#barthes #roland Barthes #a lover’s discourse #sigh
5. To know that one does not write for the other, to know that these things I am going to write will never cause me to be loved by the one I love (the other), to know that writing compensates for nothing, sublimates nothing, that it is precisely THERE WHERE YOU ARE NOT-this is the beginning of writing.
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| — | Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments |
2. 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.)
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| — | Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments |
2. In real mourning, it is the “test of reality” which shows me that the loved object has ceased to exist. In amorous mourning, the object is neither dead nor remote. It is I who decide that its image must die (and I may go so far as to hide this death from it). As long as this strange mourning lasts, I will therefore have to undergo two contrary miseries: to suffer from the fact that the other is present (continuing, in spite of himself, to wound me) and to suffer from the fact that the other is dead (dead at least as I loved him). Thus I am wretched (an old habit) over a telephone call which does not come, but I must remind myself at the same time that this silence, IN ANY CASE, is insignificant, since I have decided to get over any such concern: it was merely an aspect of the amorous image that it was to telephone me; once this image is gone, the telephone, whether it rings or not, resumes its trivial existence.
(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.”)
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| — | Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments |
