Because

Because I am unhappy with (my) writing
Because I am overwhelmed by ______
Because I know many of my readers are lovahs (ipso facto or by choice)
I will now present a few block quotations from A Lover's Discourse: Fragments or, as it could be known, True Facts About Life

Agony/Anxiety

2. The psychotic lives in the terror of breakdown (against which the various psychoses are merely defenses). But "the clinical fear of breakdown is the fear of a breakdown which has already been experienced (primitive agony) ... and there are moments when a patient needs to be told that the breakdown, fear of which is wrecking his life, has already occurred." Similarly, it seems, for the lover's anxiety: it is the fear of a mourning which has already occurred, at the very origin of love, from the moment when I was first "ravished." Someone would have to be able to tell me: "Don't be anxious anymore--you've already lost him/her."

To Be Ascetic

Whether he feels guilty with regard to the loved being, or whether he seeks to impress that being by representing his unhappiness, the amorous subject outlines an ascetic behavior of self-punishment.


1. Since I am guilty of this, of that (I have --I assign myself--a thousand reasons for being so), I shall punish myself, I shall chasten by body: cut my hair very short, conceal my eyes behind dark glasses (a way of taking the veil), devote myself to the study of some serious and abstract branch of learning. I shall get up early and work while it is still dark outside, like a monk. I shall be very patient, a little sad, in a word, worthy, as suits a man of resentment. I shall (hysterically) signify my mourning (the mourning which I assign myself) in my dress, my haircut, the regularity of my habits. This will be a gentle retreat; just that slight degree of retreat necessary to proper functioning of a discrete pathos

Absence

4. 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?)

Talking

1. Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words...

The Unknowable

1. I am caught in this contradiction: on ethe one hand, I believe I know the other better than anyone and triumpantly assert my knowledge to the other (I know you--I'm the only one who really knows you!); and on the other hand, I am often struck by the obvious fact that the other is impenetrable, intractable, not to be found; I cannot open up the other, trace back the other's origins, solve the riddle. Where does the other come from? Who is the other? I wear myself out, I shall never know.

(Of everyone I had know, X was certainly the most impenetrable. This was because you never know anything about his desire: isn't knowing someone precisely that--knowing his desire? I knew everything, immediately, about Y's desires, hence Y himself was obvious to me, and I was inclined to love him no longer in a state of terro but indulgently, the way a mother loves her child.)

Reversal: "I can't get to know you" means "I shall never know what you really think of me." I cannot decipher you because I do not know how you decipher me.

...

3. Or again, instead of trying to define the other ("What is he?"), I turn to myself: "What do I want, wanting to know you?" What would happen if I decided to define you as a force and not as a person? And if I were to situate myself as another force confronting yours? This would happen: my other would be defined solely by the suffering or the pleasure he affords me.