all my favorite things���favorite films, favorite books—and cram whatever I can into his hands, wanting his sacred touch on it. (The Ribbon) I love the way he looks when I pull away from kissing him and open my eyes before he does. He’s “Adorable!”
*
To Love Love: Charlotte is quite insipid; she is the paltry character of a powerful, tormented, flamboyant drama staged by the subject Werther; by a kindly decision of this subject, 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. (I want to go back there, like the imprisoned child of Poitiers who wanted to get back to her big cave Malempia.)
*
Love’s Languor: “and you tell me my other self will you answer me at last I am tired of you I want you I dream of you for you against you answer me your name is a perfume about me your color bursts among the thorns bring back my heart with cool wine make me a coverlet of the morning I suffocate beneath this mask withered shrunken skin nothing exists save desire”
*
For some reason or other, our love encounters grow less frequent and less satisfactory. Once, after a particularly long, sweaty session of lovemaking (it takes him forever to come because of his antidepressants), he rolls onto his back and reaches for his phone on my nightstand.
“I have to go.”
“So soon? You only just got here.”
“I know, I…”
“I like having sex with you”—I swing my leg over him so I straddle his chest—“but that’s not all it is for me. I really… really like you.”
“Thank you.”
(He’s oblivious to his error.)
“What do you mean, ‘Thank you’? Say ‘I-really-really-like-you-too.’”
“I-really-really-like-you-too.”
*
Why( am I always the one to text good morning first, always the one to suggest going out to see a movie, or to a restaurant, always the one asking…)?
“Are you just not into me?”
“No, it’s nothing like that. I just don’t have as much time as you do to put into a relationship. I’m sorry I’m making you feel that way.”
A tear rips in the envelope of his image, slicing through my heart like a knife. My language is capsized.
(The Tip of the Nose: Could the other be vulgar, whose elegance and originality I had so religiously hymned? Here is a gesture by which is revealed a being of another race. I am flabbergasted.)
“It’s all right.”
*
He never seems to really talk to me. I don’t seem to know what he thinks or how he feels about anything. He’s as opaque as a stone. He’s The Unknowable. How does he really feel about me? What does it feel like to be inside him looking out? If I could somehow, by magic, experience his feelings, would they be anything I could name?—“Who is the other? I wear myself out, I shall never know.”
(“To expend oneself, to bestir oneself for an impenetrable object is pure religion. To make the other into an insoluble riddle on which my life depends is to consecrate the other as a god…”)
*
Fade-out: In the text, the fade-out of voices is a good thing; the voices of the narrative come, go, disappear, overlap; we do not know who is speaking; the text speaks, that is all: no more image, nothing but language. But the other is not a text, the other is an image, single and coalescent; if the voice is lost, it is the entire image which vanishes (love is monologic, maniacal; the text is heterologic, perverse). The other’s fade-out, when it occurs, makes me anxious because it seems without cause and without conclusion. Like a kind of melancholy mirage, the other withdraws into infinity and I wear myself out trying to get there.
(When this garment was at the height of fashion, an American firm advertised the washed-out blue of its jeans by claiming: “It fades and fades and fades.” The loved being, in the same way, endlessly withdraws and pales: a feeling of madness, purer than if this madness were violent.)
*
He’s distraught. His cat’s arthritis has gotten so bad that he might have to be put down this weekend. He wonders whether he should drop everything and go up-island to see him one last time.
(“I have an Other-ache”: “Supposing that we experienced the other as he experiences himself—which Schopenhauer calls compassion and which might more accurately be called a union within suffering, a unity of suffering—we should hate the other when he himself, like Pascal, finds himself hateful.” If the other suffers from hallucinations, if he fears going mad, I should myself hallucinate, myself go mad. Now, whatever the power of love, this does not occur: I am moved, anguished, for it is horrible to see those one loves suffering, but at the same time I remain dry, watertight. My identification is imperfect: I am a Mother (the other causes me concern), but an insufficient Mother; I bestir myself too much, in proportion to the profound reserve in which, actually, I remain. For at the same time that I “sincerely” identify myself with the other’s misery, what I read in this misery is that it occurs without me, and that by being miserable by himself, the other abandons me: if he suffers without my being the cause of his suffering, it is because I don’t count for him: his suffering annuls me insofar as it constitutes him outside of myself.)
I tell him to go, that he’ll regret it if he doesn’t, and he does go; he’s gone—(The Absent One)—Saturday, Sunday, Monday, the next week…
*
In Praise of Tears: The amorous subject has a particular propensity to cry… The slightest amorous emotion, whether of happiness or of disappointment, brings Werther to tears. Werther weeps often, very often, and in floods. Is it the lover in Werther who weeps, or is it the romantic?
*
No Answer (to my calls): “This is what death is, most of all: everything that has been seen, will have been seen for nothing. Mourning over what we have perceived.” In those brief moments when I speak for nothing, it is as if I were dying. For the loved being becomes a leaden figure, a dream creature who does not speak, and silence, in dreams, is death. Or again: the gratifying Mother shows me the Mirror, the Image, and says to me: “That’s you.” But the silent Mother does not tell me what I am: I am no longer established, I drift painfully, without existence.
*
Ideas of Suicide: In the amorous realm, the desire for suicide is frequent: a trifle provokes it.
*
The World Thunderstruck:
I. “I am waiting for a telephone call, and this waiting makes me more anxious than usual. I try to do something, but without much success. I walk back and forth in my room: the various objects—whose familiarity usually comforts me—the gray roofs, the noises of the city, everything seems inert to me, cut off, thunderstruck—like a waste planet, a Nature uninhabited by man.”
II. “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.”
III. “In a crowded restaurant, with friends, I am suffering (an incomprehensible word for someone who is not in love). This suffering comes to me from the crowd, from the noise, from the decor (kitsch). A lid of disreality falls over me from the lamps, the mirrored ceilings,” etc.
IV. “I am alone in a café. It is Sunday, lunchtime. On the other side of the glass, on a poster outside, Coluche grimaces and plays the fool. I’m cold.”
(The world is full without me, as in Nausea; the world plays at living behind a glass partition; the world is in an aquarium; I see everything close up and yet cut off, made of some other substance; I keep falling outside myself, without dizziness, without blur, into precision, as if I were drugged. “Oh, when this splendid Nature, spread out here before me, appears as frozen as a varnished miniature…”)
*
It’s evening. He’s back at my doorstep.
(Dark Glasses: X, who left for his vacation without me, has shown no signs of life since his departure: accident? post-office strike? indifference? distancing maneuver? exercise of a passing impulse of autonomy (“His youth deafens him, he fails to hear”)? or simple innocence? I grow increasingly anxious, pass through each act of the waiting-scenario. But when X reappears in one way or another, for he cannot fail to do so (a thought which should immediately dispel any anxiety), what will I say to him? Should I hide my distress—which will be over by then (“How are you?”)? Release it aggressively (“That wasn’t at all nice, at least you could have…”) or passionately (“Do you know how much worry you caused me?”)? Or let this distress of mine be delicately, discreetly understood, so that it will be discovered without having to strike down the other (“I was rather concerned…”)? A secondary anxiety seizes me, which is that I must determine the degree of publicity I shall give to my initial anxiety.)
I lean up to him and kiss him. He pulls me into a hug—(“In the loving calm of your arms”)—and kisses me.
“You have been very naughty,” I settle on saying sweetly.
He laughs. “I have been naughty.”
We climb the stairs together and enter my room. I lie on the bed fully clothed and he joins me. He puts his head on my chest. I comb my fingers through his curls as he looks up at me, his eyes glittering in the soft yellow lamplight.
“It’s not that I don’t have feelings for you. I just don’t think I can give you what you need,” he says, after announcing that we’re over. “Maybe I’m just broken.”
(The “It’s not you, it’s me” bit. How cliché! I can’t believe how much it hurts.)
“You’re not broken.”
He turns his head on his cheek. “This is going to sound crazy, but I think I Love You.”
(I should have been the one to say it first!)
“I-love-you-too,” I say weakly.
*
Exiled from the Image-repertoire: Let me take Werther at that fictive moment (in the fiction itself) when he might have renounced suicide. Then the only thing left to him is exile: not to leave Charlotte (he has already done so once, with no result), but to exile himself from her image, or worse still: to cut off that raving energy known as the Image-repertoire. Then begins “a kind of long insomnia.” That is the price to be paid: the death of the Image for my own life.
(Amorous passion is a delirium; but such delirium is not alien; everyone speaks of it, it is henceforth tamed. What is enigmatic is the loss of delirium: one returns to… what?)
***
And now we’re back to the present. I feel like absolute shit. I probably should have written this on paper and burned it, but—oh, what the hell. I hope you don’t find it too cringeworthy.
(Not a review; just working some stuff out. I haven’t even finished the book yet. [Update: finished.] To be honest, I don’t like Barthes all that much.)
A brief and pathetic love episode
We’re lying together naked, but not yet as lovers. He’s twenty-two. His body is so long and lean against mine. His hair is a long lion’s mane of thick brown curls (he’s a white guy, by the way), matching his short beard and spreading across the pillow, and his eyes are as brown and soft as a spaniel’s. His lips are curved in a tender smile. I’m lying naked on his hairy chest, my chin resting on top of my hands.
“So,” I say, “what do you do?”
“I work on a flower farm.”
“That’s interesting. What did you study in university?”
“I never went to university.”
“Ever been in a relationship?”
“Not really.”
“Why not?”
“I just don’t think I have the capacity to worry about someone else.”
“But you would have someone to worry about you.”
“Yeah, I guess so.”
“Any siblings?”
“A sister.”
“Older or younger?”
“Older.”
“Do you like her?”
“I like her a lot.”
“Any hobbies?”
He’s silent for a moment and then says, smiling, “Flowers.”
(I look up at that to-die-for face of his and decide that life is definitely not fair. Why does someone so gorgeous have to be so simple? We have nothing in common.)
He lifts himself up on one elbow and stares at me. “I like you,” he says, giggling.
“I-like-you-too.”
“I think I really like you.”
I’m taken aback. “I-think-I-really-like-you-too.”
*
A few weeks later we go out for coffee. He tells me about his father, who died when he was very young. In a car crash. He tells me about his brother, who died a few months ago. Of an overdose. “I’m so sorry,” I say pathetically. “You’ve experienced so much loss for someone so young.” He replies, “It’s all right,” and tells me he believes that being exposed to death at a young age has made it easy for him to live in the now, and appreciate the moment.
He drives me to the farm where he sometimes works. I’ve never thought of myself as having a green thumb, or anything else, or as even sentimental about nature, but I’m fascinated by all that he knows about these flowers. There must be a dozen greenhouses filled with them—marigolds, zinnias, daisies, chrysanthemums, asters. My favorite are the dahlias, which seem to come in all shades and colors—pinks, corals, lavenders, purples, white. I ask him what his favorite color is, and he says it’s salmon, picking out a dahlia with salmon petals. (My favorite is blue, which he explains rarely occurs in nature.) I like the goofy way he walks with his hands in his pockets, the way he tilts his head when he smiles. He’s so at home with his fingers in the dark soil, and pulls out a tuber for me to see. “You should see this place in the spring,” he says. “Right now, everything is dying away…”
His image is encased in the shimmering “envelope” of “a devout, orthodox discourse”: the lover’s discourse.
*
We become boyfriends. I sketch him one night, naked and asleep, filling in the contours and curves of his body with careful detail. (The Other’s Body) I show him all my favorite things���favorite films, favorite books—and cram whatever I can into his hands, wanting his sacred touch on it. (The Ribbon) I love the way he looks when I pull away from kissing him and open my eyes before he does. He’s “Adorable!”
*
To Love Love: Charlotte is quite insipid; she is the paltry character of a powerful, tormented, flamboyant drama staged by the subject Werther; by a kindly decision of this subject, 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. (I want to go back there, like the imprisoned child of Poitiers who wanted to get back to her big cave Malempia.)
*
Love’s Languor: “and you tell me my other self will you answer me at last I am tired of you I want you I dream of you for you against you answer me your name is a perfume about me your color bursts among the thorns bring back my heart with cool wine make me a coverlet of the morning I suffocate beneath this mask withered shrunken skin nothing exists save desire”
*
For some reason or other, our love encounters grow less frequent and less satisfactory. Once, after a particularly long, sweaty session of lovemaking (it takes him forever to come because of his antidepressants), he rolls onto his back and reaches for his phone on my nightstand.
“I have to go.”
“So soon? You only just got here.”
“I know, I…”
“I like having sex with you”—I swing my leg over him so I straddle his chest—“but that’s not all it is for me. I really… really like you.”
“Thank you.”
(He’s oblivious to his error.)
“What do you mean, ‘Thank you’? Say ‘I-really-really-like-you-too.’”
“I-really-really-like-you-too.”
*
Why( am I always the one to text good morning first, always the one to suggest going out to see a movie, or to a restaurant, always the one asking…)?
“Are you just not into me?”
“No, it’s nothing like that. I just don’t have as much time as you do to put into a relationship. I’m sorry I’m making you feel that way.”
A tear rips in the envelope of his image, slicing through my heart like a knife. My language is capsized.
(The Tip of the Nose: Could the other be vulgar, whose elegance and originality I had so religiously hymned? Here is a gesture by which is revealed a being of another race. I am flabbergasted.)
“It’s all right.”
*
He never seems to really talk to me. I don’t seem to know what he thinks or how he feels about anything. He’s as opaque as a stone. He’s The Unknowable. How does he really feel about me? What does it feel like to be inside him looking out? If I could somehow, by magic, experience his feelings, would they be anything I could name?—“Who is the other? I wear myself out, I shall never know.”
(“To expend oneself, to bestir oneself for an impenetrable object is pure religion. To make the other into an insoluble riddle on which my life depends is to consecrate the other as a god…”)
*
Fade-out: In the text, the fade-out of voices is a good thing; the voices of the narrative come, go, disappear, overlap; we do not know who is speaking; the text speaks, that is all: no more image, nothing but language. But the other is not a text, the other is an image, single and coalescent; if the voice is lost, it is the entire image which vanishes (love is monologic, maniacal; the text is heterologic, perverse). The other’s fade-out, when it occurs, makes me anxious because it seems without cause and without conclusion. Like a kind of melancholy mirage, the other withdraws into infinity and I wear myself out trying to get there.
(When this garment was at the height of fashion, an American firm advertised the washed-out blue of its jeans by claiming: “It fades and fades and fades.” The loved being, in the same way, endlessly withdraws and pales: a feeling of madness, purer than if this madness were violent.)
*
He’s distraught. His cat’s arthritis has gotten so bad that he might have to be put down this weekend. He wonders whether he should drop everything and go up-island to see him one last time.
(“I have an Other-ache”: “Supposing that we experienced the other as he experiences himself—which Schopenhauer calls compassion and which might more accurately be called a union within suffering, a unity of suffering—we should hate the other when he himself, like Pascal, finds himself hateful.” If the other suffers from hallucinations, if he fears going mad, I should myself hallucinate, myself go mad. Now, whatever the power of love, this does not occur: I am moved, anguished, for it is horrible to see those one loves suffering, but at the same time I remain dry, watertight. My identification is imperfect: I am a Mother (the other causes me concern), but an insufficient Mother; I bestir myself too much, in proportion to the profound reserve in which, actually, I remain. For at the same time that I “sincerely” identify myself with the other’s misery, what I read in this misery is that it occurs without me, and that by being miserable by himself, the other abandons me: if he suffers without my being the cause of his suffering, it is because I don’t count for him: his suffering annuls me insofar as it constitutes him outside of myself.)
I tell him to go, that he’ll regret it if he doesn’t, and he does go; he’s gone—(The Absent One)—Saturday, Sunday, Monday, the next week…
*
In Praise of Tears: The amorous subject has a particular propensity to cry… The slightest amorous emotion, whether of happiness or of disappointment, brings Werther to tears. Werther weeps often, very often, and in floods. Is it the lover in Werther who weeps, or is it the romantic?
*
No Answer (to my calls): “This is what death is, most of all: everything that has been seen, will have been seen for nothing. Mourning over what we have perceived.” In those brief moments when I speak for nothing, it is as if I were dying. For the loved being becomes a leaden figure, a dream creature who does not speak, and silence, in dreams, is death. Or again: the gratifying Mother shows me the Mirror, the Image, and says to me: “That’s you.” But the silent Mother does not tell me what I am: I am no longer established, I drift painfully, without existence.
*
Ideas of Suicide: In the amorous realm, the desire for suicide is frequent: a trifle provokes it.
*
The World Thunderstruck:
I. “I am waiting for a telephone call, and this waiting makes me more anxious than usual. I try to do something, but without much success. I walk back and forth in my room: the various objects—whose familiarity usually comforts me—the gray roofs, the noises of the city, everything seems inert to me, cut off, thunderstruck—like a waste planet, a Nature uninhabited by man.”
II. “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.”
III. “In a crowded restaurant, with friends, I am suffering (an incomprehensible word for someone who is not in love). This suffering comes to me from the crowd, from the noise, from the decor (kitsch). A lid of disreality falls over me from the lamps, the mirrored ceilings,” etc.
IV. “I am alone in a café. It is Sunday, lunchtime. On the other side of the glass, on a poster outside, Coluche grimaces and plays the fool. I’m cold.”
(The world is full without me, as in Nausea; the world plays at living behind a glass partition; the world is in an aquarium; I see everything close up and yet cut off, made of some other substance; I keep falling outside myself, without dizziness, without blur, into precision, as if I were drugged. “Oh, when this splendid Nature, spread out here before me, appears as frozen as a varnished miniature…”)
*
It’s evening. He’s back at my doorstep.
(Dark Glasses: X, who left for his vacation without me, has shown no signs of life since his departure: accident? post-office strike? indifference? distancing maneuver? exercise of a passing impulse of autonomy (“His youth deafens him, he fails to hear”)? or simple innocence? I grow increasingly anxious, pass through each act of the waiting-scenario. But when X reappears in one way or another, for he cannot fail to do so (a thought which should immediately dispel any anxiety), what will I say to him? Should I hide my distress—which will be over by then (“How are you?”)? Release it aggressively (“That wasn’t at all nice, at least you could have…”) or passionately (“Do you know how much worry you caused me?”)? Or let this distress of mine be delicately, discreetly understood, so that it will be discovered without having to strike down the other (“I was rather concerned…”)? A secondary anxiety seizes me, which is that I must determine the degree of publicity I shall give to my initial anxiety.)
I lean up to him and kiss him. He pulls me into a hug—(“In the loving calm of your arms”)—and kisses me.
“You have been very naughty,” I settle on saying sweetly.
He laughs. “I have been naughty.”
We climb the stairs together and enter my room. I lie on the bed fully clothed and he joins me. He puts his head on my chest. I comb my fingers through his curls as he looks up at me, his eyes glittering in the soft yellow lamplight.
“It’s not that I don’t have feelings for you. I just don’t think I can give you what you need,” he says, after announcing that we’re over. “Maybe I’m just broken.”
(The “It’s not you, it’s me” bit. How cliché! I can’t believe how much it hurts.)
“You’re not broken.”
He turns his head on his cheek. “This is going to sound crazy, but I think I Love You.”
(I should have been the one to say it first!)
“I-love-you-too,” I say weakly.
*
Exiled from the Image-repertoire: Let me take Werther at that fictive moment (in the fiction itself) when he might have renounced suicide. Then the only thing left to him is exile: not to leave Charlotte (he has already done so once, with no result), but to exile himself from her image, or worse still: to cut off that raving energy known as the Image-repertoire. Then begins “a kind of long insomnia.” That is the price to be paid: the death of the Image for my own life.
(Amorous passion is a delirium; but such delirium is not alien; everyone speaks of it, it is henceforth tamed. What is enigmatic is the loss of delirium: one returns to… what?)
***
And now we’re back to the present. I feel like absolute shit. I probably should have written this on paper and burned it, but—oh, what the hell. I hope you don’t find it too cringeworthy.
July 14, 2016
Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.
- This is a book you either read over a period of time, in spurts, in fragments as it is written, or you binge read in a couple of days, like I have. Each chapter is a definition, a philosophical tease, a shortened version of what could be a lecture or an erudite discussion on life and love; after all, Barthes made his living as an academic.
- This is a book you should read after having read Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther and Selected Writings. A few notable ones are mentioned in Barthes' A Lover's Discourse: Freud, Proust, and Nietzsche. However, it is a comparative study of Goethe's Werther and his stance on his love, or I should say, his helplessness because of love. (However, read The Selected Writings version of Young Werther and you'll learn, from Goethe himself, that this feeling of despair started before love, that love may have been a trigger, yes, but, according to Goethe, most readers tend to evaluate the book differently).
- This is a book to read only when you're open to discussing love in several abstract and concrete forms. Seriously, how many ways can we talk about love? The theories are endless, so it's no surprise that this becomes an anatomy of lust and love, of the essence and the reality of love; or as Barthes puts it, the disreal and unreal, the cosmos.
To try to write love is to confront the muck of language: that region of hysteria where language is both too much and too little, excessive.
July 3, 2008
Fuck! Left in random Manhattan apt, then shipped to Haiti in aunt's luggage.
-----
Double fuck! Lost it again on the subway with hundreds of notes.
-----
Ok finished, after 6 months.
This book is a destroying and destroyed queer love poem masquerading half-assedly as theory. It is a poem with a mustache of theory. And it's pretty great for this. He sets it up as aspiring to decode a liminal site of discourse: the lover's discourse "is completely forsaken by the surrounding languages: ignored, disparaged, or derided by them."--and does this in a way that means to be understood for its universality. But then he clearly makes no bones about describing sitting by the phone in coldsweats gnawing (his own) fingers and desolate, waiting for "X" to call him. This is charming and sweet.
More importantly, the book is just incredibly brilliant, and just true. He positions the simple act of recognition, the utterance: "That is so true..." as the qualifier for an amorous image to be constitutive of the lover's "image repertoire"(as he calls it). Most all of his images qualify in this regard; they are immediately recognizable (to me at least). E.g., this illustration from the entry "Monstrous." "The lover's discourse stifles the other, who finds no place for his own language beneath this massive utterance."
The book is divided, seemingly haphazardly (alphabetically), into sections dealing with various utterances, conditions, or dispositions of the amorous image repertoire. Absence, adorable, affirmation, alteration, etc.
But really the book should be called An Unrequited Lover's Discourse, because it has *nothing* to do with the discourses or image repertoire that arise on love fulfilled. *That* discourse comes out the other end of the book as the only remaining liminal site of the "disparaged" lovers discourse. It is as though Barthes' personal loss is so palpable, so in need of codification in theory, of respect, that it elides the possibility of requitement altogether, positioning loss as the totality of love. A *romantic* position to be sure, and one not altogether out of step with *The Sorrows of Young Wether*, the major source text here (among a great many others).
But above all, really, is the simple fact that I could read a thousand pages of Barthes describing a single, unremarkable turd and be satisfied. He has a Nietzschean disposition toward cataclysm and provocation, toward paradox and the bending of incompetent languages around his meaning--he digs impertinently, surgically, for the actual in a way that would seem exclusive with such gentle taste--he is generous and lovable (unvikinglike) in a way that Nietzsche isn't (in the way that Rilke or e e cummings *are*).
Good parts from the first half:
"Meaning (destiny) electrifies my hand; I am about to tear open the other's opaque body, oblige the other (whether there is a response, a withdrawal, or mere acceptance) to enter into the interplay of meaning: I am about *to make the other speak*."
"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;*..."
"...any ethic of purity requires that we detach the gift from the hand which gives or receives it..."
"To speak of the gift is to place it in an exchange economy (of sacrifice, competition, etc.); which stands opposed to silent expenditure."
"Nature, today, is the city."
"The mechanics of amorous vassalage require a fathomless futility."
-----
Double fuck! Lost it again on the subway with hundreds of notes.
-----
Ok finished, after 6 months.
This book is a destroying and destroyed queer love poem masquerading half-assedly as theory. It is a poem with a mustache of theory. And it's pretty great for this. He sets it up as aspiring to decode a liminal site of discourse: the lover's discourse "is completely forsaken by the surrounding languages: ignored, disparaged, or derided by them."--and does this in a way that means to be understood for its universality. But then he clearly makes no bones about describing sitting by the phone in coldsweats gnawing (his own) fingers and desolate, waiting for "X" to call him. This is charming and sweet.
More importantly, the book is just incredibly brilliant, and just true. He positions the simple act of recognition, the utterance: "That is so true..." as the qualifier for an amorous image to be constitutive of the lover's "image repertoire"(as he calls it). Most all of his images qualify in this regard; they are immediately recognizable (to me at least). E.g., this illustration from the entry "Monstrous." "The lover's discourse stifles the other, who finds no place for his own language beneath this massive utterance."
The book is divided, seemingly haphazardly (alphabetically), into sections dealing with various utterances, conditions, or dispositions of the amorous image repertoire. Absence, adorable, affirmation, alteration, etc.
But really the book should be called An Unrequited Lover's Discourse, because it has *nothing* to do with the discourses or image repertoire that arise on love fulfilled. *That* discourse comes out the other end of the book as the only remaining liminal site of the "disparaged" lovers discourse. It is as though Barthes' personal loss is so palpable, so in need of codification in theory, of respect, that it elides the possibility of requitement altogether, positioning loss as the totality of love. A *romantic* position to be sure, and one not altogether out of step with *The Sorrows of Young Wether*, the major source text here (among a great many others).
But above all, really, is the simple fact that I could read a thousand pages of Barthes describing a single, unremarkable turd and be satisfied. He has a Nietzschean disposition toward cataclysm and provocation, toward paradox and the bending of incompetent languages around his meaning--he digs impertinently, surgically, for the actual in a way that would seem exclusive with such gentle taste--he is generous and lovable (unvikinglike) in a way that Nietzsche isn't (in the way that Rilke or e e cummings *are*).
Good parts from the first half:
"Meaning (destiny) electrifies my hand; I am about to tear open the other's opaque body, oblige the other (whether there is a response, a withdrawal, or mere acceptance) to enter into the interplay of meaning: I am about *to make the other speak*."
"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;*..."
"...any ethic of purity requires that we detach the gift from the hand which gives or receives it..."
"To speak of the gift is to place it in an exchange economy (of sacrifice, competition, etc.); which stands opposed to silent expenditure."
"Nature, today, is the city."
"The mechanics of amorous vassalage require a fathomless futility."
February 20, 2009
This book is a classic in France, and it's probably Barthe's most popular work. It is absolutely brilliant, and may be well be the best analysis ever made of love, as seen from the beginning to the end of a relationship. It isn't a novel, it's not an essay either, nor a self-help book or a psychology study: it's just, as the title implies, fragments - fragments about the daily life of two people in love, people at various stage of love, and those fragments capture so perfectly, so intimately, so precisely all the different aspects of love, that their totality forms a universal, transcendent, and mesmerizing vision of what love between two human beings can be. It is bittersweet, in the sense that the course of love is always almost the same, yet it's a book filled with happiness, joys, and at the end quite reassuring: what ever heartbreak you've been through, it's finally quite normal. Reading this book won't teach anyone how to love better or more wisely, but it does portray the complexities, small and big, and the mutliple wonders of love, in a very unique and direct way.
December 26, 2024
۵ ستارهی درخشان برای کتاب محبوبم در ۲۰۲۴:
برای گفتن از «سخن عاشق»، کتابی شگفتانگیز که برای من شروعکننده و مقدمهی خیلی چیزهای مهمی در زندگیم بود، معالاسف باید از زبان استفاده کنم و چقدر که همیشه زبان ناکافی و الکنه.
چیزی که در چند ماه اخیر یاد گرفتم و چیزی که انگار از بعد خوندن کتاب «حسرت» من هم دیگه بهش باور دارم، ناقص بودن ساحت زبانه. هر مِیلی که از ذهن و احساس به قلمرو زبان میرسه، بخشیش از دست میره. همیشه و در لحظه چیزی در ما هست بیاننشده و تشنه برای دیده شدن. میلی سرکش، که از قضا هیچوقت هم ارضا نمیشه.
لجبازی کردم، به زبان امید واهی داشتم و به درک دیگری. پاکوبان برزمین، اصرار میکردم که من میتونم دیگری رو بشناسم و ببینم در کمال خودش و خودم رو بیان کنم، تا غایت خودم. نمیشه، از دست ما کاری برنمیاد، زبان مثل طلسم زندگی انسانها رو دربرگرفته، راه فراری ازش نیست و در عین حال تنها روزنهی امید و نجاتمونه.
بارت سخن عاشق رو با علم به تمامی اینها مینویسه. پس کتابش رو با این جمله شروع میکنه:«سخن عاشق، امروزه سخنی از فرط تنهاییست» و با این حال مینویسه. چرا؟
چقدر اندیشمند میشناسید که در مورد عشق اندیشهورزی کرده باشن؟ چقدرشون عاشقانه این کار رو انجام دادن؟ چه کسی رو میشناسید در تاریخ طویل فلسفه که واقعا «عاشق» بوده باشه؟
کدوم فیلسوفی خودش وارد گود شده و بودن در ماجرای عاشقانه رو اونقدر ارزشمند دونسته که در موردش حرف بزنه؟ بدون ترس از اون و بدون فاصلهگیری افراطی.
عاشق بودن و احساساتیگری همیشه منع شده. در تقابل عقل و احساس در دنیای فلاسفه و (بیاید صادق باشیم) دنیای خود ما، عقل همیشه برنده شده و این یعنی تنهایی که بارت در ابتدای کتابش ازش حرف میزنه دو وجه داره، هم فردی و هم اجتماعی. عاشق هیچوقت نمیتونه کامل عشقش رو بیان کنه و عاشق هیچوقت نه در جامعه، نه در سیاست، نه در فرهنگ و نهاد قدرت پذیرفته نمیشه. عاشق و سخنش، سخنیست از فرط تنهایی.
و بارت با این حال مینویسه. هر جا که در ادبیات به ماجرای عاشقانهای برخورده براش حاشیهنویسی کرده. هر فیلسوفی که جرئت کرده و کمی به عشق نزدیک شده بارت پیداش کرده، جملاتش رو خونده و بر اونها شرحی نوشته. هر چند ناقص، هرچند همیشه کمی دور از آنچه دقیقا حس میکنیم، اما با تنها چیزی که اون رو خوب بلد بوده، با کلمات که تنها دستاویز هرانسانیه از عشق حرف زده و با افتخار هم حرف زده. اعادهی حیثیت کرده از عشق و کلاهش رو برای این احساس شگفتانگیز برداشته.
اگر بخوام چیزی از این کتاب برای خودم بردارم همین یک جملهست :«با وجود دشواریهای ماجرای من، با وجود بغضها، تشویشها و تردیدها، با وجود حسرتهایی که در این راه خواهم خورد، من بیوقفه در دل خود بر عشق بهعنوان ارزش آری خواهم گفت.»
برای گفتن از «سخن عاشق»، کتابی شگفتانگیز که برای من شروعکننده و مقدمهی خیلی چیزهای مهمی در زندگیم بود، معالاسف باید از زبان استفاده کنم و چقدر که همیشه زبان ناکافی و الکنه.
چیزی که در چند ماه اخیر یاد گرفتم و چیزی که انگار از بعد خوندن کتاب «حسرت» من هم دیگه بهش باور دارم، ناقص بودن ساحت زبانه. هر مِیلی که از ذهن و احساس به قلمرو زبان میرسه، بخشیش از دست میره. همیشه و در لحظه چیزی در ما هست بیاننشده و تشنه برای دیده شدن. میلی سرکش، که از قضا هیچوقت هم ارضا نمیشه.
لجبازی کردم، به زبان امید واهی داشتم و به درک دیگری. پاکوبان برزمین، اصرار میکردم که من میتونم دیگری رو بشناسم و ببینم در کمال خودش و خودم رو بیان کنم، تا غایت خودم. نمیشه، از دست ما کاری برنمیاد، زبان مثل طلسم زندگی انسانها رو دربرگرفته، راه فراری ازش نیست و در عین حال تنها روزنهی امید و نجاتمونه.
بارت سخن عاشق رو با علم به تمامی اینها مینویسه. پس کتابش رو با این جمله شروع میکنه:«سخن عاشق، امروزه سخنی از فرط تنهاییست» و با این حال مینویسه. چرا؟
چقدر اندیشمند میشناسید که در مورد عشق اندیشهورزی کرده باشن؟ چقدرشون عاشقانه این کار رو انجام دادن؟ چه کسی رو میشناسید در تاریخ طویل فلسفه که واقعا «عاشق» بوده باشه؟
کدوم فیلسوفی خودش وارد گود شده و بودن در ماجرای عاشقانه رو اونقدر ارزشمند دونسته که در موردش حرف بزنه؟ بدون ترس از اون و بدون فاصلهگیری افراطی.
عاشق بودن و احساساتیگری همیشه منع شده. در تقابل عقل و احساس در دنیای فلاسفه و (بیاید صادق باشیم) دنیای خود ما، عقل همیشه برنده شده و این یعنی تنهایی که بارت در ابتدای کتابش ازش حرف میزنه دو وجه داره، هم فردی و هم اجتماعی. عاشق هیچوقت نمیتونه کامل عشقش رو بیان کنه و عاشق هیچوقت نه در جامعه، نه در سیاست، نه در فرهنگ و نهاد قدرت پذیرفته نمیشه. عاشق و سخنش، سخنیست از فرط تنهایی.
و بارت با این حال مینویسه. هر جا که در ادبیات به ماجرای عاشقانهای برخورده براش حاشیهنویسی کرده. هر فیلسوفی که جرئت کرده و کمی به عشق نزدیک شده بارت پیداش کرده، جملاتش رو خونده و بر اونها شرحی نوشته. هر چند ناقص، هرچند همیشه کمی دور از آنچه دقیقا حس میکنیم، اما با تنها چیزی که اون رو خوب بلد بوده، با کلمات که تنها دستاویز هرانسانیه از عشق حرف زده و با افتخار هم حرف زده. اعادهی حیثیت کرده از عشق و کلاهش رو برای این احساس شگفتانگیز برداشته.
اگر بخوام چیزی از این کتاب برای خودم بردارم همین یک جملهست :«با وجود دشواریهای ماجرای من، با وجود بغضها، تشویشها و تردیدها، با وجود حسرتهایی که در این راه خواهم خورد، من بیوقفه در دل خود بر عشق بهعنوان ارزش آری خواهم گفت.»
May 26, 2013
"Le parole non sono mai pazze (tutt'al più sono perverse): è la sintassi che è pazza."
Questo non è un compendio. C'è un po di tutto, pur senza che ci sia tutto.
Talvolta si tende a leggere qualcosa perché si spera nel nostro intimo che possa darci in qualche modo una risposta all' interrogativo impellente di quel momento. E allora ci si appoggia alle parole di qualcun' altro.
Nella maggior parte delle volte nulla è più sbagliato.
E allora dopotutto a che serve?
Qui vorrei chiamare in causa il grande Gabo che secondo me ha dato la risposta più pertinente di tutte:
"I libri descrivono momenti. Non devono per forza dare soluzioni."
Bene Barthes ha descritto questi momenti in maniera perfetta in ogni definizione di questo saggio.
Almeno in una voce di questo libro, o in più di una, sarà possibile rintracciare un momento della propria vita.
Ad esempio (Pezzo rintracciabile alla voce Attesa):
"«Sono innamorato? Sì, poichè aspetto.» L’altro invece non aspetta mai. Talvolta ho voglia di giocare a quello che non aspetta; allora cerco di tenermi occupato, di arrivare in ritardo; ma a questo gioco io perdo sempre: qualunque cosa io faccia, mi ritrovo sempre sfaccendato, esatto, o per meglio dire in anticipo. La fatale identità dell’innamorato non è altro che: io sono quello che aspetta"
Non vorrete mica darmi a bere che almeno per una volta nella vita anche voi non siete rimasti in quello stato che descrive benissimo De Gregori?:
"E Cesare
perduto nella pioggia
sta aspettando da sei ore il suo amore ballerina
E rimane li'
a bagnarsi ancora un po'
e il tram di mezzanotte
se ne va"
C'è da dire inoltre che l' innamorato descritto da Barthes è quello più frequente e vale a dire quello non ricambiato, l' infelice. Werther e il romanticismo non a caso vengono presi in più di una situazione come riferimento.
"Un quadro romantico(il quadro è il naufragio della "Speranza" di Friedrich) raffigura in una luce polare un cumulo di lastre di ghiaccio frantumate; in quello spazio
desolato non c’è nessun uomo, nessun oggetto; ma, proprio per questo, per poco che io
sia in preda alla tristezza amorosa, quel vuoto vuole che mi ci proietti; mi vedo come una
figurina, seduto su uno di quei blocchi, abbandonato là per sempre.
“Ho freddo, - dice l’innamorato - torniamo a casa”, ma non c’è nessuna strada
e la nave è sfasciata.
Esiste un freddo speciale dell’innamorato: la freddolosità del cucciolo (d’uomo, d’animale)che ha bisogno del calore materno."
Ho apprezzato moltissimo la scelta di Barthes di non definire il sesso dell' essere amato definendolo semplicemente "l' altro". A prescindere dal fatto che questo' ultimo fosse omosessuale, mette tutti i tipi d' amore sullo stesso piano, non compiendo discriminazioni di alcun tipo anzi unificando il tutto.
Bisognerebbe davvero che tutti leggessero questo libro a prescindere dal fatto che siano innamorati o meno. Che lo siano o non lo siano mai stati.
Del resto ognuno di noi potrebbe ritrovarsi in qualcosa come questo, ognuno a modo suo, certo (perché ognuno di noi è una tavola di un legno diverso):
“La resistenza del legno varia a seconda del punto in cui si conficca il chiodo: il legno non è isotropo. neanch’io lo sono; ho i miei “punti delicati”. io solo conosco la mappa di questi punti ed è in base ad essa che io guido me stesso, evitando, ricercando questo o quello, conformemente a dei comportamenti esteriormente enigmatici; vorrei che questa mappa di agopuntura morale venisse preventivamente distribuita ai miei nuovi conoscenti (che, del resto, potrebbero utilizzarla anche per farmi soffrire di più).”
Questo non è un compendio. C'è un po di tutto, pur senza che ci sia tutto.
Talvolta si tende a leggere qualcosa perché si spera nel nostro intimo che possa darci in qualche modo una risposta all' interrogativo impellente di quel momento. E allora ci si appoggia alle parole di qualcun' altro.
Nella maggior parte delle volte nulla è più sbagliato.
E allora dopotutto a che serve?
Qui vorrei chiamare in causa il grande Gabo che secondo me ha dato la risposta più pertinente di tutte:
"I libri descrivono momenti. Non devono per forza dare soluzioni."
Bene Barthes ha descritto questi momenti in maniera perfetta in ogni definizione di questo saggio.
Almeno in una voce di questo libro, o in più di una, sarà possibile rintracciare un momento della propria vita.
Ad esempio (Pezzo rintracciabile alla voce Attesa):
"«Sono innamorato? Sì, poichè aspetto.» L’altro invece non aspetta mai. Talvolta ho voglia di giocare a quello che non aspetta; allora cerco di tenermi occupato, di arrivare in ritardo; ma a questo gioco io perdo sempre: qualunque cosa io faccia, mi ritrovo sempre sfaccendato, esatto, o per meglio dire in anticipo. La fatale identità dell’innamorato non è altro che: io sono quello che aspetta"
Non vorrete mica darmi a bere che almeno per una volta nella vita anche voi non siete rimasti in quello stato che descrive benissimo De Gregori?:
"E Cesare
perduto nella pioggia
sta aspettando da sei ore il suo amore ballerina
E rimane li'
a bagnarsi ancora un po'
e il tram di mezzanotte
se ne va"
C'è da dire inoltre che l' innamorato descritto da Barthes è quello più frequente e vale a dire quello non ricambiato, l' infelice. Werther e il romanticismo non a caso vengono presi in più di una situazione come riferimento.
"Un quadro romantico(il quadro è il naufragio della "Speranza" di Friedrich) raffigura in una luce polare un cumulo di lastre di ghiaccio frantumate; in quello spazio
desolato non c’è nessun uomo, nessun oggetto; ma, proprio per questo, per poco che io
sia in preda alla tristezza amorosa, quel vuoto vuole che mi ci proietti; mi vedo come una
figurina, seduto su uno di quei blocchi, abbandonato là per sempre.
“Ho freddo, - dice l’innamorato - torniamo a casa”, ma non c’è nessuna strada
e la nave è sfasciata.
Esiste un freddo speciale dell’innamorato: la freddolosità del cucciolo (d’uomo, d’animale)che ha bisogno del calore materno."
Ho apprezzato moltissimo la scelta di Barthes di non definire il sesso dell' essere amato definendolo semplicemente "l' altro". A prescindere dal fatto che questo' ultimo fosse omosessuale, mette tutti i tipi d' amore sullo stesso piano, non compiendo discriminazioni di alcun tipo anzi unificando il tutto.
Bisognerebbe davvero che tutti leggessero questo libro a prescindere dal fatto che siano innamorati o meno. Che lo siano o non lo siano mai stati.
Del resto ognuno di noi potrebbe ritrovarsi in qualcosa come questo, ognuno a modo suo, certo (perché ognuno di noi è una tavola di un legno diverso):
“La resistenza del legno varia a seconda del punto in cui si conficca il chiodo: il legno non è isotropo. neanch’io lo sono; ho i miei “punti delicati”. io solo conosco la mappa di questi punti ed è in base ad essa che io guido me stesso, evitando, ricercando questo o quello, conformemente a dei comportamenti esteriormente enigmatici; vorrei che questa mappa di agopuntura morale venisse preventivamente distribuita ai miei nuovi conoscenti (che, del resto, potrebbero utilizzarla anche per farmi soffrire di più).”
December 7, 2021
Sull’amore la penso come Proust e come gl’intellettuali un pò snob di cui parla Barthes, che lo considerano una malattia, una specie di raffreddore. Dice: “deve fare il suo corso”. Si può stare anche molto male, ma è molto improbabile che si muoia (salve predisposizioni a complicazioni, rare). Poi, passa.
Questo libro secondo me è un cardine della studio della patologia, che peraltro non definisce come tale (però lo chiama incidente). Dopo averlo letto ogni ammalato si sentirà più tranquillo: i sintomi sono chiari, il decorso anche, le sensazioni più abnormi e terrificanti rientrano in una casistica conclamata. Durata della prognosi non prevedibile. In ogni caso, se avrete la pazienza di non suicidarvi, passerà, sia che ci si ritrovi in una coppia vita natural durante, sia che ci si lasci tra gl’improperi.
A qualcuno forse darà fastidio, ma a me sentirmi nella norma (una volta tanto) mi ha rassicurato. A tratti la lettura mi ha dato la sensazione di trovarmi davanti al “magico”, a qualcuno che ti ha visto e ascoltato in una palla di vetro. E poi è un testo originalissimo anche nella concezione e nella struttura, pieno di stimoli e di sorprese, denso e miracolosamente godibile e coinvolgente.
Utilità pratica per chi è nella fase acuta? Un generico conforto e basta, direi, non di più. Se hai un attacco di starnuti e qualcuno ti dice “hai il raffreddore”, le cose non è che migliorano. Più utile forse nella profilassi. Il protocollo potrebbe essere più o meno questo: prima di innamoravi chiedetele/gli se ha letto il libro. Se si, apertura immediata di una trattativa. Se no, regalino prodromico, settimana di tempo e se ne riparla. A quel punto, visto che si sa cosa sta per accadere, si vede se è possibile concordare un patto di non aggressione e mutuo soccorso. In quel caso, si può decidere di lasciarsi andare, sempre muniti di termometro e fazzoletti e dopo aver giurato solennemente che “la violenza, quella mai!”. In caso contrario, tentare l’unica terapia che ha qualche margine di successo e cioè quella d’urto in fase di incubazione per stroncare il male prima che sia tropo tardi (come si fa, nel caso del raffreddore, con l’aspirina 1000 mg e/o i suffamigi di vino bollente, con conseguente sudatona risolutiva).
Certo, si capisce, sono percorsi tutti e due ad alto rischio di insuccesso, ma il male è quello che è. E comunque ci si può consolare col fatto che dà i suoi vantaggi: le coccole, il letto caldo, nient’altro a cui pensare, qualche brivido, qualche bella allucinazione da accesso febbrile, il piacere di qualche momento di sollievo, le liberatorie esternazioni finali in cui si espellono gli umori superflui prodotti (esattamente, come del caso del raffreddore, appunto - bis).
Non mi piacciono i commenti con citazioni ipertrofiche, ma qui devo fare un’eccezione:
“La catastrofe amorosa s’avvicina forse a ciò che, nel campo psicotico, è stata definita una situazione estrema, la quale è una situazione che il soggetto vive conscio del fatto che essa finirà col distruggerlo irrimediabilmente; l’immagine è ricavata da ciò che avvenne a Dachau. C’è da chiedersi se non sia indecente paragonare la situazione di un soggetto che sta soffrendo le pene d’amore a quella di un deportato che vive nell’universo concentrazionario di Dachau. Può una fra le più inconcepibili atrocità della Storia, essere confrontata a un incidente futile, infantile, sofisticato, oscuro, capitato ad un soggetto che vive una vita comoda e che in definitiva è semplicemente vittima del proprio Immaginario?
Tuttavia, le due situazioni hanno in comune questo: esse sono, alla lettera, due situazioni paniche: entrambe sono senza seguito, senza ritorno: io mi sono talmente trasfuso nell’altro, che, quando esso mi viene a mancare, non riesco a riprendermi, a recuperarmi: sono perduto per sempre.”
Per fortuna, non è vero: è solo un raffreddore. Passerà. Basta avere la pazienza di non suicidarsi (bis).
Questo libro secondo me è un cardine della studio della patologia, che peraltro non definisce come tale (però lo chiama incidente). Dopo averlo letto ogni ammalato si sentirà più tranquillo: i sintomi sono chiari, il decorso anche, le sensazioni più abnormi e terrificanti rientrano in una casistica conclamata. Durata della prognosi non prevedibile. In ogni caso, se avrete la pazienza di non suicidarvi, passerà, sia che ci si ritrovi in una coppia vita natural durante, sia che ci si lasci tra gl’improperi.
A qualcuno forse darà fastidio, ma a me sentirmi nella norma (una volta tanto) mi ha rassicurato. A tratti la lettura mi ha dato la sensazione di trovarmi davanti al “magico”, a qualcuno che ti ha visto e ascoltato in una palla di vetro. E poi è un testo originalissimo anche nella concezione e nella struttura, pieno di stimoli e di sorprese, denso e miracolosamente godibile e coinvolgente.
Utilità pratica per chi è nella fase acuta? Un generico conforto e basta, direi, non di più. Se hai un attacco di starnuti e qualcuno ti dice “hai il raffreddore”, le cose non è che migliorano. Più utile forse nella profilassi. Il protocollo potrebbe essere più o meno questo: prima di innamoravi chiedetele/gli se ha letto il libro. Se si, apertura immediata di una trattativa. Se no, regalino prodromico, settimana di tempo e se ne riparla. A quel punto, visto che si sa cosa sta per accadere, si vede se è possibile concordare un patto di non aggressione e mutuo soccorso. In quel caso, si può decidere di lasciarsi andare, sempre muniti di termometro e fazzoletti e dopo aver giurato solennemente che “la violenza, quella mai!”. In caso contrario, tentare l’unica terapia che ha qualche margine di successo e cioè quella d’urto in fase di incubazione per stroncare il male prima che sia tropo tardi (come si fa, nel caso del raffreddore, con l’aspirina 1000 mg e/o i suffamigi di vino bollente, con conseguente sudatona risolutiva).
Certo, si capisce, sono percorsi tutti e due ad alto rischio di insuccesso, ma il male è quello che è. E comunque ci si può consolare col fatto che dà i suoi vantaggi: le coccole, il letto caldo, nient’altro a cui pensare, qualche brivido, qualche bella allucinazione da accesso febbrile, il piacere di qualche momento di sollievo, le liberatorie esternazioni finali in cui si espellono gli umori superflui prodotti (esattamente, come del caso del raffreddore, appunto - bis).
Non mi piacciono i commenti con citazioni ipertrofiche, ma qui devo fare un’eccezione:
“La catastrofe amorosa s’avvicina forse a ciò che, nel campo psicotico, è stata definita una situazione estrema, la quale è una situazione che il soggetto vive conscio del fatto che essa finirà col distruggerlo irrimediabilmente; l’immagine è ricavata da ciò che avvenne a Dachau. C’è da chiedersi se non sia indecente paragonare la situazione di un soggetto che sta soffrendo le pene d’amore a quella di un deportato che vive nell’universo concentrazionario di Dachau. Può una fra le più inconcepibili atrocità della Storia, essere confrontata a un incidente futile, infantile, sofisticato, oscuro, capitato ad un soggetto che vive una vita comoda e che in definitiva è semplicemente vittima del proprio Immaginario?
Tuttavia, le due situazioni hanno in comune questo: esse sono, alla lettera, due situazioni paniche: entrambe sono senza seguito, senza ritorno: io mi sono talmente trasfuso nell’altro, che, quando esso mi viene a mancare, non riesco a riprendermi, a recuperarmi: sono perduto per sempre.”
Per fortuna, non è vero: è solo un raffreddore. Passerà. Basta avere la pazienza di non suicidarsi (bis).
September 12, 2012
I first read, and fell in love, with Roland Barthes at uni. Christ, I was still a virgin when I swooned over ALD for the first time. Now at the tail-end of a long relationship, the terrible beauty of Barthes' writing is quite effulgent.
I was reminded again of how great a novel (well, anti-novel...) ALD is when Jeffrey Eugenides paid such tender, bittersweet homage to it in 'The Marriage Plot'.
There is a scene where Madeleine is lying in bed reading The Book, eating peanut butter from the jar with a spoon, while it is raining outside ... My God, how romantic is that!
"A moment of affirmation; for a certain time, though a finite one, a deranged interval, something has been successful: I have been fulfilled (all my desires abolished by the plenitude of their satisfaction): fulfillment does exist, and I shall keep on making it return: through all the meanderings of my amorous history, I shall persist in wanting to rediscover ..."
The above quote is from a section called 'In the loving comfort of your arms'. Who needs Oprah Winfrey, as bland as processed Big Mac cheese, when you can have the Holy Emmental (elemental?) Barthes to comfort, distract and chafe you simultaneously?
In the canon of greatest literature about love, ALD is up there with 'Song of Songs' and the 'Kama Sutra'.
A book to live and love by.
I was reminded again of how great a novel (well, anti-novel...) ALD is when Jeffrey Eugenides paid such tender, bittersweet homage to it in 'The Marriage Plot'.
There is a scene where Madeleine is lying in bed reading The Book, eating peanut butter from the jar with a spoon, while it is raining outside ... My God, how romantic is that!
"A moment of affirmation; for a certain time, though a finite one, a deranged interval, something has been successful: I have been fulfilled (all my desires abolished by the plenitude of their satisfaction): fulfillment does exist, and I shall keep on making it return: through all the meanderings of my amorous history, I shall persist in wanting to rediscover ..."
The above quote is from a section called 'In the loving comfort of your arms'. Who needs Oprah Winfrey, as bland as processed Big Mac cheese, when you can have the Holy Emmental (elemental?) Barthes to comfort, distract and chafe you simultaneously?
In the canon of greatest literature about love, ALD is up there with 'Song of Songs' and the 'Kama Sutra'.
A book to live and love by.
Read
June 10, 2015I have literally no idea how to begin to comment on this.
It is the most extraordinary work ... like ... ever. It's kind of an exploration of love ... of the affect of love on the mind ... via language. Or rather it seeks to liberate the meaning of love from the meaning of language about love.
Oh I cannot. I just cannot.
This probably makes it sound weird or inaccessible, but it's playful, expressive, fascinating, true.
Probably the most ... human writings on the subject of love I have ever read. Or at least the crazy, desirous, all-consuming side of it.
Sometimes, love is just someone who makes you a cup of a tea.
It is the most extraordinary work ... like ... ever. It's kind of an exploration of love ... of the affect of love on the mind ... via language. Or rather it seeks to liberate the meaning of love from the meaning of language about love.
Oh I cannot. I just cannot.
This probably makes it sound weird or inaccessible, but it's playful, expressive, fascinating, true.
Probably the most ... human writings on the subject of love I have ever read. Or at least the crazy, desirous, all-consuming side of it.
Sometimes, love is just someone who makes you a cup of a tea.
January 24, 2017
من اسیر این تناقض ام: از یک سو, باور دارم که دیگری را بهتر از هر کسی میشناسم و دانش ام را پیروزمندانه به رخ اش می کشم و از سوی دیگر, اغلب از این واقعیت آشکارا جا میخورم که دیگری نفوذ ناپذیر, سرکش و دست نیافتنی ست.
یاد شعری از مولانا می افتم: کز تناقضهای دل پشتم شکست... بیقرارم بیقرارم بیقرار
عاشق تر باشی بهتر درک میکنی؟ نه, همه ی آنچه عشق و عاشقی از من میخواهد درک این حکمت است که دیگری نشناختنی است.
این کتاب یک قصه ی عاشقانه یا سرگذشت عشق نیست گزیده گویه هاییست از مطالعات نویسنده گانی مثل (از رنج های ورتر جوان/گوته – نیچه – بالزاک- استانداال- کلیات روانکاوی و بسیاری دیگر) و برخی هم از گفتگوهایی که بارت با دوستانش داشته و همینطور زندگی شخصی اش.
یاد شعری از مولانا می افتم: کز تناقضهای دل پشتم شکست... بیقرارم بیقرارم بیقرار
عاشق تر باشی بهتر درک میکنی؟ نه, همه ی آنچه عشق و عاشقی از من میخواهد درک این حکمت است که دیگری نشناختنی است.
این کتاب یک قصه ی عاشقانه یا سرگذشت عشق نیست گزیده گویه هاییست از مطالعات نویسنده گانی مثل (از رنج های ورتر جوان/گوته – نیچه – بالزاک- استانداال- کلیات روانکاوی و بسیاری دیگر) و برخی هم از گفتگوهایی که بارت با دوستانش داشته و همینطور زندگی شخصی اش.
February 16, 2024
Cudowny wielogłos zjawiska metamiłosnego.
August 28, 2012
Questo è un libro speciale.
La malinconia per il lutto d’amore, il momento paradisiaco dei segni sottili e clandestini, la pienezza dell’ abbraccio, l’illusione della Laetitia, il morso della gelosia, le macchinazioni, insomma tutto quello che ti rende oscenamente, meravigliosamente stupido quando sei innamorato ti torna da Goethe, da Sade, da Platone, da Mann, da Freud… e ti sembra che siano le tue parole, quelle che hai detto, quelle che hai taciuto, quelle che non ti sei sentito dire.
E improvvisamente credi che tutti abbiano scritto solo per raccontare di te, come quando in macchina accendi la radio e trasmettono la tua canzone preferita e non te lo vuoi ricordare che è un caso, che la stanno sentendo in mille, perché in quel momento ti sembra di essere il centro del mondo, il destinatario unico di un regalo inatteso, immeritato, incantevole.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eq0EWN...
La malinconia per il lutto d’amore, il momento paradisiaco dei segni sottili e clandestini, la pienezza dell’ abbraccio, l’illusione della Laetitia, il morso della gelosia, le macchinazioni, insomma tutto quello che ti rende oscenamente, meravigliosamente stupido quando sei innamorato ti torna da Goethe, da Sade, da Platone, da Mann, da Freud… e ti sembra che siano le tue parole, quelle che hai detto, quelle che hai taciuto, quelle che non ti sei sentito dire.
E improvvisamente credi che tutti abbiano scritto solo per raccontare di te, come quando in macchina accendi la radio e trasmettono la tua canzone preferita e non te lo vuoi ricordare che è un caso, che la stanno sentendo in mille, perché in quel momento ti sembra di essere il centro del mondo, il destinatario unico di un regalo inatteso, immeritato, incantevole.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eq0EWN...
June 15, 2014
L'amore è come le foglie di lattuga
Una delle preoccupazioni maggiori di Barthes nello scrivere questo libro, è la stessa che ha il lettore nello spiegare cosa ha letto ed evitare qualsiasi fraintendimento sul fatto che non sia un banale libro sull’amore.
Barthes riesce a fugare ogni dubbio a partire dal titolo, io (lettrice) ovviamente devo abbassare il tiro e rifugiarmi in metafore.
Sgombrate la mente e immaginate di essere dal fruttivendolo. Comprate una lattuga. Non una di quelle perfette, asettiche, simmetricissime e pulitissime che si trovano facilmente sui banchi del supermercato, ma una di quelle che vengono direttamente dalla campagna. Sporca di terra, irregolare, coi bordi arricciati in maniera diseguale, e con probabili lumachine a dimora tra le foglie più tenere. Tornate a casa con il vostro ciuffo verde-speranza in braccio, e in vista del pranzo procedete ad un attento lavaggio del vostro piccolo tesoro. È probabile che priviate il cespo delle prime foglie, più brutte e più dure, ma dopo incomincerete a “svestirlo” e a lavare le foglie ad una ad una. Pur mettendole sotto l’acqua corrente, vi accorgerete che per mondarle dalla terra e dai micro moscerini, dovrete armarvi di santa pazienza e seguire il percorso delle venature col dito accompagnando l’acqua negli angoli più nascosti, nelle insenature a ridosso del bordo, allargare le onde più strette, sentire al tatto le increspature più sottili per capire se sono naturali o trattengono ancora qualche briciola di terra. Arrivati alla rosetta centrale, l’aprirete dolcemente ma con fermezza per scovare rimasugli di sporcizia e sfrattare inquilini abusivi. Solo dopo averla guardata per l’ennesima volta, magari persino in controluce, potrete dire che la lattuga non ha più segreti per voi, e decidere su quale secondo immolarla a mo’ di contorno.
Se con un agile balzo della mente (qua vi voglio disinvolti) trasformate la lattuga nell’enunciazione amorosa di un soggetto innamorato qualunque, ecco il lavoro che fa Barthes: tolte le foglie grossolane dei luoghi comuni, sfrondata dagli schemi più prevedibili, passa a una disamina attenta, analitica e impietosa di qualsiasi declinazione possa prendere il discorso amoroso. Dribbla qualsiasi ostacolo dettato dai meccanismi contorti di chiunque sia preso dal vortice della passione, sbugiarda qualsiasi sillogismo, e svela che non c’è nulla di contorto, perché tutto si ripete in modo uguale per tutti, anche se “il soggetto amoroso” è fermamente convinto dell’unicità delle proprie sensazioni.
Se Werther avesse avuto modo di leggere il libro di Barthes, di sicuro non sarebbe finito nel modo che sappiamo, ma piuttosto avrebbe scritto pamphlet umoristici burlandosi delle proprie tragedie sentimentali, una sorta di Woody Allen ante litteram. E si sarebbe consolato del fatto di essere l’unica vittima di cotanto mal d’amore, insieme al resto del genere umano.
Ma del resto, il bello è proprio questo: assumere l’aria del veterano ogni volta che guardiamo gli altri innamorarsi, e poi cadere a nostra volta innamorati e credere di essere soli nella caduta.
C’è un passo di un libro, Nel tempo di mezzo di Fois, che avrebbe potuto agevolmente collocarsi a epigrafe del libro di Barthes:
"Vincenzo cerca le parole. E le parole sono che si tratta di una creatura talmente bella da togliere il respiro, perfetta in tutto, nel sorriso, nei gesti. Michele Angelo lo ascolta senza interrompere, c’è qualcosa di meraviglioso nel cognito che riprende forma; e una tenerezza immensa nella voce di quell’uomo, ragazzo, che ripete esattamente quello che tutti prima di lui hanno detto a proposito della donna di cui si stanno innamorando. Come se il proprio specifico sentimento fosse completamente sconosciuto all’intera umanità. Ma Vincenzo pare non rendersi conto di quanto normale possa essere ciò che racconta come straordinario. Se avesse visto la nonna Mercede in chiesa quando sollevò lo sguardo per osservare quel ragazzone che era suo nonno Michele Angelo, mentre sistemava il turibolo grande a tre metri dal suolo, avrebbe potuto capire fino a che punto l’ostinazione, la coazione a ripetere dentro la quale siamo imprigionati, conti. E fino a che punto conti quella meravigliosa cecità che ci fa sparire ogni alternativa possibile."
Invece nell’epigrafe troviamo questo, e forse è ancora meglio.
“È dunque
Un innamorato
Che parla
E che dice:”
Una delle preoccupazioni maggiori di Barthes nello scrivere questo libro, è la stessa che ha il lettore nello spiegare cosa ha letto ed evitare qualsiasi fraintendimento sul fatto che non sia un banale libro sull’amore.
Barthes riesce a fugare ogni dubbio a partire dal titolo, io (lettrice) ovviamente devo abbassare il tiro e rifugiarmi in metafore.
Sgombrate la mente e immaginate di essere dal fruttivendolo. Comprate una lattuga. Non una di quelle perfette, asettiche, simmetricissime e pulitissime che si trovano facilmente sui banchi del supermercato, ma una di quelle che vengono direttamente dalla campagna. Sporca di terra, irregolare, coi bordi arricciati in maniera diseguale, e con probabili lumachine a dimora tra le foglie più tenere. Tornate a casa con il vostro ciuffo verde-speranza in braccio, e in vista del pranzo procedete ad un attento lavaggio del vostro piccolo tesoro. È probabile che priviate il cespo delle prime foglie, più brutte e più dure, ma dopo incomincerete a “svestirlo” e a lavare le foglie ad una ad una. Pur mettendole sotto l’acqua corrente, vi accorgerete che per mondarle dalla terra e dai micro moscerini, dovrete armarvi di santa pazienza e seguire il percorso delle venature col dito accompagnando l’acqua negli angoli più nascosti, nelle insenature a ridosso del bordo, allargare le onde più strette, sentire al tatto le increspature più sottili per capire se sono naturali o trattengono ancora qualche briciola di terra. Arrivati alla rosetta centrale, l’aprirete dolcemente ma con fermezza per scovare rimasugli di sporcizia e sfrattare inquilini abusivi. Solo dopo averla guardata per l’ennesima volta, magari persino in controluce, potrete dire che la lattuga non ha più segreti per voi, e decidere su quale secondo immolarla a mo’ di contorno.
Se con un agile balzo della mente (qua vi voglio disinvolti) trasformate la lattuga nell’enunciazione amorosa di un soggetto innamorato qualunque, ecco il lavoro che fa Barthes: tolte le foglie grossolane dei luoghi comuni, sfrondata dagli schemi più prevedibili, passa a una disamina attenta, analitica e impietosa di qualsiasi declinazione possa prendere il discorso amoroso. Dribbla qualsiasi ostacolo dettato dai meccanismi contorti di chiunque sia preso dal vortice della passione, sbugiarda qualsiasi sillogismo, e svela che non c’è nulla di contorto, perché tutto si ripete in modo uguale per tutti, anche se “il soggetto amoroso” è fermamente convinto dell’unicità delle proprie sensazioni.
Se Werther avesse avuto modo di leggere il libro di Barthes, di sicuro non sarebbe finito nel modo che sappiamo, ma piuttosto avrebbe scritto pamphlet umoristici burlandosi delle proprie tragedie sentimentali, una sorta di Woody Allen ante litteram. E si sarebbe consolato del fatto di essere l’unica vittima di cotanto mal d’amore, insieme al resto del genere umano.
Ma del resto, il bello è proprio questo: assumere l’aria del veterano ogni volta che guardiamo gli altri innamorarsi, e poi cadere a nostra volta innamorati e credere di essere soli nella caduta.
C’è un passo di un libro, Nel tempo di mezzo di Fois, che avrebbe potuto agevolmente collocarsi a epigrafe del libro di Barthes:
"Vincenzo cerca le parole. E le parole sono che si tratta di una creatura talmente bella da togliere il respiro, perfetta in tutto, nel sorriso, nei gesti. Michele Angelo lo ascolta senza interrompere, c’è qualcosa di meraviglioso nel cognito che riprende forma; e una tenerezza immensa nella voce di quell’uomo, ragazzo, che ripete esattamente quello che tutti prima di lui hanno detto a proposito della donna di cui si stanno innamorando. Come se il proprio specifico sentimento fosse completamente sconosciuto all’intera umanità. Ma Vincenzo pare non rendersi conto di quanto normale possa essere ciò che racconta come straordinario. Se avesse visto la nonna Mercede in chiesa quando sollevò lo sguardo per osservare quel ragazzone che era suo nonno Michele Angelo, mentre sistemava il turibolo grande a tre metri dal suolo, avrebbe potuto capire fino a che punto l’ostinazione, la coazione a ripetere dentro la quale siamo imprigionati, conti. E fino a che punto conti quella meravigliosa cecità che ci fa sparire ogni alternativa possibile."
Invece nell’epigrafe troviamo questo, e forse è ancora meglio.
“È dunque
Un innamorato
Che parla
E che dice:”
March 5, 2013
Originally posted here.
Admittedly, this is the kind of book that I will quickly chuck for its verbosity. I’ve always thought books like this – those that use hemorrhagic and florid words – were written more for the purpose of exhibiting the author’s unparalleled vocabulary more than anything. But for some reason, I hung on to this one. I stayed with it, and it stayed with me. Willingly.
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.
These fragments are the marriage of love and theory – love theorized. Barthes’ brilliance is beyond cavil. I should have picked it up after Jeffrey Eugenides paid tribute to it through Madeleine in The Marriage Plot , and why I didn’t now escapes me.
Barthes assigns names to people, places and things which he makes use of throughout the book. “The other” or the "amorous subject" is the loved one, the subject of the speaker’s affections. “Amorous desire” is the feeling of love from speaker to “the other.” The speaker is alternately male and female. And while Barthes cites references constantly, it won’t matter that you haven’t a clue what it is – who the hell is Goethe? – focus on the text, on the fragments, and it will make perfect sense.
How does a love end?-- Then it does end? To tell the truth, no one--except for the others-- ever knows anything about it; a kind of innocence conceals the end of this thing conceived, asserted, lived according to eternity. Whatever the loved being becomes, whether he vanishes or moves into the realm of Friendship, in any case I never see him disappear; the love which is over and done with passes into another world like a ship into space, lights no longer winking: the loved being once echoed loudly, now that being is entirely without resonance (the other never disappears when and how we expect). This phenomenon results from a constraint in the lover's discourse: I myself cannot (as an enamored subject) construct my love story to the end: I am its poet (its bard) only for the beginning; the end, like my own death, belongs to others; it is up to them to write the fiction, the external, mythic narrative.
If you’ve read the relatively recent The Lover’s Dictionary by David Levithan, you will see the similarity in structure. Whether you appreciated The Lover’s Dictionary or not is immaterial, however, because Barthes’ classic masterpiece is a far, far cry from Levithan’s wordplay. Structurally, they both use fragments, of words or phrases explained, but A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments is more meaty and substantial. Reading it requires utmost concentration--you need to open your mind and your heart in order for it to penetrate. Only then will it enthrall you... captivate you.
December 30, 2007
a lengthy set of scenarios evidencing our inability to speak the full truth of our loves as a result of the drive's inevitable detours through the defiles of the signifier. i have no idea why so many people find it erotic or expressive of their most intimate amorous sentiments. if anything, the book strikes a poignant note insofar as it amasses example after example of how the imaginary (our desires) and the symbolic (our words and concepts) inevitably fail to match one another. it occurs to me after reading various other reviews, that people should spend far less time projecting their fantasies on to authors and titles, and far more time reading books with the same care that went into writing them.
December 28, 2015
این راست نیست که هرچه عاشقتر باشی بهتر درک میکنی. همهی آنچه عشق و عاشقی از من میخواهد فقط درکِ این حکمت است: دیگــــــــــــــری نشنــــــــــــــاختنی اســــــــــــــت؛
ماتیِ او پردهی ابهامی به روی یک راز نیست، بل گواهی است که در آن بازیِ بود و نمود هیچجایی ندارد. پس من در مسرتِ عشق ورزیدن به یک ناشناس غرق میشوم، کسی که تا ابد ناشناس خواهد ماند. سِیری عارفانه: من آنچه را نمیشناسم میشناسم...
ماتیِ او پردهی ابهامی به روی یک راز نیست، بل گواهی است که در آن بازیِ بود و نمود هیچجایی ندارد. پس من در مسرتِ عشق ورزیدن به یک ناشناس غرق میشوم، کسی که تا ابد ناشناس خواهد ماند. سِیری عارفانه: من آنچه را نمیشناسم میشناسم...
April 12, 2021
Έβαλα τρία αστέρια...Ντροπή μου το ξέρω. Συνήθως είμαι κουβαρντού.... αλλά με κούρασε. Από κάποια στιγμή κι έπειτα άρχισα να το διαβάζω διαγώνια.
Κάνει φιλότιμες προσπάθειες ο Μπαρτ να εξηγήσει τον έρωτα αλλά μάλλον δεν είμαι καλή μαθήτρια. Υπάρχουν κάποιες πολύ καλές στιγμές βέβαια, όμως ως εκεί. Ίσως ο έρωτας να πρέπει να εξηγηθεί πιο... ερωτικά!
Κάνει φιλότιμες προσπάθειες ο Μπαρτ να εξηγήσει τον έρωτα αλλά μάλλον δεν είμαι καλή μαθήτρια. Υπάρχουν κάποιες πολύ καλές στιγμές βέβαια, όμως ως εκεί. Ίσως ο έρωτας να πρέπει να εξηγηθεί πιο... ερωτικά!
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November 10, 2013I had one friend in particular-- I'm sure most of us have-- who, somewhere around his fifth drink, was vulnerable to going into the "why don't girls liiiiiiike me?" bitchfest, and, if interested in someone, "why doesn't (X) liiiiiike me as much as I liiiiiiike her?"
"Well, sir," I would have said had I read this book by then. "Roland might be a good guy for you to talk to. He'll tell you that if you're the sort of person who prevaricates over things and worries about the meanings of their words, you'll have that same conversation with yourself when you're alone."
That friend is more of a romantic than me, and so is Barthes. And being a responsible, emotionally honest, stable, faithful significant other is something I'm really not very good at. I've listened to both of these romantic souls, and incidentally primarily listened to both of them while perched on barstools. Neither of them will make me a better lover.
But just like that same friend has my back for sure, Roland Barthes is someone I like to listen to, even when he's a man old enough to be my father who still compares himself to Werther.
"Well, sir," I would have said had I read this book by then. "Roland might be a good guy for you to talk to. He'll tell you that if you're the sort of person who prevaricates over things and worries about the meanings of their words, you'll have that same conversation with yourself when you're alone."
That friend is more of a romantic than me, and so is Barthes. And being a responsible, emotionally honest, stable, faithful significant other is something I'm really not very good at. I've listened to both of these romantic souls, and incidentally primarily listened to both of them while perched on barstools. Neither of them will make me a better lover.
But just like that same friend has my back for sure, Roland Barthes is someone I like to listen to, even when he's a man old enough to be my father who still compares himself to Werther.
Want to read
August 6, 2016
نمایش برگرد مرا ببین بر اساس این کتاب از رولان بارت، تا 5 شهریور هر شب ساعت 9 در خانه وارطان (خانه گفتمان شهر و معماری) به روی صحنه می رود. این اجرا ترکیبی از ویدئو، هنرهای تجسمی، چیدمان صوتی و نمایش است. آقای رضا کیانیان هم بعنوان راوی در این نمایش-چیدمان نقش آفرینی می کنند
October 7, 2015
I had never read anything by Barthes, Maybe this is not the best example, I have more recommendations to look for now, but I love the fact that he wrote a book like this.
December 10, 2024
Annotating the bleep out of this and Barthes’ definition of getting the ick helped me get over my breakup more than anything else haha it’s a real [language] lover’s bible!
November 27, 2025
C'est pas un livre qu'on peut vraiment aimer, c'est un manuel pour pas se suicider des que l'amour est pas réciproque.
February 12, 2023
Este es un libro como bien lo dice su título de fragmentos sobre el amor y las relaciones amorosas y todo lo que ello implica. No es un libro que profundice ni que vaya a convertirse en un libro de cabecera (como opinan muchos), por lo menos no para mí. Pero tiene algunos fragmentos interesantes.
Sobre el deseo:
✍️Encuentro en mi vida millones de cuerpos; de esos millones puedo desear centenares; pero de esos centenares, no amo sino a uno. El otro del que estoy enamorado me designa la especificidad de mi deseo. (...) Han Sido necesarias muchas casualidades, muchas coincidencias sorprendentes ( y tal vez muchas búsquedas), para que encuentre la Imagen que, entre mil, conviene a mi deseo.
Aquí va otra sobre los celos:
✍️Cómo celoso sufro cuatro veces: porque estoy celoso, porque me reprocho el estarlo, porque temo que mis celos hieran al otro, porque me dejo someter a una nadería: sufro por ser excluido, por ser agresivo, por ser loco y por ser ordinario.
⚠️ Una cosa a tener en cuenta: al que no le guste que le destripen las tramas, este autor se despacha bastante a gusto con la novela a modo de análisis, de "Las penas del joven Werther" de Goethe.
Sobre el deseo:
✍️Encuentro en mi vida millones de cuerpos; de esos millones puedo desear centenares; pero de esos centenares, no amo sino a uno. El otro del que estoy enamorado me designa la especificidad de mi deseo. (...) Han Sido necesarias muchas casualidades, muchas coincidencias sorprendentes ( y tal vez muchas búsquedas), para que encuentre la Imagen que, entre mil, conviene a mi deseo.
Aquí va otra sobre los celos:
✍️Cómo celoso sufro cuatro veces: porque estoy celoso, porque me reprocho el estarlo, porque temo que mis celos hieran al otro, porque me dejo someter a una nadería: sufro por ser excluido, por ser agresivo, por ser loco y por ser ordinario.
⚠️ Una cosa a tener en cuenta: al que no le guste que le destripen las tramas, este autor se despacha bastante a gusto con la novela a modo de análisis, de "Las penas del joven Werther" de Goethe.
Want to read
January 22, 2021I used to be a lunatic from the gracious days
I used to feel woebegone and so restless nights
My aching heart would bleed for you to see
Oh, but now
I don't find myself bouncing home
Whistling buttonhole tunes to make me cry
No more I love you's
The language is leaving me
No more I love you's
Changes are shifting
Outside the words
The lover speaks about the monsters
I used to have demons in my room at night
Desire, despair, desire
So many monsters
Oh, but now
I don't find myself bouncing around
Whistling my conscience to make me cry
No more I love you's
The language is leaving me
No more I love you's
The language is leaving me in silence
No more I love you's
Changes are shifting
Outside the words
𝄞 ♫ ♪
I used to feel woebegone and so restless nights
My aching heart would bleed for you to see
Oh, but now
I don't find myself bouncing home
Whistling buttonhole tunes to make me cry
No more I love you's
The language is leaving me
No more I love you's
Changes are shifting
Outside the words
The lover speaks about the monsters
I used to have demons in my room at night
Desire, despair, desire
So many monsters
Oh, but now
I don't find myself bouncing around
Whistling my conscience to make me cry
No more I love you's
The language is leaving me
No more I love you's
The language is leaving me in silence
No more I love you's
Changes are shifting
Outside the words
𝄞 ♫ ♪
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