A lovers discourse series#

“A Lover’s Discourse” Roland Barthes by Murr, The Lectern , A Lover’s Discourse by Roland BarthesĪs a jealous man, I suffer four times over: because I am jealous, because I blame myself for being so, because I fear that my jealousy will wound the other, because I allow myself to be subject to a banality: I suffer from being excluded, from being aggressive, from being crazy, and from being common. That brief, momentary voice, almost ungracious in its rarity, that almost nothing of the loved and distant voice, becomes in me a sort of monstrous cork, as if a surgeon were thrusting a huge plug of wadding into my head. Nothing more lacerating than a voice at once beloved and exhausted: a broken, rarefied, bloodless voice, one might say, a voice from the end of the world, which will be swallowed up far away by cold depths: such a voice is about to vanish, as the exhausted being is about to die: fatigue is infinity: what never manages to end. Pages 39-40, A Lover’s Discourse by Roland Barthes The lover’s fatal identity is precisely: I am the one who waits. Sometimes I want to play the part of the one who doesn’t wait I try to busy myself elsewhere, to arrive late but I always lose at this game: whatever I do, I find myself there, with nothing to do, punctual, even ahead of time. “Am I in love? -Yes, since I’m waiting.” The other never waits. The other with whom I am in love designates for me the specialty of my desire. I encounter millions of bodies in my life of these millions, I may desire some hundreds but of these hundreds, I love only one.

Despite its relatively low word count, the book is dense and its content quite challenging, which makes reading it both hard and illuminating. However, due to its sometimes difficult literary allusions and its stream-of-consciousness style, there can be a little mistake about its overall efficacy. Both those who’ve been infatuated and those who haven’t will find reading this book enjoyable and understandable. This book is a must-read for anyone who has ever been in love, or even for those who believe they are immune to the power of love. Each brief fragment of the first-person narrative explores one concept or insight that may inspire a romantic dream. He explains by “fragments” the lover’s point of view through concepts about love derived from literature and his own philosophical thoughts.

A lovers discourse series#

In a series of short essays, he dissects the complexities of romantic love from every angle. He, therefore, aimed to dissect one of the most profound human emotions-falling in love-by deconstructing the lover’s suffering into those fluctuating moods and feelings they experience when in love.īarthes used the methods of structuralism for the first time in writing this book. Barthes believes that we are compelled to cultivate toxic and unempathetic relationships because we lack a vocabulary for discussing love in contemporary culture. When we’re in love, we speak a different language. With a philosophical narrative that sometimes blurs the line between fact and fiction, each of the book’s 80 chapters focuses on a different aspect of love.

A Lover’s Discourse ( Fragments d’un discours amoureux, 1977) by Roland Barthes is a meditative non-fiction book that explores the language of love by examining the “outbursts of words” a lover employs to describe his feelings.