A book almost utterly ineffable.
Roland Barthes is often referred by Carson. My own remark are in [ ].
How this book is constructed
- The description of the lover’s discourse has been replaced by its simulation
- then, is a portrait, which offers the reader a discursive site
Components: Figure - amorous feeling
Absence
in a single direction, expressed by the one who stays, never by the one who leaves
“I am loved less than I love”
This endured absence is nothing more or less than forget-fulness, I am, intermittently, unfaithful. This is the condition of my survival; for if I did not forget. I should die. The lover who doesn’t forget sometimes dies of excess, exhaustion,and tension of memory (like Werther)
in amorous absence, I am, sadly, an unglued image that dries, yellow, shrivels.
Adorable
Yet the more I experience the specialty of my desire, the less I can give it a name; to the precision of the target corresponds a wavering of the name; what is characteristic of desire, proper to desire, can produce only an impropriety of the utterance. Of this failure of language,there remains only one trace: the word “adorable” (the right translation of “adorable” would be the Latin ipse: it is the self, himself, herself, in person)
Affirmation
Love has two affirmations. 1. mad projection of a fulfilled future 2. love’s value is ceaselessly threatened by depreciation
Anxiety
it is the fear of a mourning which has already occurred, at the very origin of love,from the moment when I was first “ravished.” Someone would have to be able to tell me: “Don’t be anxious anymore - you’ve already lost him/her.”
Annulment
annular = ring
Explosion of language during which the subject manages to annul the loved object under the volume of love itself: by a specifically amorous perversion, it is love that the subject loves, not the object.
It is my desire I desire, and the loved being is no more than its tool
I sacrifice the image to the image-repertoire [a key concept]
[Suffering is a vertex, through the annual structure it reinforces itself. Even if you are trying to love it. The only way “to get out of it” is live with it.]
Ascetic
ascetic = stoic
[keyword:] guilty, self-punishment
turn back, look at me, see what you have made of me. It is a blackmail
Atopos = unclassifiable
[a- = denial, topos = place]
[my question: is desire classifiable?] is the lover merely a choosier cruiser, who spends his life looking for “his type”?
The atopia of Socrates is liked to Eros.
It is the originality of the relation which must be conquered. Most of my injuries come from stereotype: I am obliged to make myself a lover, like everyone else: to be jealous, neglected, frustrated, like everyone else. But when the relation is original, then the stereotype is shaken, transcended, evacuated, and jealousy, for instance has no more room in the relation without a site, without topos - without what in French we call, colloquially, “topo” - without discourse.
Attente = waiting
waiting for a telephone call is thereby woven out of the unavowable interdictions to infinity
[infinity would also appear later on. in vain or in ‘finity’. let’s see]
The lover’s fatal identity is precisely: I am the one who waits
A mandarin fell in love with a courtesan.“I shall be yours,’ she told him,“when you have spent a hundred nights waiting for me, sitting on a stool, in my garden,beneath my window.” But on the ninety-ninth night, the mandarin stood up, put his stool under his arm, and went away.
Cacher = to hide
[keywords:] conceal the excess
I must determine the degree of publicity I shall give to my initial anxiety
the signs of this passion run the risk of smothering the other. Then should I not, precisely because of my love, hide from the other how much I love him?
[愛が重いです。軽く訳がないもの。]
…hence I tergiversate [ambiguine]: I show my passion a little
Yet to hide a passion totally (or even to hide, mores imply, its excess) is inconceivable : not because the human subject is too weak, but because passion is in essence made to be seen: the hiding must be seen: I want you to know that I am hiding something from you, that is the active paradox I must resolve: at one and the same time it must be known and not known: I want you to know that I don’t want to show my feelings: that is the message I address to the other. Larvatus prodeo: I advance pointing to my mask: I set a mask upon my passion, but with a discreet (and wily) finger I designate this mask. Every passion, ultimately, has its spectator: at the moment of his death, Captain Paz cannot keep from writing to the woman he has loved in silence: no amorous oblation without a final theater: the sign is always victorious.
[I should have read this book earlier. Not because I could avoid much of my sadness, but it provides the very way to express it.]
[‘Larva’ means both ‘ghost’ and ‘mask’ and ‘larvare’ means ‘to bewitch, enchant’, ‘larvatus’ being the masculine perfect passive participle of this verb. There is a pun here and the notion conveyed is of a ghost issuing from the grave, just as an actor issued masked from the sides or back of the stage.]
in order to hide without lying, I shall make use of a cunning preterition [= omission] I shall divide the economy of my signs.
Cases = pigeonholed
[= （假定自己被）束之高阁，不予理睬]
He wants to enter into a system. For the system is a whole in which everyone has his place.
To want to be pigeonholed is to want to obtain for life docile [= easy to control] reception. As support, the structure is separated from desire [desire, as we see, is not easily controllable]: what I want. quite simply, is to be “kept”, like some sort of superior prostitute
Catastrophe
two systems of despair: gentle despair & violent despair.
This is clear as a catastrophe: “I’m done for!”
[I like you too much till heartbreak and despair, till the only thing between as is an end.]
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.
[so it’s about ‘gain’ and ‘lost’]
Circumscribe
=restrict
the other topic of this chapter is Laetitia (deriving from the root word laeta, meaning “happy”, “glad”, “lucky”, “successful”, “prosperous”, “luxurious”, “lush”, or “abounding”)
The connection is control the pleasures by the amorous relation.
To keep the pleasure …to place within a parenthesis of the unthinkable those broad depressive zones which separate such pleasures: “to forget” the loved being outside of the pleasures that being bestows.
I with the beloved one, we are inside and outside the amorous pleasure at the same time.
Gaudium (Latin source of joy) is “the pleasure the soul experiences when it considers the possession of a present or future good as assured
Laetitia is a lively pleasure, “a state in which pleasure predominates within us” (among other, often contradictory sensations)
Coeur
= heart
一言以蔽之
The heart is the organ of desire.
You wait for me where I do not want to go: you love me where I do not exist. Or again: the world and I are not interested in the same thing; and to my misfortune, this divided thing is myself; I am not interested (Werther says) in my mind; you are not interested in my heart.
the heart is what remains to me
Comblement
= fulfillment
the desire and the possibility of complete satisfaction.
once I am no longer within the excessive, I feel frustrated; for me, enough means not enough
What is the insights provided by transport. On uttering transport, whether the interface is crossed, or not quite, the irreversibilities have already long gone.
language seems pusillanimous: I am transported, beyond language, mediocre, beyond the general: “There occurs an the counter which is intolerable, on account of the joy within it, and sometimes man is thereby reduced to nothing; this is what I call the transport. The transport is the joy of which one cannot speak.”
Comprendre
= understand
What do I think of love? —As a matter of fact, I think nothing at all of love. I’d be glad to know what it is, but being inside, I see it in existence, not in essence. What I want to know (love) is the very substance I employ in order to speak (the lover’s discourse).
the very words for myself. I am curious about this matter but no necessity to be bothered on my own
I want to “look in the face” what is dividing me, cutting me off. Understand your madness
Conduite
= behavior [or rather, selection is discussed]
From the lover’s point of view, the fact becomes consequential because it is immediately transformed into a sign: it is the sign, not the fact, which is consequential
Everything signifies: by this proposition, I entrap myself, I bind myself in calculations, I keep myself from enjoyment.
Whatever signifies, is inevitable.
I am not the man of mere “acting out”- my madness is tempered, it is not seen; it is right away that fear consequences, any consequence: it is my fear—my deliberation - which is “spontaneous.”
Connivance
= help in doing sth wrong; the failure to stop sth wrong from happening
[My neutral mirror, my enemies’ aspect, and me myself]
I am jealous of the one I love and of the one who loves the one I love.
The medium and object are both entity associated with desire, direct and indirect.
Contacts
[the contact in this chapter refers to sexual desires]
Every contact, for the lover, raises the question of an answer: the skin is asked to reply.
a kind of festival not of the senses but of meaning.
In the lover’s realm, there is no acting out: no propulsion, perhaps even no pleasure—nothing but signs, a frenzied activity of language: to institute, on each furtive occasion, the system (the paradigm) of demand and response.
Desire is not about the real behavior nor pleasure, but the sign of demand and response.
Contingencies
= accidents, incidents
Corps
= body
[Observation of body parts is an amorous action, especially of those unnoticed parts, hair root, nails, eyelash. Idols, by their nature of work, expose themselves actively under the lens, providing the space for imagination. For any entity like me, tends to observe the others, than showcasing oneself]
Declaration
[The following paragraph is so…erotic. It is the very reason that I continue reading literature and linguistics.]
Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire. The emotion derives from a double contact: on the one hand, a whole activity of discourse discreetly, indirectly focuses upon a single signified, which is “I desire you,” and releases, nourishes, ramifies it to the point of explosion (language experiences orgasm upon touching itself); on the other hand, I enwrap the other in my words, I caress, brush against, talk up this contact, I extend myself to make the commentary to which I submit the relation endure.
Retracing our steps from here, one might say that every discussion of love (however detached its tonality) inevitably involves a secret allocution (I am addressing Lacan
someone whom you do not know but who is there, at the end of my maxims).No one wants to speak of love unless it is for someone.
allocution means a fformal speech giving advice or warning
[It’s good that I have my incarnation of sadness. Not every one has one.]
Dedication
The amorous gift, a subject dedicates smth to the loved being
To speak of the gift is to place it in an exchange economy (of sacrifice, competition, etc.); which stands opposed to silent expenditure.
[real economy is UNLOST]
(Love is mute, Novalis says; only
poetry makes it speak.) Song means nothing: it is in this that you will understand at last what it is that I give you; as useless as the wisp of yarn, the pebble held out to his mother by the child.
the gift is delivered, sometimes, through uttering
About writing and the loved being:
there is a certain adequation between these objects and your person. But writing does not possess this obligingness. Writing is dry, obtuse; a kind of steamroller, writing advances, indifferent, indelicate, and would kill “father, mother, lover” rather than deviate from its fatality
The amorous being is a double edged sword
The gift given or received, can be a power, a cost, to kill, to kidnap, to suffocate, to let one be but oneself.
there is no benevolence [kindness] within writing, rather a terror: it smothers the other, who, far from perceiving the
gift in it, reads there instead an assertion of mastery, of power, of pleasure, of solitude. Whence the cruel paradox of the dedication: I seek at all costs to give you what smothers you.
And Thus,
amorous dedication is impossible (I shall not be satisfied with a worldly or mundane signature, pretending to dedicate to you a work which escapes us both).
Depense
= Expenditure [associated with economy of amorous subject. I have to reclaim that it is more conceptual and financial]
Such exuberance can be interlaced with melancholy, with depressions and suicidal impulses, for the lover’s discourse is not an average of states; but such a disequilibrium belongs to that black economy which marks me with its aberration and, so to speak, with its intolerable luxury.
Love is so related to exuberance that it is against the economy of poems and languages. The luxury is intolerable.
Disreality
Withdrawal of reality experience
Sometimes the world is unreal (I utter it differently), sometimes it is disreal (I utter it with only the greatest difficulty if at all).
[“Disreal” is different from “unreal”. “Unreality” is utterable, while “disreality” is nowhere. It is isolated self-assembly entity. On the last day in the gateway house, M said “you can even ask me to marry you”. At the instance the world does not carry any meaning. Just in vain. Those cat-and-dog roleplays do not belong to such kind - there can be an “unreal” picture in those cases. But not very. M can ask her to stay, but that really, means literally nothing. That is my understanding of “disreality”]
I am not crazy. But sometimes, once my bad temper is exhausted, I have no language left at all: the world is not “unreal” (I could then utter it: there are arts of the unreal, among them the greatest arts of all), but disreal: reality has fled from it, is nowhere, so that I no longer have any meaning (any paradigm) available to me;
The unreal .) is uttered, abundantly (a thousand
novels, a thousand poems). But the disreal cannot be uttered; for if I utter it (if I lunge at it, even with a clumsy or overliterary sentence), I emerge from it.
Ecorche
= flayed, deprived
wood is not isotropic. Nor am I; I have my “exquisite points.”
you cannot tease me without danger: irritable, hypersensitive? —Let us say, rather, tender, easily crushed, like the fiber of certain kinds of wood.
[I am not that sure about the analogue of the wood there. From dictionary, I guess it is indicating impasses. “Not be out of the wood(s) yet = used to say that there are likely to be more difficultie]
Ecrire
= to write. The title of this chapter is Inexpressible Love
Enticements, arguments, and impasses generated by the desire to “express” amorous feeling in a “creation” (particularly of writing).
I am both too big and too weak for writing: I am alongside it
language is both too much and too littlie, excessive and impoverished
[So here is the very result:]
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.
[So when I looked back hundreds of pieces of dairy I wrote before for a particular person. I am writing not because I really want something from the person. The friendship is inspiring and delightful enough. A real relationship is overwhelming that I cannot handle. But rather there was something excessive in my mind that overflow. The writings are for no one. Not even myself.]
Errance
= errantry. [Errant, means going around, wandering. The explanation is given by author as below]
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 realizes he is doomed to wander until he dies, from love to love.
[This indicates two things, one is inevitable repetitions. The other is permanent temporary]
How does a love ends? No one ever knows anything about it….I myself cannot (as an enamored subject) construct my love story to the end: I am its poet (its bard) only for the beginning; the end, like my own death, belongs to others; it is up to them to write the fiction, the external, mythic narrative.
it is never said of the Phoenix that it dies, but only that it is reborn (then I can be reborn without dying?).
Throughout life, all of love’s “failures” resemble
one another
[And thus repetitions is granted ]
The “perpetual mutability” which animates me, far from
squeezing all those I encounter into the same functional type.errantry does not align—it produces iridescence [colorfulness]: what results is the nuance. Thus I move on, to the end of the tapestry [weaved colored cloth], from one nuance to the next (the nuance is the last state of a color which can be named; the nuance is the Intractable).
Etreinte
= embrace, a fulfil, a union
nothing is exhausted, nothing is wanted: all desires are abolished, for they seem definitively fulfilled
Exile
[The very topic I am looking into these days.]
Deciding to give up the amorous condition, the subject sadly discovers himself exiled from his Image-repertoire… which is “a kind of long insomnia.”
That is the price to be paid: the death of the Image for my own life.
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.
A double lack: I cannot even invest my misery, as I could when I suffered from being in love. In those days I desired, dreamed, struggled; the benefit lay before me, merely delayed, traversed
by contretemps [unfortunate events].It was as if I were trying to embrace one last time, hysterically, someone about to die—someone for whom I was about to die: I was performing a denial of separation.
Facheux
= irksome, annoying
The world is in fact just that: an obligation to share.
Everything is irksome which briefly erases the dual relation, which alters the complicity and relaxes intimacy: “You belong to me as well,” the world says.
Any obedience to worldly procedures appears as a compromise on the part of the loved being, and this compromise alters that being’s image.
[I hope you are exclusively nice to me, but meanwhile wish you are equally kind to the world. The conflict emerges out of uneasiness or jealousy.]
Fading
[Everything is fading out, including you and I.]
Painful ordeal [painful experience] in which the loved being appears to withdraw from all contact, without such enigmatic indifference even being directed against the amorous subject or pronounced to the advantage of anyone else, world or rival.
[Not only ordeal, good memory together will also become indifference. That is how time works, and how the world works]
the fade-out of voices is a good thing; the voices of the narrative come, go, disappear, overlap; we do not know who is speaking; the text speaks, that is all: no more image, nothing but language.
[image fades, text remains]
without cause and without conclusion. Like a kind of melancholy mirage, the other withdraws into infinity and I wear myself out trying to get there.
[notice again the infinity. not in vain but in infinity.]
The loved being, in the same way, endlessly withdraws and pales: a feeling of madness, purer than if this madness were violent.)
I never know the loved being’s voice except when it is dead, remembered, recalled inside my head, way past the ear;
[when you are speaking I cannot take it down in my mind immediately. only when you finished, and I recalled that it is revived.]
which is not that of junction but that of distance: the loved, exhausted voice heard over the telephone is the fade-out in all its anxiety.
the other departs twice over, by voice and by silence: whose turn is it to speak? We fall silent in unison: crowding of two voids. I’m going to leave you
Faults
he has failed the loved being and there by experiences a sentiment of guilt.
[“I failed you” means I let you down?]
But he would have been at fault had he left first, and this fault might have haunted him for a long time.”
This fault occurs whenever I make any gesture of independence with regard to the loved object;
What I am guilty of, then, is paradoxically lightening the burden, it is being strong which frightens me, it is control (or its gesticulation) which makes me guilty.
[If I loose out my control, does it means that I relieve from the responsibility to take care of you? Does it means that you are not even that important?]
Every pain, every misfortune, Nietzsche remarks, has been falsified by a notion of guilt, of being at fault:
Jete
= festivity
[Fiesta, my heart is like swallowing the sun. Forever hot and not failing. My every season is a splendid festival. Come by once and enjoy. It’s my fiesta.]
Then is it nothing, for you. to be someone’s festivity?)
Jou = mad
Every lover is mad, we are told. But can we imagine a madman in love? Never—I am entitled only to an impoverished, incomplete, metaphorical madness: love drives me nearly mad, but I do not communicate with the supernatural, there is nothing of the sacred within me; my madness, a mere irrationality, is dim, even invisible
[it is driving me mad, not essentially angry or annoying]
madness is an experience of depersonalization.
Gene
= Embarrassment
What is heavy is the silent knowledge: I know that you know that I know
the unspoken as the symptom . of the conscious.
I enjoy a text bursting with legibility for the reason that it does not speak.
Gravia
= delirium
the other keeps bringing me back to my own impasse: I can neither escape from this impasse nor rest within it,
Habit
“blue coat and yellow vest” of Werther
In dressing myself, I embellish [beautify, decorate] that which, by desire, will be spoiled.
I must resemble whom I love.
[to live another life, of the loved being]
[while the habit is but a disguise.]
Werther disguises himself. As what? As an enchanted lover;
This blue garment imprisons him so effectively that the world around him vanishes: nothing but the two of us.
Identification
Identification is not a psychological process; it is a pure structural operation: I am the one who has the same place I have.
I see myself in the other who loves without being loved, I recognize in him the very gestures of my own unhappiness, but this time it is I myself who am the active agent of this unhappiness: I experience myself both as victim and as executioner.
[I am, reason and result simultaneously.]
PROST: Intended for a more particular and more vulgar purpose, this room . . . long served as refuge for me, doubtless because it was the only one where I was allowed to lock the door, a refuge for all my occupations which required an invincible solitude: reading, daydreaming, tears, and pleasure.”
Images
In the amorous realm, the most painful wounds are inflicted more often by what one sees than by what one knows.
[knowledge and information are neutral. images hurt]
I am not in the scene: the image is without a riddle.
I know perfectly well that Charlotte does not belong to me, says Werther’s reason, but all the same, Albert is stealing her from me, says the image which is before his eyes.
The image—as the example for the obsessive—is the thing itself. The lover is thus an artist; and his world is in fact a world reversed, since in it each image is its own end (nothing beyond the image).
Inconnaissable
= unknowable
I am caught in this contradiction: on the one hand, I believe I know the other better than anyone and triumphantly assert my knowledge to the other (“I know you—I’m the only one who really knows you!”); and on the other hand, I am often struck by the obvious fact that the other is impenetrable, intractable, not to be found; I cannot open up the other, trace back the other’s origins, solve the riddle. Where does the other come from? Who is the other? I wear myself out, I shall never know.
(Of everyone I had known, X was certainly the most impenetrable. This was because you never knew anything about his desire: isn’t knowing someone precisely that— knowing his desire? I knew everything, immediately, about Y’s desires, hence Y himself was obvious to me, and I was inclined to love him no longer in a state of terror but indulgently, the way a mother loves her child.It is not true that the more you love, the better you understand; all that the action of love obtains from me is merely this wisdom: that the other is not to be known; his opacity is not the screen around a secret, but, instead, a kind of evidence in which the game of reality and appearance is done away with. I am then seized with that exaltation [excitement] of loving someone unknown, someone who will remain so forever: a mystic impulse: I know what I do not know.
[“only until now you found out we barely know each other?” “believe me, I know you enough and you know me enough”]
I turn to myself: “What do I want, wanting to know you?” What would happen if I decided to define you as a force and not as a person? And if I were to situate myself as another force confronting yours? This would happen: my other would be defined solely by the suffering or the pleasure he affords me.
Induction
amorous desire is discovered by induction.
This “affective contagion,” this induction, proceeds from others, from the language, from books, from friends: no love is original.
[We all learn love from somewhere - books, songs, lyrics, others’ stories. Desire might be spontaneous upon intriguing. Love is not. Love is learned.]
the structural of “successful” couple: … to designate desire and then to leave it alone, like those obliging natives who show you the path but don’t insist on accompanying you on your way.
STENDHAL: “Before love is born, beauty is necessary as a sign, it predisposes o this passion by the praises we hcar bestowed upon whom we will love” (On Love).
Informer
a friendly figure whose constant role, seems to be to wound the amorous subject by “innocently” furnishing commonplace information about the loved being, though the effect of this information is to disturb the subject’s image of that being.
Worldly friendship is epidemic: everyone catches it, like a disease.
However anodyne the message he [the informer] gives me (like a disease), he reduces my other to being merely another. I am of course obliged to listen to him (I cannot in worldly rerms allow my vexation to be seen), but I strive to make my listening flat, indifferent, impervious.
What I want is a little cosmos (with its own time, its own logic) inhabited only by “the two of us.” Everything from outside is a threat; either in the form of boredom, or in the form of injury
Whatever it tells me, the information is painful: a dull, ungrateful fragment of reality lands on me. For the lover’s delicacy, every fact has something aggressive about it: a bit of “science,” however commonplace, invades the Image-repertoire.
[others telling something not pleasant about the loved being, disturbing the image of amorous subject]
Insupportable
unbearable <This can’t go on>
[I can’t handle it. I can’t hear any words. I am still here and would you come back to me. I can’t handle it. Don’t be far away. We shouldn’t call it quit cause I can’t handle it.]
A demon denies time, change, growth, dialectic, and says at every moment: This can’t go on! Yet il goes on, it lasts, if not forever, at least a long time.
I signify to myself that I have - courageously! - decided to put an end to the repetition; the patience of an impatience. (Reasonable sentiment: everything works out, but nothing lasts. Amorous sentiment: nothing works out, but it keeps going on.)
To acknowledge the Unbearable
Imagining a painful outcome (renouncing, leaving, etc.), I intone, within myself, the exalted hallucination of closure; a vainglory of abnegation seizes me (renouncing love but not friendship, etc.), and I immediately forget what I would then have to sacrifice
endurance (the natural dimension of real fatigues).
Issues
Ideas of solution. [I am rather impressive this chapter comes right after “unbearable”]
Thus is revealed, once again, the language-nature of the amorous sentiment: every solution is pitilessly referred to its one and only idea—i.e., to a verbal being; so that, finally, being language, the idea of outcome adjusts itself to the foreclosure of any outcome: the lover’s discourse is in a sense a series of No Exits.
By imagining an extreme solution, I produce a fiction … art of the catastrophe calms me down.
[it might be, but not necesssary]
“For there to be a misfortune, the good itself must do harm”). Puzzle: to “get out,” I must get out of the system—which T want to get out of, etc. If it were not in the “nature” of amorous madness to pass, to cease of itself, no one could ever put an end to it (it is not because he is dead that Werther has stopped being in love, quite the contrary).
Jelousy
Melitta is shared because she is perfect, and Hyperion suffers from the fact: “My misery was truly limitless. I was forced to withdraw.” Thus I suffer twice over: from the division itself, and from my incapacity to endure its nobility.
Je t’ amine
= I love you
Once the first avowal has been made, “I love you”
has no meaning whatever; it merely repeats in an enigmatic mode—so blank does it appear—the old message
[In a lot of cases, this is the phrase that one desperate for. But the fact that it carries NO meaning. At least in western context, it is just something like “having a good day”. Chinese and Japanese seldom use this - too heavy to handle, too light to utter. Not precise or accurate. It is a context rather than an action or a verb.]
To love does not exist in the infinitive
I-love-you has no usages. Like a child’s word, it enters into no social constraint; it can be a sublime, solemn, trivial word, it can be an erotic, pornographic word. It is a socially irresponsible word. I-love-you is without nuance. It suppresses explanations, adjustments, degrees, scruples.
[“I am doing this or that because I love you.” Come on that explains nothing. ]
I-love-you has no “elsewhere” - it is the word of the
(maternal, amorous) dyad [an item with two parts]; in it, no distance, no distortion will split the sign; it is the metaphor of nothing else.I-love-you is not a sentence: it does not transmit a meaning, but fastens onto a limit situation: “the one where the subject is suspended in a specular relation to the other.” It is a holophrase.
(Though spoken billions of times, I-love-you is extra-lexicographical; it is a figure whose definition cannot transcend the heading.)
Then to what linguistic order does this odd being, this linguistic feint [pretend], belong, too articulated to be no more than an impulse, too phatic [social] to be a sentence?
in the proffering of I-love-you, desire is neither repressed (as in what is uttered) nor recognized (where we did not expect it: as in the uttering itself) but simply: released, as an orgasm. Orgasm is not spoken, but it speaks and it says: Ilove-you.
[ice pleasure]
I love you and So do it
what I hallucinate is the absolute New: (amorous) reform has no appeal for me.
[Definitely the three magic words]
What I want, deliriously, is to obtain the word. Magical, mythical?
As a counter-sign, I-love-you is on the side of Dionysus: suffering is not denied (nor even complaint, disgust, resentment), but by its proffering, it is not internalized:
[Saying the three words does not reduce my suffering. Not that I am not satisfied with the answer. It just means nothing. Totally meaningless.]
Languor
In languor, I merely wait: “I knew no end to desiring you.” (Desire is everywhere, but in the amorous state it becomes something very special: languor
languor would be that exhausting transition from narcissistic libido to object libido. (Desire for the absent being and desire for the present being: languor superimposes the two desires, putting absence within presence. Whence a state of contradiction: this is the “gentle fire.”)
Letter
What does “thinking of you” mean? It means: forgetting “you” (without forgetting, life itself is not possible) and frequently waking out of that forgetfulness. Many things, by association, bring you back into my discourse. “Thinking of you” means precisely this metonymy. For, in itself, such thinking is blank: I do not think you, I simply make you recur (to the very degree that 1 forget you). It is this form (this thythm) which I call “thought”: I have nothing to tell you, save that it is to you that I tell this nothing
[…so that she could think of the woman for another hundred and twenty-two minutes]
[and this is how you lose the time war]
the lover the letter has no tactical value: it is purely expressive…the relation brings together two images. You are everywhere, your image is total,
Loquela
= flux of language [another concepts accidentally fall into my specialize, unfortunately.]
love makes me think too much
a fever of language overcomes me, a parade of reasons, interpretations, pronouncements.
Once I happen to produce a “‘successful” phrase in my mind (imagining I have found the right expression for some truth or other), it becomes a formula I repeat in proportion to the relief it affords
he twiddles his wound
[I want you to cry, cry for me, make you rain fall cry for me]
I take a role: I am the one who is going to cry;I am play this role for myself, and it makes me cry: I am my own theater. And seeing me cry this way makes me cry all the more; and if the tears tend to decrease, I quickly repeat to myself the lacerating phrase that will set them flowing again
He describes in Charlotte’s presence a scene of funereal leave-taking;
Magic
[how a word (vow) realizes in a nearly magically way]
Sometimes the anxiety is so powerful and so pressing - an anxiety of waiting, for instance—that it becomes necessary to do something. This “something” is naturally (ancestrally) a vow
So he began again, attaching to this delicate gesture … ever vaguer vows which were to include - for fear of choosing - everything which fails in the world.
Monstrous
that the lover is intolerable (by his heaviness) to the beloved.
he lover’s discourse stifles the other, who finds no place for his own language beneath this massive utterance.
I who supposed myself to be pure subject (subjected subject: fragile, delicate, pitiable) find myself turned into an obtuse thing blindly moving onward, crushing everything beneath his discourse
soliloquy makes me into a monster: one huge tongue.
Mutisme
= silence, suffers anxiety
my language is not, strictly speaking, a discard but rather an “overstock”
This is what death is, most of all: everything that has been seen, will have been seen for nothing. Mourning over what we have perceived.” In those brief moments when I speak for nothing, it is as if I were dying. For the loved being becomes a leaden figure, a dream creature who does not speak, and # silence, in dreams, is death.
Nuit
= night
Most often I am in the very darkness of my desire; I know not what it wants, good itself is an evil to me, everything resounds, I live between blows, my head ringing
I make no attempt to emerge from the amorous impasse by Decision, Enterprise, Separation, Sacrifice, etc.; in short, by gesture. I merely substitute one night for the other. “To darken this darkness, this is the gate of all wonder.”
Obscene
a powerful transgression which leaves him alone and exposed; by a reversal of values, then, it is this sentimentality which today constitutes love’s obscenity.
[crossing certain boundary is what distinguishes cleans from dirt]
my love is “a sexual organ of unparalleled sensitivity which trembles as it makes me utter terrible cries, the cries of a huge but stinking ejaculation, at grips with the ecstatic gift that one makes of oneself as a naked, obscene victim … mocked by the loud laughter of the whores.”
“The distinctive mark of modern souls is not lying but innocence, incarnate in lying moralism. To discover this innocence everywhere—that may be the most disheartening part of our task.”
Whatever is anachronic is obscene. As a (modern)
divinity, History is repressive, History forbids us to be out of time. Of the past we tolerate only the ruin, the monument, kitsch, what is amusing: we reduce this past to no more than its signature. The lover’s sentiment is old-fashioned, but this antiquation cannot even be recuperated as a spectacle: love falls outside of interesting time; no historical, polemical meaning can be given to it; it is in this that it is obscene.The moral tax levied by society on all transgressions affects passion still more than sex today.
the limit of language (any utterable obscenity as such can no longer be the last degree of the obscene: uttering it, even through the wink of a figure, I myself am already recuperated, socialized).
Pleurer
= crying [and cry for me]
How do History and Type combine? Is it not up to the type to formulate—to form—what is out of time, ahistorical? In the lover’s very tears, our society represses its own timelessness, thereby turning the weeping lover into a lost object whose repression is necessary to its “health.”
when I cry, I always address myself to someone, and because the recipient of my tears is not always the same: I adapt my ways of weeping to the kind of blackmail which, by my tears, I mean to exercise around me.
By weeping, I want to impress someone, to bring pressure to bear up on someone … I make myself cry, in order to prove to myself that my grief is not an illusion: tears are signs, not expressions
Gossip
Gossip is the voice of truth. and this voice is magical … her discourse is insensitive, a kind of objetivity
The third-person pronoun is a wicked pronoun: it is the pronoun of the non-person, it absents, it annuls.
Pourquoi
= why
why you only love me a little
A delirium, however, does not exist unless one wakens from it
Ravishment
popular name: love at the first sight
Language (vocabulary) has long since posited the equivalence of love and war:
[When I am looking you, I got butterflies.]
Love at first sight is a hypnosis: I am fascinated by an image: at first shaken, electrified, stunned, “paralyzed”
This “wondrous serenity” is merely a waiting—a desire: I never fall in love unless I have wanted to; the emptiness I produce in myself (and on which, like Werther, quite innocently, I pride myself) is nothing but that interval, longer or shorter,
[so it is the one I am obsessed with right now….]
What suddenly manages to touch me (ravish me) in the other is the voice, the line of the shoulders, the slenderness of the silhouctte, the warmth of the hand, the curve of a smile, etc. Whereupon,
the first thing we love is a scene.
[a scene rather than a particular person ravishes me.]
I can fall in love with a sentence spoken to me: and not only because it says something which manages to touch my desire, but because of its syntactical turn (framing), which will inhabit me like a memory.
an “episode” endowed with a beginning (love at first sight) and an end… it is after the fact
[so…what’s after like]
Love at first sight is always spoken in the past tense: it might be called an anterior immediacy.
[so, is it priori?]
I cannot get over having had this good fortune: to meet what matches my desire; or to have taken this huge risk: instantly to submit to an unknown image
Regretted
Imagining himself dead, the amorous subject sees the loved being’s life continue as if nothing had happened.
[I will not forgive you. For the rest of my life.
Somehow the former M has already died, once J leaves.
Fic B to me is Werther to Roland. ]
nothing would change in the train of their existence. Out of love, the delirious assumption of Dependence (I have an absolute need of the other), is generated, quite cruelly, the adverse position: no one has any real need of me.
I envision myself nibbled up by others’ words, dissolved in the ether of Gossip. And the Gossip will continue without my constituting any further part of it, no longer its object: a linguistic energy, trivial and tireless, will triumph over my very memory.
Rencontre
= encounter
[Only good imagination without any realistic consideration. ‘What if to kiss, what if to hold’ this and that.]
it is by means of this Aistorical hallucination that I sometimes make love into a romance, an adventure. This would appear to assume three stages (or three acts): first comes the instantaneous capture (I am ravished by an image); then a series of encounters … the “sequel” is the long train of sufferings, wounds, anxieties, distresses, resentments, despairs, embarrassment
I cannot rest until it recurs: I affirm the affirmation, I begin again, without repeating.
so that his hand unfailingly lands on the little piece which immediately completes the puzzle of his desire. This is a gradual discovery (and a kind of verification) of affinities, complicities, and intimacies which I shall(I imagine) eternally sustain with other, who is thereby becoming “my other”
Reverberation
= an image reverberates painfully in the subject’s affective consciousness.
this is the kingdom of memory, weapon of reverberation—of what Nietzsche called ressentiment.
In amorous panic, I am afraid of my own destruction
[just, afraid of getting hurt]
If the thing reverberates too powerfully, it makes such a din in my body that I must halt any occupation;
Depression has its own—encoded— gestus, then, and doubtless that is what limits it; for it suffices that at a given moment I can substitute another (even blank) gesture for this one
シングルベッドで朝まで抱き合っても
あなたは私のものじゃないのね
The bed (by day) is the site of the Image-repertoire; the desk is once again, and whatever one does there, reality.
DIDEROT: “The word is not the thing, but a flash in whose light we perceive the thing.”
Traditional linguistics would analyze only the message: conversely, active Philology would try especially to interpret, to evaluate the (here, reactive) force which directs (or attracts) it …
I establish myself, however painfully, in the very substance of the message (i.e., the content of the rumor), while I bitterly and mistrustfully scrutinize the force which warrants it:
who can tolerate without pain a meaning that is complex and yet purified of any “noise” or interference? … as if listening itself were to become a state of utterance: in me, it is the ear which speaks.
Reveil
= waking that he is once again besieged by the anxieties of his passion.
“All of a sudden his miseries were clear in his mind: one does not die of pain, or he was a dead man at that moment”)
Scene
It is dialogue which corrupted Tragedy, even before Socrates appeared on the scene. Monologue is thereby pushed back to the very limits of humanity: in archaic tragedy, in certain forms of schizophrenia [spirit splitting], in amorous soliloquy
The scene is like the Sentence: structurally, there
is no obligation for it lo stop; no internal constraint exhausts it … Only some circumstance external to its structure can interrupt the scene: the exhaustion of the two partnersthe couple is already undone: like love, the scene is always reciprocal. Hence, the scene is interminable, like language itself: it is language itself, taken in
its infinity,No scene has a meaning, no scene moves toward an enlightenment or a transformation.
…once again that only death can interrupt the Sentence, the Scene. What is a hero? The one who has the last word. Can we think of a hero who does not speak before dying?
Seul
= alone
[Love-as-passion is a metonymy. Only two two concepts falling into the same realm can be referred by a metonymy.]
Werther not only the suicide but also, perhaps, the lover, the utopian, the class heretic, the man who is “ligatured [tightly bound]” to no one but himself
it is because Eros is censured
Love and not politics, (amorous) Desire and not (social) Need.
Eros is a system. Today, however, there is no system of love: and the several systems which surround the contemporary lover offer him no room
it is a solitude of system: I am alone in making a system out of it
society subjects me to a strange, public repression: no censure, no prohibition: I am merely suspended a humanis, far from human things, by a tacit decree of insignificance: I belong to no repertoire, participate in ono asylum
Signs
Signs are not proofs, since anyone can produce false or ambiguous signs
I shall no longer believe in interpretation
Souvenir
= remembrance 追忆
imperfect tense murmurs behind this present.
as if I remembered time itself and only time: it is a fragrance without support, a texture of memory; something like Japanese haiku a pure expenditure, such has been
able recuperating it in any destiny.The imperfect is the tense of fascination: it seems to be alive and yet it doesn’t move: imperfect presence, imperfect death; neither oblivion nor resurrection; simply the exhausting lure of memory.
I remember in order to be unhappy/happy—not in order to understand. I do not write, I do not shut myself up in order to write the enormous novel of time recaptured.
Thus
I realize with hysteria that I cannot displace him;
I see the other thus—I see the other’s thusness - but in the realm of amorous sentiment this thus is painful to me because it separates us and because, once again, I refuse to recognize the division of our image, the other’s alterity.
Designating you as thus, I enable you to escape the death of classification, I kidnap you from the Other, from language, I want you to be immortal. As he is, the loved being no longer receives any meaning, neither from myself nor from the system in which he is caught; he is no more than a text without context; I no longer need or desire to decipher him; he is in a sense the supplement of his own site. If he were only a site, I might well, someday, replace him, but I can substitute nothing for the supplement of his site, his thus.
I love the other, not according to his (accountable) qualities, but according to his existence; by a movement one might well call mystical, I love, not what he is, but that he is.
acceding to the other’s thus, I no longer oppose oblation to desire: it seems to me that I can make myself desire the other less and delight in him more.
The worst enemy of thus is gossip
But then the mighty force of our tasks drove us apart again into different seas and sunny zones, and perhaps we shall never see each other again; perhaps we shall meet again but fail to recognize each other: our exposure to different seas and suns has changed us
Tenderness
tender gestures, insofar as the subject realizes that he is not their privileged recipient.
we shut ourselves up in a mutual kindness, we mother each other reciprocally; … ask me anything that can put your body to sleep, but also do not forget that I desire you—a little, lightly, without trying to seize anything right away.
Sexual pleasure is not metonymic: once taken, it is cut off: it was the Feast, always terminated and instituted only by a temporary, supervised lifting of the prohibition. Tenderness, on the contrary, is nothing but an infinite, insatiable metonymy; the gesture, the episode of tenderness (the delicious harmony of an evening) can only be interrupted with laceration: everything seems called into question once again: return of rhythm disappearance of nirvana.
But if I receive it (and this can be simultaneous) within the field of desire, I am disturbed: tenderness, by rights, is not exclusive … Where you are tender, you speak your plural.
desire is to lack what one has - and to give what one does not have: a matter of supplements, not complements).
not according to a homosexual parti pris, but because within the same sex the difference remains inscribed: Patroclus was the lover, Achilles the beloved.
As for this everything I desire, it suffices for its fulfillment (the dream insists) that each of us be without sites: that we be able magically to substitute for each other: that the kingdom of “one for the other” come
This union would be without limits, not by the scope of its expansion, but by the indifference of its permutations.
Truth
Love is blind: the proverb is false. Love opens his eyes wide, love produces clear-sightedness: “I have, about you, of you, absolute knowledge.” Report of the clerk to the master: You have every mastery of me, but I have every knowledge of you.
Displacement: it is not the truth which is true, but the relation to the lure which becomes true. To be in the truth, it is enough to persist: a “lure” endlessly affirmed, against everything, becomes a truth. (And suppose there might be, ultimately, in love-as-passion, a fragment of real … truth.)
Vouloir-saisir
= will-to-process [or, I would like to name it closure]
Realizing that the difficulties of the amorous relationship originate in his ceaseless desire to appropriate the loved being in one way or another, the subject decides to abandon henceforth all “will-to-possess” in his regard.
Not to kill oneself (for love) means: to take this decision, not to possess the other
The will-to-possess must cease—but also the non-will-to-possess must not be seen: no oblation [gift to the god].
I must manage to let myself drop somewhere outside of language, into the inert, and in a sense, quite simply, to sit down
I love you is in my head, but I imprison it behind my lips. I do not divulge. I say silently to who is no longer or is not yet the other: I keep myself from loving you.
Nietzschean accent: “Not to pray any longer—to bless
forgetting, forgotten, intoxicated by what it does not drink and will never drink!
Epilogue
I finally finished the notes. It took me two whole months. I started reading on Aug 5th and now is Oct 8th. The longest time I spent on the first-time reading and note-taking. But it is all worth it! Roland’s beautiful language is everything. And the bittersweet context.
By the way there is a wonderful review by aprosaicpintofpisces “Roland Barthes: Love as a Language” on the Artifice. It is 130 pages in PDF and I am on half way. Definitely very well written with contemporary movie and novel examples. I might not afford to write a complete review on the work but I would upload an annotated file.
231201
It took me another two months to finally finish the review. A lot… a lot happened in between. The review is amazing and my annotated version is here.