* (restored)
‘Roland Barthes envied the novel. And he approached his work through what he calls the novelistic, which is writing essays as if they were novels. And I see in his work an incredible over- intellectualizing. This is kind of obvious. It’s his temperament and it’s his mandate. He makes a list of things … he calls them anamneses, moments of narrative or visual interest that he says have no meaning. He just lists them, three pages of them, and they have incredible meaning. Each of them is luminous and speaks volumes. And his immediate dismissal of their possible meaning is like a denial that there’s an unconscious, a denial that he has an unconscious or that he might be able to wander with one of them in an unscripted direction.’ — Wayne Koestenbaum
‘The text which the lover weaves in Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse does not have narrative or purpose but becomes a ‘brazier of meaning’ as the ambiguous signs of the loved one’s behaviour are interpreted. Such behaviour is ‘scriptible’ — is rewritten by the lover as he reads them, just as we rewrite a text in reading it.’ — textetc.com
‘What Barthes has been writing since The Pleasure of the Text (1973) is in part a kind of rearguard defence against those of his more earnest disciples (the Nouvelle Critique) who erected his brilliant but wayward ideas into full-blown “structuralist” theory. Texts are no longer to be mulled over, pegged out and analyzed according to some abstract (or “meta-linguistic”) scheme of approach. Rather, they offer themselves to the reader as a site of intimate, teasing rapportswhich he can only respond to by bringing his entire sensibility-erotic as well as intellectual-into play. A Lover’s Discourse can be read in a great variety of ways, depending on whether one looks in it for oblique signs and remnants of Barthes’s theoretical interests (still present, though muted), or for the style of offbeat self-communing which has lately come to occupy more of his thought. About one thing the text is clear enough. It represents the choice of a consciously self-dramatising method, the drift of which “renounces examples and rests on the single action of a primary language (no meta-language)”. In other words, the text is an utterance-a piece of first-person love talk-subtly interwoven with themes from Barthes’ reading, his intellectual friendships and passages of thought, but in the end coming down to that encounter with his own desires and image-repertoire.’ — PN Review
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Gallery
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Further
‘Essaying Two Lovers’ Discourses’
‘Significant Loss: Roland Barthes’s final books’
‘Notes on A Lover’s Discourse’
A Lover’s Discourse @ tumblr
‘Foucault: A Lover’s Discourse About Madness and the Media’
‘Absence, Desire, and Love in John Donne and Roland Barthes’
‘another lover’s discourse’
‘An Unexpected Return: Barthes’s Lectures at the Collège de France’
‘The Indirect Language of Love: Creole Fragments of a Lover’s Discourse‘
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Expo Roland Barthes @ Centre Pompidou 2002
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Book
Roland Barthes A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments
Hill and Wang
‘Roland Barthes’s most popular and unusual performance as a writer is A Lover’s Discourse, a writing out of the discourse of love. This language—primarily the complaints and reflections of the lover when alone, not exchanges of a lover with his or her partner—is unfashionable. Thought it is spoken by millions of people, diffused in our popular romances and television programs as well as in serious literature, there is no institution that explores, maintains, modifies, judges, repeats, and otherwise assumes responsibility for this discourse . . . Writing out the figures of a neglected discourse, Barthes surprises us in A Lover’s Discourse by making love, in its most absurd and sentimental forms, an object of interest.’ — Jonathan Culler
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Excerpts
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).
I am therefore alarmed by the other’s fatigue: it is the cruelest of all rival objects. How to combat exhaustion? I can see that the other, exhausted, tears of a fragment of this fatigue in order to give it to me. But what am I to do with this bundle of fatigue set down before me? What does this gift mean? Leave me alone? Take care of me? No one answers, for what is given is precisely what does not answer.
Besides intercourse (when the Image-repertoire goes to the devil), there is that other embrace, which is a motionless cradling: we are enchanted, bewitched: we are in the realm of sleep, without sleeping; we are within the voluptous infantilism of sleepiness: this is the moment for telling stories, the moment of the voice which takes me, siderates me, this is the return to the mother (“in the loving calm of your arms,” says a poem set to music by Duparc). In this companionable incest, everything is suspended: time, law, prohibition: nothing is exhausted, nothing is wanted: all desires are abolished, for they seem definitively fulfilled.
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.)
Any episode of language which stages the absence of the loved object — whatever its cause and its duration — and which tends to transform this absence into an ordeal of abandonment. Then, too, on the telephone the other is always in a situation of departure; the other departs twice over, by voice and by silence: whose turn is it to speak? We fall silent in unison: the crowding of two voids. “I’m going to leave you”, the voice on the telephone says each second.
The amorous gift is sought out, selected, and purchased in the greatest excitement—the kind of excitement which seems to be of the order of orgasm. Strenuously I calculate whether this object will give pleasure, whether it will disappoint, or whether, on the contrary, seeming too “important,” it will in and of itself betray the delirium—or the snare in which I am caught. The amorous gift is a solemn one; swept away by the devouring metonymy which governs the life of the imagination, I transfer myself inside it altogether. By this object, I give you my All, I touch you with my phallus; it is for this reason that I am mad with excitement, that I rush from shop to shop, stubbornly tracking down the “right” fetish, the brilliant, successful fetish which will perfectly suit your desire.
The amorous subject, according to one contingency or another, feels swept away by the fear of a danger, an injury, an abandonment, a revulsion — a sentiment he expresses under the name of anxiety
Absence can exist only as a consequence of the other: it is the other who leaves, it is I who remain. The other is in a state of perpetual departure, of journeying; the other is by vocation, migrant, fugitive. I — I who love, by converse vocation, am sedentary, motionless, at hand, in expectation, nailed to the spot, in suspense — like a package in some forgotten corner of a railway station. Amorous absence functions in a single direction, expressed by the one who stays, never by the one who leaves: an always present I is constituted only by confrontation with an always absent you: to speak this absence is from the start to propose that the subject’s place and the other’s place cannot permute. It is to say: “I am loved less than I love.” Historically, the discourse of absence is carried on by the woman: Woman is sedentary, Man hunts, journeys; woman is faithful (she waits), man is fickle (he sails away, he cruises).
A deliberative figure: the amorous subject wonders, not whether he should declare his love to the loved being (this is not a figure of avowal), but to what degree he should conceal the turbulences of his passion: his desires, his distresses; in short, his excesses (in Racinian langauges: his fureur).
As a jealous man, I suffer four times over: because I am jealous, because I blame myself for being so, because I fear that my jealousy will wound the other, because I allow myself to be subject to a banality: I suffer from being excluded, from being aggressive, from being crazy, and from being common.
‘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.
Despite the difficulties of my story, despite discomforts, doubts, despairs, despite impulses to be done with it, I unceasingly affirm love, within myself, as a value. Though I listen to all the arguments which the most divergent systems employ to demystify, to limit, to erase, in short to depreciate love, I persist: “I know, I know, but all the same…” I refer the devaluations of a lover to a kind of obscurantist ethic, to a let’s-pretend realism, against which I erect the realism of value: I counter whatever “doesn’t work” in love with the affirmation of what is worthwhile.
To reduce his wretchedness, the subject pins his hope on a method of control which permits him to circumscribe the pleasures afforded by the amorous relation: on the one hand, to keep these pleasures, to take full advantage of them, and on the other hand, to place within a parenthesis of the unthinkable those broad depressive zones which separate such pleasures: “to forget” the loved being outside of the pleasures that being bestows.
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.
My anxieties as to behavior are futile, ever more so, to infinity. If the other, incidentally or negligently, gives the telephone number of a place where he or she can be reached at certain times, I immediately grow baffled: should I telephone or shouldn’t I? (It would do no good to tell me that I can telephone – that is the objective, reasonable meaning of the message – for it is precisely this permission I don’t know how to handle.) What is futile is what apparently has and will have no consequence. But for me, an amorous subject, everything which is new, everything which disturbs, is received not as a fact but in the aspect of a sign which must be interpreted. From the lover’s point of view, the fact becomes consequential because it is immediately transformed into a sign: it is the sign, not the fact, which is consequential (by its aura). If the other has given me this new telephone number, what was that the sign of? Was it an invitation to telephone right away, for the pleasure of the call, or only should the occasion arise, out of necessity? My answer itself will be a sign, which the other will inevitably interpret, thereby releasing, between us, a tumultuous maneuvering of images. Everything signifies: by this proposition, I entrap myself, I bind myself in calculations, I keep myself from enjoyment.
Sometimes, by dint of deliberating about “nothing” (as the world sees it), I exhaust myself; then I try, in reaction, to return — like a drowning man who stamps on the floor of the sea — to a spontaneous decision (spontaneity: the great dream: paradise, power, delight): go on, telephone, since you want to! But such recourse is futile: amorous time does not permit the subject to align impulse and action, to make them coincide: I am not the man of mere “acting out” — my madness is tempered, it is not seen; it is right away that I fear consequences, any consequence: it is my fear — my deliberation — which is “spontaneous.
It occasionally seems to the amorous subject that he is possessed by a demon of language which impels himto injure himself and to expel himself — according to Goethe’s expression — from the paradise which at other moments the amorous relation constitutes for him.
Tonight I came back to the hotel alone; the other has decided to return later on. The anxieties are already here, like the poison already prepared (jealousy, abandonment, restlessness); they merely wait for a little time to pass in order to be able to declare themselves with some propriety. I pick up a book and take a sleeping pill, “calmly.” The silence of this huge hotel is echoing, indifferent, idiotic (faint murmur of draining bathtubs); the furniture and the lamps are stupid; nothing friendly that might warm (“I’m cold, let’s go back to Paris). Anxiety mounts; I observe its progress, like Socrates chatting (as I am reading) and feeling the cold of the hemlock rising in his body; I hear it identify itself moving up, like an inexorable figure, against the background of the things that are here.
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*
p.s. Hey. ** Sebastian 🦠, Hey! I’m so pleased you snuck inside. Or maybe even not snuck. My festive season was very lowkey and not especially festive other than the decorated outdoors, but that was fine with me. Theoretically, that volunteering thing sounds quite nice. A good bookstore is better than a spa. No, I don’t know St Bride’s School or Aristasia, but of course I’m very interested. I’ll proceed to their realm, thanks! Let me pass along your tip. Everyone, Seb has found a possible way to circumvent the Cloudflare obnoxiousness. Here he is: ‘OKAY. if anyone else is having the “blog thinks you’re a robot” issue, i think i figured out how to beat it. i changed the name i wrote down in my comment, switched to mobile data & used a proxy app called UPX. from the looks of things it’s worked.’ ** Steeqhen, Cool if the comments were like coffee without the liquid. I wonder if that class will have you read Roussel’s ‘Travels in Africa’, a great book where he traveled through Africa and wrote about it without ever leaving his seat on a train. Yeah, maybe your hand will relax a bit once bit gets used to being the platform for a pen? Those projects you have going on sound really exciting to a one. Very fiery, very cool. ** Charalampos, The main book on Corll I read was ‘The Man with the Candy’, but there’ve been others since then are probably more researched. I think ‘ Emilia Perez’ is supposed to be a little ways off the mainstream, but it doesn’t sound it’s all that far off. ** James Bennett, Hi, James. I do try to give people the benefit of the doubt, for sure, and try to rely on my instincts, but I’ve certainly been bamboozled. I don’t know if you know about the whole JT Leroy thing, but there’s a big example of me trusting a voice on the phone who turned to be a fraud and sadist. So I try to be more careful now. But, yeah, I’m not a suspicious person, for better or worse. Yet another reason to steer extremely clear of ‘Nosferatu’, thank you. ** Misanthrope, Cool re: Your Welch liking. The first two thirds or so of ‘A Voice Through a Cloud’ are incredible, but then he was dying while writing the latter parts of the book, and it kind of vagues out. But it’s a great novel anyway. It’s, what, 3 degrees centigrade here, so standard wintery. ** jay, I would be curious to see a video of a macro/micro couple having whatever they think is sex because I can not imagine how they pull that fantasy off in 3D/real life without it just seeming like a ridiculous comedy, but I assume they must have curiously attuned powers of perception. Yeah, there are def. very interesting indie and sub-indie games being made. I haven’t seen anything quite as psychedelic as those 90s ones though. The ones I’ve seen are very cool but also very narrative centric. Nice. Share a set report once you get into the filming or even rehearsals if you feel like it. I’m curious, and I also miss being in the midst of shooting a film. ** _Black_Acrylic, I thought so too, and I don’t even know the UK very well. I’ll see if I can find any Herefordshire escorts. It’s a rare town in the UK that doesn’t seem to have at least one or alternately one slave. ** James, Wow, I should reboot the escorts post and insert your commentary. I should, but it’s too much grunt work, and the blog has no reverse mode. Anyway, that was enlightening and fun to pore over. Thank you for spilling. Yeah, people hear the word Oxford and they think it’s a pinnacle that all aspiring students must have as their Mount Olympus. But I have friends who go to Oxford, and they do almost nothing but complain about it and how overhyped it is. I say your rejection is tantamount to freeing you. No, I can’t say I’m particularly into the Bard. I mean, dude was the genius everyone says. I remember when I was in writing workshops in college, and there were always these aspiring writers who would read Shakespeare and then give up because they thought they’d never be as great as him. Fuck that shit. ** Steve, No, my interest in sigils was ‘Guide’-specific only. ‘Memphis rap sigil’: no, never heard of that, but I think I need to investigate. Nice. Yes, I’m about to be on the Aristasia hunt myself. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Yes, it’s really good to have taken that big step. I know when and where ‘Room Temperature’ will premiere, but I’m not allowed to say anything yet until it’s officially announced. Early spring. Given all the demands on love, no wonder he’s that tense. Slapping a piece of duct tape over [love’s] tiny, juicy, braying lips is something I will never forget, G. ** Lucas, Happy Escort Day to you! Yes, rest up today. We need you blasting your way forward. I’m fine, just pretty stressed because I have to gather a whole bunch of things for the visa application today, and … ugh. The story sounds exciting. Yours, I mean. It’s awesome to start working in a new voice. The epistolary is actually a very interesting to place to play hide and seek with the reader. You can work with and inside the whole ‘trustworthy’ aspect. Yeah, go for it. That’s my cheerleader’s advice for the day. And feel much better! ** Cletus, I’ve been wanting to read Nick Zedd’s autobiography. I knew him a little. I interviewed him once, and, boy, was he an unforthcoming kind of guy. With Nick, there was the actual backlash and then there was the backlash he only imagined was occurring. He had a pretty string paranoid streak. ** HaRpEr, That’s always a question for me: are they cathartic sincerely, or is the heavy revealing a strategy. Obviously, it depends, I guess. ‘Tril-ogy Comp’ is great. ‘I-Be AREA’ might be my favorite of his. Among his earlier stuff, ‘A Family Finds Entertainment’ is amazing. Oh, haha, that interview. It was total fiction. Stewart Home, the interviewer and an excellent writer, did interview me, but I think he must’ve found me not interesting enough, so he just made that all up. I didn’t know until it was published, and people do still ask me about my ‘wild period’ epitomised by that interview, but, no, not a true word there. ‘Three Poems’, so great! Probably my favorite Ashbery, and that’s saying something. ** Justin D, Yeah, ‘Myst’ was, like, 95% atmosphere. So nice. The sequel, ‘Riven’, is maybe even better, I think. But the ones after that aren’t. That ‘two adjacent marshmallows’ is so good right? I actually wrote that down thinking maybe I’ll steal it for something. ** Dan Carroll, Hi, Dan! Oh, shit, I hope the possible job wasn’t thwarted, assuming that you want it. I’m thinking the puppet thematic will survive in the new film, although Zac has to agree, but it’s pretty good, I have to say. As I’ve said before, my grandma was a taxidermist, and there were taxidermy animals everywhere in my house. If we were friends back then, you would have avoided my house like the plague. Big up! ** PL, Hi! HNY to you! Well, you got inside so hopefully the curse is lifted. Sorry about the email. I’m really, really behind. The short you’re doing sounds really interesting. I’m more than happy to talk with you about it. How would we do that? Capote: He’s certainly a beautiful writer. I never got totally swept in by his work, but I don’t remember why. I remember really liking a short story by him called ‘Hand Carved Coffins’. I haven’t seen ‘Red Rooms’, but it’s on my to-watch list. The others I know, and, yes, like. Nice viewing. I’m happy to get to talk with you again! ** Joe, Hi! Thanks. There are lots of obstacles remaining, but we’re starting to tick them off or at least making an effort to. ‘Infinite Jest’: It’s been years since I read it, but I think David was one of the most genius sentence writers in the English language, so there was that thrill. I remember really admiring how it was structured and how it went in so many directions and used so many different tempos while always proceeding forward. So there are two things. As far as finishing it … I’m a person who often doesn’t finish reading novels even when I think they’re great. I’ll read far enough to understand what the novel is doing and learn what I think I can learn from the technique of how it’s written and feel like I’ve gotten all the excitement I’m going to get from it, and then I’ll stop reading because I don’t care very much about the narrative aspect or how the writer chooses to conclude the narrative (or I’ll just skip forward and read the ending if I am curious as to how the narrative pans out), basically. I have no interest in seeing ‘Queer’. I haven’t liked Luca Guadagnino’s films at all. I think they’re very bourgeois, and I feel like I can imagine how he has fancified and stylised and prettified that novel without having to sit through it. But I hated Cronenberg’s ‘Naked Lunch’. I don’t know, I think Burroughs isn’t a writer who can survive the transition from prose to visuals very well, or based on the attempts so far. I don’t know. I could very easily be wrong. ** Tyler Ookami, I know of that Hideshi Hino series, but I’ve never watched them. Huh, interesting, I’ll see if I can find them on youtube. Thanks a lot! ** Right. I have restored the spotlight that once fell on this great Roland Barthes book so you can see it (again?) in a spotlight’s light if that prospect interests you. See you tomorrow.
Now available in North America 