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The Absent one:
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 state
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 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."
Historically, the discourse of absence os carried
on by the woman: Woman is sedentary, Man hunts, journeys; woman is faithful
(she waits), man is fickle (he sails away, he cruises). If is woman who
gives shape to absence, elaborates its fiction, for she has time to do
so. She weaves and she sings.
But isn't desire always the same, whether the object
is present or absent? Isn't the object always absent?
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. Absence persists - I must endure
it. Hence, I will manipulate it: transform the distortion of time into
oscillation, produce rhythm, make an entrance onto the shape of language.
(language is born of absence: the child has made himself a doll out of
a spool, throws it away and picks it up again, miming the mother's departure
and return: a paradigm is created). Absence becomes an active practice,
a business (which keeps me from doing anything else); there is a creation
of a fiction which has many roles (doubts, reproaches, desires, melancholies).
This staging of language postpones the other's death: a very short interval,
we are told, separates the time during which the child still believes his
mother to be absent and the time during which he believes her to be already
dead. To manipulate absence is to extend this interval, to delay as long
as possible the moment which the other might topple sharply from absence
into death.
Atopos (i.e., Unclassifiable,
of a ceaselessly unforeseen originality)
I surprise the other's atopia on his/her face each
time I read there a certain tremendous innocence: the other knows nothing
of the harm he or she has done me -- or, to put it less rhetorically, of
the harm he or she has given me. Is not the innocent party unclassifiable
(hence suspect in every society, which "knows where it is" only where it
can classify faults)?
X has many character traits by which it was not difficult to classify
him (he was "indiscreet," "wily," "indolent," etc.), but I had had, two
or three times, occasion to read in his eyes an expression of such an innocence
that I persisted, whatever happened, in setting him, so to speak, aside
from himself, outside of his own character. At that moment, I was exoneration
him from all criticism or commentary. As innocence, atopia resists description,
definition, language, which is classification of names (of faults). Being
atopic, the other makes language indecisive; one cannot speak of the other,
about the other; every attribute os false, painful, erroneous, awkward.
The other is unqualifiable (this would be the true meaning of atopos).
Waiting :
There is a scenography of waiting: I organize it, manipulate it, cut
out a proportion of time in which I shall mime the loss of the loved object
and provoke all the effects of a minor mourning. this is then acted out
as a play.
The setting represents the interior of a cafe: we have a rendezvous,
I am waiting. In the prologue, the sole actor of the play (and with reason),
I discern and indicate the other's delay; this delay is as yet only a mathematical
computable entity (I look at my watch several times); the prologue ends
with a brainstorm: I decide to "take it badly". I release the anxiety of
waiting. Act 1 now begins; it is occupied by suppositions: was there a
misunderstanding as to the time, the place? I try to recall the moment
when the rendezvous was made, the details which were supplied. What is
to be done (anxiety of behavior)? Try another cafe? But if the other comes
during these absences? Not seeing me, the other might leave, etc. Act 11
is the act of anger; I address violent reproaches to the absent one: "All
the same, he (she) could have..." "He (she) knows perfectly well".
"Oh, if she (he) could be here, so that I could reproach him (her) for
not being here. In Act 111, I attain to (I obtain?) anxiety in the pure
state: the anxiety of abandonment; U have just shifted in a second from
absence to death; the other is as if dead: explosion of grief: I am internally
livid. That is the play; it can be shortened by the other's arrival; if
the other arrives in act 1, the greeting is calm; if the other arrives
in act 11, there is a "scene"; if in act 111, there is recognition, the
action of grace: I breath deeply.
The being I am waiting for is not real. Like
the mother's breast for the infant, "I create and recreate it over and
over, starting from my capacity to love, starting from the need for it";
the other comes here where I am waiting, here where I have already created
him/her. And if the other does not come, I hallucinate the other: waiting
is a delirium.
The telephone: each time it rings, I snatch up the
receiver, I think it will be the loved being who is calling me (since that
being should call me); a little more effort and I "recognize" the other's
voice, I engage in the dialogue, to the point where I lash out furiously
against the importunate outsider who wakens me from my delirium. In the
cafe, anyone who comes in, bearing the faintest resemblance, is thereupon,
in the first impulse, recognized.
And, Long after the amorous relation is allayed,
I keep the habit of hallucination the being that I have loved: Sometimes
I am still in anxiety over a telephone call that is late, and no matter
who is on the line, I imagine I recognize the voice I once loved: I am
an amputee who still feels pain in his missing leg.
Am I in love? -- Yes, since I am waiting. The other
never waits. Sometimes I want to play the part of the one who doesn't wait;
I try to busy myself elsewhere, to arrive late; but I always lose at this
game: whatever I do, I find myself there, with nothing to do, punctual,
even ahead of time. The lover's fatal identity is precisely: I am the one
who waits.
A mandarin fell in love with courtesan. "I shall
be yours," she told him. "when you have spent a hundred 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 up his stool under his arm,
and went away.
Dark Glasses (The amorous subject wonders,
not whether he should declare his love to the loved being, but to what
degree he should conceal the turbulence of his passion: his desires, his
distresses; in short, his excesses.)
...Yet, to hide a passion totally (or even to hide, more simply, its
excess) is inconceivable: not because the human subject is too weak, but
because passion is in essence made to be seen: the hiding must be seen:
I want you to know that I am hiding something from you, that is the active
paradox I must resolve: at one and the same time it must be known and not
known: I want you to know that I don't want to show my feelings: that is
the message I address to the other. I advance pointing to my mask:
I set a mask upon my passion, but with a discreet (and wily) finger I designate
this mask.
Tutti Sistemati (The amorous subject sees everyone around him as "pigeonholed", each appearing to be granted a little practical and affective system of contractual liaisons from which he feels himself to be excluded; this inspires him with an ambiguous sentiment of envy and mockery.)
Game: there were as many chairs as children, minus
one; while the children marched around, a lady pounded on a piano; when
she stopped, everyone dashed for a chair and sat down, except the clumsiest,
the least brutal, or the unluckiest, who remained standing, stupid, de
trop: the lover.
How is it that the sistemati around me can inspire
me with envy? From what, seeing them, am I excluded? I want, I desire,
simply a structure. Of course there is not a happiness of structure; but
every structure is habitable, indeed that may be its best definition. I
can perfectly well inhabit what does not make me happy; I can simultaneously
complain and endure; I can reject the meaning of the structure I submit
to and traverse without displeasure certain of its everyday portions (habits,
minor satisfactions, little securities, endurable things, temporary tensions).
The other's structure (for the other always has
a life structure to which I do not belong) has something absurd about it:
I see the other insisting on living according to the same routine: kept
elsewhere, the other seems to me frozen, eternal, eternity can be conceived
as ridiculous.
The Uncertainty of Signs
(Whether he seeks to prove his love, or to discover if the other loves
him, the amorous subject has ne system of sure signs at his disposal).
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?
Freud to his fiancee: "The only thing that makes
me suffer is being in a situation where it is impossible for me to prove
my love to you."
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 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.
The love letter: (This figure refers to
the special dialectic of the love letter, both blank (encoded) and expressive
(charged with longing to signify desire).
Like desire, the love letter waits for an answer;
it implicitly enjoins the other to reply, for without a reply the other's
image changes, becomes other. This is what the young Freud explains so
authoritatively to his fiancee: "Yet I don't want my letters to keep
remaining unanswered, and I shall stop writing you altogether if you don't
write back. Perpetual monologues apropos of a loved being, which are neither
corrected nor nourished by that being, lead to erroneous notions concerning
mutual relations, and make us strangers to each other when we meet again,
so that we find things different from what, without realizing it, we imagined.
Images: (In the amorous realm, the
most painful wounds are inflicted more often by what one sees than by what
one knows).
("Suddenly, coming back from the coatroom, he sees
them in intimate conversation, leaning close to one another").
The image is presented, pure and distinct as a letter:
it is the letter of what pains me. Precise, complete, definitive, it leaves
no room for me, down to the last finicky detail: I am excluded from it
as excluded from it as from the primal scene, which exist only insofar
as it is framed within the contour of the key hole. Here then at last is
the meaning of the image, of any image: that from which I am excluded.
The Dedication (any episode of language
which accompanies any amorous gift, whether real or projected; and, more
generally, every gesture, whether actual or interior, by which the subject
dedicates something to the loved being).
The amorous gift is sought out, selected, and purchased
in the greatest excitement -- the kind of excitement which seems to be
of the order of orgasm. Strenuously I calculate whether this object will
give pleasure, whether it will disappoint, ot whether, on the contrary,
seeming too important, it will in and of itself betray the delirium --
or the snare in which I am caught. The amorous gift is a solemn one; swept
away by the devouring metonomy which governs the life of the imagination,
I transfer myself inside it altogether. By this object, I give you my all.
It is for this reason that I am mad with excitement, that I rush from shop
to shop, stubbornly tracking down the "right" fetish, the brilliant, successful
fetish which will perfectly suit your desire.
I have this fear: that the given object may not
function properly because of some insidious defect: If it is a box, (selected
very carefully), for example, the latch doesn't work (the shop being run
by society women; and moreover, the shop is called because I love.
Is it because I love that the latch doesn't work?). The delight of giving
the present then evaporates, and the subject knows that whatever he gives,
ge does not have it.
...The object I give is interpretable; it has a
meaning greatly in excess of its address.
End of segments from Roland Barthes' lovers' discourse.
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