Roland Barthes on the violent despair of lovers
Wednesday 24th February 2016
Quote of the day: “The amorous catastrophe may be close to what has been called, in the psychotic domain, an extreme situation, ‘a situation experienced by the subject as irremediably bound to destroy him’; the image is drawn from what occurred at Dachau. Is it not indecent to compare the situation of the love-sick subject to that of an inmate of Dachau? Can one of the most unimaginable insults of History be compared with a trivial, childish, sophisticated, obscure incident occurring to a comfortable subject who is merely the victim of his own Image-repertoire? Yet these two situations have this in common: they are, literally, panic situations: situations without remainder, without return: I have projected myself into the other with such power that when I am without the other I cannot recover myself, regain myself: I am lost, forever.” (Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse)
