A Lover's Discourse

documenting a year long correspondence with Roland Barthes’ text. Each week I will post at least one new postcard into the virtual postbox and pin it here; offered up for the lover’s regard.

[aloversdiscourse]

je-t’-aime / I-love-you

The figure refers not to the declaration of love, to the avowal, but to the repeated utterance of the love cry.

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nuit / night

Any state which provokes in the subject the metaphor of the darkness, whether affective, intellective, or existential, in which he struggles or subsides.

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nuages / clouds

Meaning and employment of that darkening of mood which overtakes the subject under various circumstances

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habit / habiliment

Any affect provoked or sustained by the clothing which the subject has worn during the amorous encounter, or wears with the intention of seducing the loved object.

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écrire / to write

Enticements, arguments, and impasses generated by the desire to ‘express’ ‘amorous’ feeling in a creation (particularly of writing).

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pourquoi / why

Even as he obsessively asks himself why he is not loved, the amorous subject lives in the belief that the loved object does love him, but does not tell him so.

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scène / scene

The figure comprehends every ‘scene’ (in the household sense of the term) as an exchange of reciprocal contestations.

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loquela

This word, borrowed from Ignatius of Loyola, designates the flux of language through which the subject tirelessly rehashes the effects of an action: an emphatic form of the lover’s discourse.

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retentissement / reverberation

Fundamental mode of amorous subjectivity: a word, an image reverberates painfully in the subject’s affective consciousness.

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magie / magic

Magic consultations, secret rites, and votive actions are not absent from the amorous subject’s life, whatever culture he belongs to.

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pleurer / crying

The amorous subject has a particular propensity to cry: the functioning of tears in this subject.

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comblement / fulfilment

The subject insistently posits the desire and the possibility of a complete satisfaction of the desire implicated in the amorous relation and of a perfect and virtually eternal success of this relation: paradisiac image of the Sovereign Good, to be given and received.

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monstreux / monstrous

the subject suddenly realises that he is imprisoning the loved object in a net of tyrannies: he has been pitiable, now he becomes monstrous.

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exil / exile

Deciding to give up the amorous condition, the subject sadly discovers himself exiled from the image repertoire.

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errance / errantry

Though each love is experienced as unique and though the subject rejects the notion of repeating it elsewhere later on, he sometimes discovers in himself a kind of diffusion of amorous desire; he then realises he is doomed to wander until he dies, from love to love.

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compassion / compassion

The subject experiences a sentiment of violent compassion with regard to the loved object each time he sees, feels, or knows the loved object is unhappy or in danger, for whatever reason external to the amorous relation itself.

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induction / induction

The loved being is desired because another or others have shown the subject that such a being is desirable: however particular, amorous desire is discovered by induction.