Roland Barthes

A Lover’s Discourse, at its 1978 publication, was revolutionary: Roland Barthes made unprecedented use of the tools of structuralism to explore the whimsical phenomenon of love. Rich with references ranging from Goethe’s Werther to Winnicott, from Plato to Proust, from Baudelaire to Schubert, A Lover’s Discourse artfully draws a portrait in which every reader will find echoes of themselves.

Fragments

A Lover's Discourse

Ghee

Dis-cursus — originally the action of running here and there, comings and goings, measures taken, “plots and plans": the lover, in fact, cannot keep his mind from racing, taking new measures and plotting against himself. His discourse exists only in outbursts of language, which occur at the whim of trivial, of aleatory circumstances.

… if the subject awaits the loved object at a rendezvous, a sentence-aria keeps running through his head: All the same, it's not fair have. .."; "he/she could have . "; "he/she knows perfectly well ": knows what? It doesn't matter, the figure "Waiting" is already formed. Such sentences are matrices of figures precisely because they remain suspended: they utter the affect, then break off, their role is filled. 

an always present I is constituted only by confrontation with an always absent you. 

Quite frequently, it is by language that the other is altered; the other speaks a different word, and I hear rumbling menacingly a whole otherworld, which is the world of the other.

arravela cruz

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.

A Lover's Discourse quotes

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