Lover's Discourse

‘May be the most detailed, painstaking anatomy of desire that we are ever likely to see or need again... An ecstatic celebration of love and language’ Washington PostThe language we use when we are in love is not a language we speak. It is a language addressed to ourselves and to our imaginary beloved. It is a language of solitude, of mythology, of what Barthes calls an 'image repertoire'. Reviving the notion of the amorous subject beyond psychological or clinical enterprises, Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse is a book for everyone who has ever been in love, or indeed, thought themselves to be immune to its power.

Love, here, is a state of the imagination, with the lover desperate to interpret the dire ambiguities inseparable from his role. This is a speculative book, and a melancholy one, an exploration of the idiom of anxiety. Barthes's love is a passion in the old, suffering sense of the word, May be the most detailed, painstaking anatomy of desire that we are ever likely to see or need again... All readers will find something they recognize in Barthes' recreation of the lover's fevered consciousness: The book is an ecstatic celebration of love and language and...readers interested in either or both...will enjoy savouring its rich and dark delights, Barthes's work, along with that of Wilde and Valéry, gives being an aesthete a good name... Defending the senses, he never betrayed the mind

Roland Barthes was born in 1915 and studied French literature and classics at the University of Paris. After teaching French at universities in Romania and Egypt, he joined the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique, where he devoted himself to research in sociology and lexicology. He was a professor at the College de France until his death in 1980.