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From: "wrinklesyournose" <wrinklesyournose@yahoo.com.au>
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Subject: Re: To Le monsieur qui ne me repond pas
Date: 14 May 2005 08:34:12 -0700
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To J.A
The absent one
Any episode of language which stages the absence of the loved object-
whatever its cause and its duration- and which tends to transform this
absence into an ordeal of abandonment.
1. Absence can exist only as a consequence of the other: it is the
other who leaves, it is I who remain. The other is in a condition of
perpetual departure, of journeying; the other is, by vocation, migrant,
fugitive; I- I who love, by converse vocation, am sedentary,
motionless, at hand, in expectation, nailed to the spot, in suspense-
like a package in some forgotten corner of a railway station. 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 absent you. To speak his 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".
2. Sometimes I have no difficulty enduring absence. Then I am "normal":
I fall in with the way "everyone" endures the departure of a beloved
person; I diligently obey the training by which I was very early
accustomed to be separated from my mother- which nonetheless remained,
at its source, a matter of suffering (not to say hysteria). I behave as
a well weaned subject; I can feel myself, meanwhile, on other things
besides the maternal breast.
This endured absence is nothing more or less than forgetfulness. 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).
3. I waken out of this forgetfulness very quickly. In great haste, I
reconstitute a memory, a confusion. A (classic) word comes from the
body, which expresses the emotion of absence: to sigh: "to sigh for the
bodily presence": the two halves of the androgyne sigh for each other,
as if each breath, being incomplete, sought to mingle with the other:
the image of the embrace, in that it melts the two images into a single
one: in amorous absence, I am, sadly, an unglued image that dries,
yellows, shrivels.
(But isn't desire always 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.)
4. Endlessly I sustain the discourse of the beloved's absence; actually
a preposterous situation; the other is absent as referent, present as
allocutory. This singular distortion generates a kind of insupportable
present; I am wedged between two tenses, that of the reference and that
of the allocution: you have gone (which I lament); you are here (since
I am addressing you). Whereupon I know what the present, that difficult
tense, is: a pure portion of anxiety.
I feel that I am sought after, surrounded, flattered. But the other is
absent; I invoke the other inwardly to keep me on the brink of this
mundane complacency, a temptation. I appeal to the other's "truth" (the
truth of which the other gives the sensation) against the hysteria of
seduction into which I feel myself slipping. I make the other's absence
responsible for my worldliness: I invoke the other's protection, the
other's return: let the other appear; take me away, like a mother who
comes looking for her child.
6. A Buddhist Koan says: "The master holds the disciple's head
underwater for a long, long time; gradually the bubble s become fewer;
at the last moment, the master pulls the disciple out and revives him:
when you have craved truth as you crave air, then you will know what
truth is". The absence of the other holds my head underwater; gradually
I drown, my air supply gives out: it is by asphyxia that I reconstitute
my truth and that I prepare what in love is Intractable.
The Intractable
1. Despite the difficulties of my story, despite discomforts, doubts,
despairs, despite impulses to be done with it, I unceasingly affirm
love, within myself, as a value. Though I listen to all the arguments
which the most divergent systems employ to demystify, to limit, to
erase, in short, to depreciate love, I persist: :"I know, I know, but
all the same.......". I refer the devaluations of love to a kind of
obscurantist ethic, to a let's pretend realism, against which I erect
the realism of value: I counter whatever "doesn't work" in love with
the affirmation of what is worthwhile. This stubbornness is love's
protest: for all the wealth of good reasons for "loving differently",
loving better, loving without being in love, etc, a stubborn voice is
raised which lasts a little longer: the voice of the Intractable lover.
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 one 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 all success and failure; I
have withdrawn from all finality, I live according to chance. Flouted
in my enterprise (as it happens), I emerge from it neither victor nor
vanquished: I am tragic.
(Someone tells me: this kind of love is not viable. But how can you
evaluate viability? Why is the viable a Good Thing? Why is it better to
last than to burn?
From, "Fragments of a Lover's Discourse", By Roland Barthes.
A mandarin fell in love with a courtesan. "I shall be yours", she told
him, "when you have spent 100 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.
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