A Lover's Discourse

Big Frank has been reading Roland Barthes' "A Lover's Discourse". Here Barthes means by 'discourses' a kind of running around - comings and goings - the wanderings of the lover's mind. He calls these 'figures': "something that has been read, heard, felt". The entire book (an alphabetical list of these figures - a kind of encyclopedia, as it were) catalogues these 'figures' with literary, philosophical, and psychological references. It covers some 80 of his 'figures', everything from absence to affirmations to embarrassment to magic to ravishment and will-to-possess. Anyone who is 'there' or has been 'there' will recognize these figures.

Here's from the section entitled "The Uncertainty of Signs".

He begins with a quotation from Balzac:

"I look for signs, but of what? What is the object of my reading? Is it: am I loved (am I loved no longer, am I still loved)? Is it my future that I am trying to read, deciphering in what is inscribed the announcement of what will happen to me, according to a method which combines paleography and manticism? Isn't it rather, all things considered, that I remain suspended on this question, whose answer I tirelessly seek in the other's face: What am I worth?"

Then from Freud:

"Signs are not proofs, since anyone can produce false or ambiguous signs. Hence one falls back, paradoxically, on the omnipotence of language: since nothing assures language, I will regard it as the sole and final assurance: I shall no longer believe in interpretation. I shall receive every word from my other as a sign of truth; and when I speak, I shall not doubt that he, too, receives what I say as the truth. Whence the importance of declarations; I want to keep wresting from the other the formula of his feeling, and I keep telling him, on my side, that I love him: nothing is left to suggestion, to divination: for a thing to be known, it must be spoken; but also, once it is spoken, even very provisionally, it is true."