created, $=dv.current().file.ctime & modified, =this.modified
tags:loveliterature
The necessity for this book is to be found in the following consideration: that the lover’s discourse is today of an extreme solitude. This discourse is spoken, perhaps, by thousands of subjects (who knows?) by warranted by no one; it is completely forsaken by the surrounding languages: ignored, disparaged, or derided by them, severed not only from authority but also from the mechanism of authority (sciences, techniques, arts). Once a discourse thus driven by its own momentum into the backwater of the “unreal,” exiled from all gregarity, it has no recourse but to become the site, however exiguous, of an affirmation.
Figures - discursus - originally the action of running here and there, comings and goings, measures taken.
The lover cannot stop his mind from racing, and plotting against himself. These fragments of discourse are figures - in a gymnastic or choreographic acceptation, not a schema but in a much livelier way the body’s gesture caught in action, but not contemplated in repose: the body of athletes, orators, statutes: what in the straining body can be immobilized. So it with the lover at grips with his figures: he struggles in a kind of lunatic sport, he spends himself, like an athlete; he “phrases,” like an orator; he is caught, stuffed into a role, like a statue. The figure is the lover at work.
… the age-old convention which decides the order of our alphabet. Hence we have avoided the wiles of pure chance, which might have indeed produced logical sequences; for we must not, one mathematician tells us, “underestimate the power of chance to engender monsters”; the monster in this case, would have been emerging from a certain order of figures, a “philosophy of love” where we must look for no more than its affirmation.
References - What comes from books and from friends occasionally appears in the Marginalia of the text, in the form of names (for the books) and initials (for the friends).
Absence amorous absence functions in a single direction, expressed by the one who stays, never by the one who leaves: an always present I is constituted only by confrontation with an always absence you. To speak this absence is from the start to propose that the subject’s place and the other’s place cannot permute, it is to say: “I am loved less than I love.”
The lover who doesn’t forget sometimes dies of excess, exhaustion, and tension of memory.
Isn’t desire the same, whether the object is present or absent? Isn’t the object always absent? This isn’t the same languor: there are two words: Pothos, desire for the absent being, and Himeros, the more burning desire for the present being.
*Adorable Holes
By singular logic, the amorous subject perceives the other as a Whole, and, at the time same, this Whole seems to him to involve a remainder, which he cannot express.
I encounter millions of bodies in my life; of these millions, I may desire some hundreds; but of these hundreds, I love only one. The other with whom I am in love designates for me the specialty of my desire.
Intractable
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 cast.) Flouted in my enterprise (as it happens), I emerge from it neither victor not vanquished: I am tragic.
Why is it better to last that to burn?
This morning, I must get off an “important” letter right away — one on which the success of a certain undertaking depends; but instead I write a love letter — which I do not send. I gladly abandon dreary tasks, rational scruples, reactive undertakings imposed by the world, for the sake of a useless task deriving from a dazzling Duty: the lover’s Duty. I perform, discreetly, lunatic chores: I am the sole witness of my lunacy. What love lays bare in me is energy. Everything I do has a meaning (hence I can live without whining) but this meaning is an ineffable finality: it is merely the meaning of my strength. The painful, guilty, melancholy inflections, the whole reactive side of my everyday life is reversed.
To be Ascetic
- Since I am guilty of this, of that (I have - I assign myself - a thousand reasons for being so), I shall punish myself, I shall chasten by body: cut my hair very short, conceal my eyes behind dark glasses (a way of taking the veil), devote myself to the study of some serious and abstract branch of learning. I shall get up early and work while it is still dark outside, like a monk. I shall be very patient, a little sad, in a word, worthy, as it suits a man of resentment. I shall (hysterically) signify my mourning (the mourning which I assign myself) in my dress, my haircut, the regularity of my habits. This will be a gentle retreat; just that slight degree of retreat necessary to proper functioning of a discrete pathops.
Waiting I am waiting for an arrival, a return a promised sign. This can be futile or immensely pathetic: in Erwartung, a woman waits for her lover, at night in the forest; I am waiting for no more than a telephone call, but the anxiety is the same. Everything is solemn: I have sense of proportions.
Waiting is an enchantment. I have received orders not to move. Waiting for a telelphone call is thereby woven out of tiny unavowable interdictions to Infinity
Close Am I in love? - Yes, since I’m waiting. The lover’s fatal identity is precisely: I am the one who waits.
Dark Glasses
cacher / to hide - Disguises A deliberative figure: the amorous subject wonders, not whether he should declare his love to the loved being (this is not a figure of avowal) but to what degree he should conceal the turbulences of his passion; his desires, his distresses: in short, his excesses.
The heart is what I imagine I give. Each time this gift is returned to me, then it is little enough to say, with Werther, that the heart is what remains of me, once all the wit attributed to me is and undesired by me is taken away: the heart is what remains to me, and this heart that lies heavy on my heart is heavy with the ebb which has filled it with itself. rel:Distributed Gift - A gift in 100 obscure pieces
The darkest place, according to Chinese proverb, is always underneath the lamp.
Accidentally, Werther’s finger touches Charlotte’s their feet under the table happen to brush against each other. Werther might be engrossed by the meaning of these accidents; he might concentrate physically on these slight zones of contact and delight in this fragment of inert finger or foot, without concern for response. But Werther is not perverse, he is in love: he creates meaning, always and everywhere out of nothing, and it is meaning which thrills him: he is in the crucible of meaning. Every contact, for the lover, raises the question of an answer: the skin is asked to reply.
Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if my words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. rel: Manicule, Body in Books and Analysis of Love
Inexpressible Love Myths: Love should be sublimated in aesthetic creation. Yet Werther, who used to draw abundantly and skillfully, cannot draw Charlotte’s portrait (he can scarcely sketch her silhouette, which is precisely the thing about her that first captivated him.) “I have lost… the sacred, life-giving power with which I created worlds about me.”
To try to write love is to confront the muck of language: that region of hysteria where language is both too much and too little, excessive (by the limitless expansion of the ego, by emotive submersion) and impoverished (by the codes on which loves diminishes and levels it)
Every lover is mad, we are told. But can we imagine a madman in love? Never - I am entitled on to an impoverished, incomplete, metaphorical madness: love drive 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.
rel: Magic Action Words Whence a new view of /-love-you. Not as a symptom but as an action. I speak so that you may answer, and the scrupulous form (the letter) of the answer will assume an eflective value, in the manner of a formula. Hence it is not enough that the other should answer me with a mere signified, however positive (“So do I”): the addressed subject must take the responsibility of formulating, of proffering the I-love-you which extend: I love you, Pelléas says. —/ love you, too, Mélisande says.
What I want, deliriously, is to obtain the word. Magical, mythical? The Beast—held enchanted in his ugliness— loves Beauty; Beauty, obviously, does not love the Beast, but at the end, vanquished (unimportant by what; let us say by the conversations she has with the Beast), she, too, says the magic word: “Je vous aime, la Béte”; and immediately, through the sumptuous arpeggio of a harp, a new subject appears. Is this story an archaic one? Then here is another: a man suffers because his wife has left him; he wants her to come back, he wants—specifically— her to say I love you to him, and he, too, runs after the words; finally she says it to him: whereupon he faints dead away: a film made in 1975. And then, once again, the myth: the Flying Dutchman wanders the earth in search of the word; if he obtains it (by an oath of fidelity), he will cease wandering (what matters to the myth is not the rule of fidelity but its proflering, its song).
Love letters: Love Letters Made Easy - Gabrielle Rosiere
Goethe
Why do I turn once again to writing? Beloved, you must not ask such a question, For the truth is, I have nothing to tell you, All the same, your dear hands will hold this note.