a lover's discourse / roland barthes

Therefore, these reminders of reading, of listening, have been left in the frequently uncertain, incompleted state suitable to a discourse whose occasion is indeed the memory of the sites (books, encounters) where such and such a thing has been read, spoken, heard.

The lover who doesn’t forget sometimes dies of excess, exhaustion, and tension of memory (like Werther).

I waken out of this forgetfulness very quickly. In great haste, I reconstitute a memory, a confusion.

… the weather, the season, the light, the boulevard, the Parisians out walking, shopping, all held within what already has its vocation as memory: a scene, in short, the hieroglyph of kindliness … the good humor of desire.

… nothing in the image can be forgotten; an exhausting memory forbids voluntarily escaping love; in short, forbids inhabiting it discreetly, reasonably.

What constitutes the voice is what, within it, lacerates me by dint of having to die, as if it were at once and never could be anything but a memory.

.. but it says something which manages to touch my desire, but because of its syntactical turn (framing), which will inhabit me like a memory.

It is already, (again, always) a memory (the nature of the photograph is not to represent but to memorialize …

… starting from a negligible trifle, a whole discourse of memory and death rises up and sweeps me away: this is the kingdom of memory, weapon of reverberation – of what Nietzsche called ressentiment.

… it is a fragrance without a support, a texture of memory;

The imperfect is the tense of fascination: … simply the exhausting lure of memory From the start, greedy to play a role, scenes take their position in memory.

Amazon Books.

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.

Review by C. Colt

Some readers may find this book difficult. Barthes never attempts to give us a uniform narrative about love. Instead, as the title implies, he provides us with fragments--some of which come from literature and some from his own philisophical musings--of a lover's point of view. Since childhood, we are taught to think of love as a singualar entity. Whether it is God's love, marriage, passion, or patriotism, we are taught to think of love as a unique, and exclusive prize. But as Barthes' points out, love is built upon fragments, many of which are mundane.

The most compelling part of "Lover's Discourse" is Barthe's dissection of the phrase, "I love you". Drawing upon literary examples and common sense, Barthes asks us what we mean when we state that we love someone. Do we love what they do for us? Do we love how they make us feel? Do we love the idea of them? Are we in love with love itself? This concept is born out by the protagonist Merseault, in Camus' novel, "A Happy Death". The first thing Merseault says to his lover when she wakes up in the morning is, "hello image".

"Lover's Discourse" extracts love from ideology and examines it under a microscope. We may be confused by what we see, and we may not like it, but the view contains more than a glimmer of reality.