A Lover's Discourse

"A man who wants the truth is never answered save in strong, highly colored images, which nonetheless turn ambiguous, indecisive, once he tries to transform them into signs: as in any manticism, the consulting lover must make his own truth." [215]


"... there is no other object in the amorous world. It is a world sensuously impoverished, abstract, erased, canceled out; my gaze passes through things without acknowledging their seduction ... In the code of the Japanese haiku, there must always be a word which refers back to the time of day and of the year; this is the kigo, the season-word. Amorous notation retains the kigo, that faint allusion to the rain, to the evening, to the light, to everything that envelops, diffuses." [174]


"It is not true that the more you love, the better you understand; all that the action of love obtains from me is merely this wisdom: that the other is not to be known; his opacity is not the screen around a secret, but, instead, a kind of evidence in which the game of reality and appearance is done away with." [135]


"... this voice, when it reaches me, when it is here, while it (with great difficulty) survives, is a voice I never entirely recognize; as if it emerged from under a mask (thus we are told that the masks used in Greek tragedy had a magical function: to give the voice a chthonic origin, to distort, to alienate the voice, to make it come from somewhere under the earth)." [115]


"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." [112]


"Yet, within this infantile embrace, the genital unfailingly appears; it cuts off the diffuse sensuality of the incestuous embrace; the logic of desire begins to function, the will-to-possess returns, the adult is superimposed upon the child. I am then two subjects at once: I want maternity and genitality. (The lover might be defined as a child getting an erection: such was the young Eros.)" [104]


"The 'perpetual mutability' (in inconstantia constans) which animates me, far from squeezing all those I encounter into the same functional type (not to answer my demand), violently dislocates their false community: errantry does not align -- it produces iridescence: what results is the nuance. Thus I move on, to the end of the tapestry, from one nuance to the next (the nuance is the last state of a color which can be named; the nuance is the Intractable)." [103]


"The amorous catastrophe may be close to what has been called, in the psychotic domain, an extreme situation, "a situation experience by the subject as irremediably bound to destroy him"; the image is drawn from what occurred at Dachau." [48]


"Waiting is an enchantment: I have received orders not to move. Waiting for a telephone call is thereby woven out of tiny unavowable interdictions to infinity: I forbid myself to the leave the room, to go to the toilet, even to telephone (to keep the line from being busy) ..." [38]


"Throughout any love life, figures occur to the lover without any order, for on each occasion they depend on an (internal or external) accident ... No logic links the figures, determines their contiguity: the figures are non-syntagmatic, non-narrative; they are Erinyes; they stir, collide, subside, return, vanish with no more order than the flight of mosquitoes." [7]


"It is said that words alone have specific uses, not sentences; but underneath each figure lies a sentence, frequently an unknown (unconscious?) one, which has its use in the signifying economy of the amorous subject. This matrix-sentence (here merely postulated) is not a "saturated" one, not a completed message. Its active principle is not what it says but what it articulates: by and large, it is only a "syntactical aria", a "mode of construction"." [5]


A Lover's Discourse
Roland Barthes