Preface to Love

2016

A Lover’s Discourse. Fragments is one of the most read text on love by the end of the twentieth century. Considered within the larger span of Roland Barthes’s works, his Fragments are a sort of preview for the main affective utopia Barthes ever dreamt of: the Neutral, as closeness and distance at the same time. The main trigger of Barthes febrile research of the Neutral is his conception of an affect apt to be separated from power. Love without exerting any pressure on the other. One of its origins may be considered his own difference: being homosexual in a society deprived of institutions meant to shelter homosexual affection.

2015

the aim of this paper is to confront two opposite views on the romantic idea of love and its role in contemporary Western societies. according to one of the analysed perspectives, represented most fully by anthony gid‐ dens, the romantic idea of love is seen as a dangerous delusion, bound to be abandoned in the rapidly changing societies of today. according to the other view, proposed by Pierre bourdieu, romantic love is still the only means to escape the power of symbolic domination. in conclusion, both accounts are analysed in terms of their underlying mythologies: victorian in case of giddens, romantic in case of bourdieu. notions of ‘ontologi‐ cal security’ and the ‘unity of the loving dyad’ are shown to be the cor‐ nerstones of powerful mythological systems encompassing our aims and modes of expression.

Sign Systems Studies, 2008

The article examines Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse (1977) in conjunction with du Maurier’s Trilby (1894) in order to present an argument about the similarities they share with the male masochistic fantasy as theorised by Deleuze in his Coldness and Cruelty (1989). Barthes’s insistence on the connection between art and love directs my approach. Trilby deals with love and aesthetics in the contexts of art, music, and narrative. The discourses of Trilby’s competing lovers over the same woman serve as a point of comparison against which I read Barthes’s dramatisation of a lover’s discourse. I argue that Barthes’s lover shares a number of central discursive figures with the Deleuzian masochistic lover. I examine Barthes’s suggestion about the tension between the non-narrative discourse of love and the metalanguage of conventional love stories. I focus on those figures in a lover’s discourse that Barthes identifies as keeping this discourse from turning into a love story. My argument is t...

Theory Now: Journal of Literature, Critique, and Thought, 2019

This article offers the literary and philosophical concept of “profane love”, following the juxtaposition of Giorgio Agamben’s concept of singular love and his political and poetic project of profanation, with the figurative and scattered notions of love found in Roland Barthes A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments. The article opens with a critique of the discursive state of love today and its relation to politics and power. Following Barthes idea of an obscene and Agamben’s notions of profanation and exposure, the article argues that love should be thought of as an experience in passivity that happens in the encounter and touch of two separate singularities. This process, the article argues, involves the imagination, and as such is thought of with regard to political and poetic imagination. The article thus thinks of Agamben’s notoriously pessimistic figure of the Homo-Sacer – the abandoned man – in a new light. It argues that the lover, as a participant in a radical experience of passivity and exposure, can also be thought of as abandoned, offering an affirmative perspective on Agamben’s political thought.

Interfaces: A Journal of Medieval European Literatures, 2016

This second issue of Interfaces: A Journal fo Medieval European Literatures addresses the subject of "The Theory and Phenomenology of Love." It brings together readings of medieval representations and explanations of love as an affection, passion, sentiment, attraction, or tension, with work on the connections between literary discourses of love and the history both of emotions and gender roles. Approaching the subject of the nature of love, and the ways it manifests itself, the authors create links between scientific and poetic discourse and highlight the relationship between the experiences of love, described and treated in literary texts, and the specific historical, cultural, and social environments in which those texts were produced. Not only do the articles reach original results within their fields; taken as a whole, the dossier, ranging as it does from the Late Antiquity to the fifteenth century, and across a Europe situated within a wider Eurasian space, offers de...

Hypatia

Philosophy & Social Criticism, 2010

Thoughts of Love, (ed Fiona and Gary Peters) Cambridge Scholars Press

Journal of the British Academy, 2018

This essay explores love poetry in its most militant and perverse forms. It examines three 'determinations' of love: first, how love is defined (determined), given that true love always feels new and singular, but language is a repetition engine which can make these professions of love seem quotational; second, why love is fixated on ends, including catastrophe, the apocalypse and death, and how it might be released (de-termined) from that fixation; and third, how love can teach us to be resolute (determined) to close the gap between the world we experience and the one we desire. Love has been described by poets and philosophers as fullness, and as lack or hunger; as fusion, and as splitting; as original, and as serial or repetitive; as the end of time, or a return to its beginnings in the lost paradises of infantile or primitive experience. Love provokes an anamnesis of an archaic experience of the ideal. It is associated with creativity and fecundity. But it also prompts p...