#lovers discourse

[abstaindevour]

I have projected myself into the other with such power that when I am without the other I cannot recover myself, regain myself: I am lost, forever.

Barthes, A Lover's Discourse

[dashistir]

The world subjects every enterprise to an alternative; that of success or failure, of victory or defeat. I protest by another logic: I am simultaneously and contradictorily happy and wretched ; " to succeed" or " to fail"  have for me only contingent, provisional meanings (which doesn't keep my sufferings and my desires from being violent); what inspires me, secretly and stubbornly, is not a tactic: I accept and I affirm, beyond truth and falsehood, beyond success and failure; I have withdrawn from all finality, I live according to chance (as is evidenced by the fact that the figures of my discourse occur to me like so many dice casts). Flouted in my enterprise (as it happens), I emerge from it neither victor nor vanquished: I am tragic. (Someone tells me: this kind of love is not viable. But how can you evaluate viability? Why is the viable a Good Thing? Why is it better to last than to burn?

Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse

[davidlavieri]

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 love 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. This stubbornness is love’s protest: for all the wealth of “good reasons” for loving differently, loving better, loving without being in love, etc. a stubborn voice is raised which lasts a little longer: the voice of the Intractable lover.

Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, “The Intractable”

[biomegasin]

felt

[abstaindevour]

delicacy: in a sense it is the "healthy" (artistic) form of compassion.

[abstaindevour]

(Fulfillment means an abolition of inheritances: Joy has no need of heirs or of children-Joy wants itself, wants eternity, the repetition of the same things, wants everything to remain eternally the same." The fulfilled lover has no need to write, to transmit, to reproduce.) 

[abstaindevour]

If I could take an anthological view of the amorous relation?

If I could manage to confine myself to the lively pleasures the other affords me, without contaminating them. mortifying them by the anxiety which serves as their hinge? If I could take an anthological view of the amorous relation? If I were to understand. initially, that a great preoccupation does not exclude moments of pure pleasure (like the Chaplain in Mother explaining that "war does not exclude peace"), and then, if I managed systematically to forget the zones of alarm which separate these moments of pleasure? If I could be dazed, inconsistent? 

[syn-site]

Ultimately it is unimportant whether the text’s dispersion is rich here and poor there; there are nodes, blanks, many figures break off short; some, being hypostases of the whole of the lover’s discourse, have just the rarity—the poverty—of essences: What is to be said of Languor, of the Image, of the Love Letter, since it is the whole of the lover’s discourse which is woven of languorous desire, of the image-repertoire, of declarations? But he who utters this discourse and shapes its episodes does not know that a book is to be made of them; he does not yet know that as a good cultural subject he should neither repeat nor contradict himself, nor take the whole for the part; all he knows is that what passes through his mind at a certain moment is marked, like the printout of a code (in other times, this would have been the code of courtly love, or the Carte du Tendre).

Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse: Fragments