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. My language t… - Roland Barthes

The petit-bourgeois is a man unable to imagine the Other. If he comes face to face with him, he blinds himself, ignores and denies him, or else transforms him into himself.

What affects me most powerfully: mourning in layers — a kind of sclerosis.

[Which means: no depth. Layers of surface — or rather, each layer: a totality. Units]

"As Narrative (Novel, Passion), love is a story which is accomplished, in the sacred sense of the word: it is a program which must be completed. For me, on the contrary, this story has already taken place; for what is event is exclusively the delight of which I have been the object and whose aftereffects I repeat (and fail to achieve). Enamoration is a drama, if we restore to this word the archaic meaning Nietzsche gives it: "Ancient drama envisioned great declamatory scenes, which excluded action (action took place before or behind the stage)." Amorous seduction (a pure hypnotic moment) takes place before discourse and behind the proscenium of consciousness: the amorous "event" is of a hieratic order: it is my own local legend, my little sacred history that I declaim to myself, and this declamation of a fait accompli (frozen, embalmed, removed from any praxis) is the lover's discourse."