Quotes About Communication

The lover's discourse is usually a smooth envelope which encases the Image, a very gentle glove around the loved being.

To know that one does not write for the other, to know that these things I am going to write will never cause me to be loved by the one I love (the other), to know that writing compensates for nothing, sublimates nothing, that it is precisely there where you are not–this is the beginning of writing. — Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse: Fragments . (Hill and Wang; Second Printing edition June 1, 1979) Originally published 1977.

The photographic image is a message without a code.

Ce que cache mon langage, mon corps le dit» Roland Barthes (Fragments d'un discours amoureux)

Where you are tender, you speak your plural.

Endlessly I sustain the discourse of the beloved's absence; actually a preposterous situation; the other is absent as referent, present as allocutory. The 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.

Aussi, le style est-il toujours un secret[...]

All this means in fact that one believes oneself to have such sureness of intelligence that acknowledging an inability to understand calls in question the clarity of the author and not that of one's own mind.

Robar a un hombre su lenguaje en nombre del propio lenguaje: todos los crímenes legales comienzan así.

Askesis is addressed to the other: turn back, look at me, see what you have made of me. It is a blackmail: I raise before the other the figure of my own disappearance, as it will surely occur, if the other does not yield.

I am caught in this contradiction: on the one hand, I believe I know the other better than anyone and triumphantly 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.

la vérité est impossible avec le langage

Every contact, for the lover, raises the question of an answer: the skin is asked to reply.

To know that one does not write for the other, to know that these things that I am going to write will never cause me to be loved by the one I love (the other), to know that writing compensates for nothing, sublimates nothing, that it is precisely *where you are not*--that is the beginning of writing.

Gossip reduces the other to he/she, and this reduction is intolerable to me. For me the other is neither *he* nor *she* The other has only a name of his own, and her own name. The third person pronoun is a wicked pronoun; it is a pronoun of the non-person, it absents, it annuls.

This is why myth is experienced as innocent speech: not because its intentions are hidden—if they were hidden, they could not be efficacious—but because they are naturalised.

The lover's discourse is in a sense a series of No Exits

Lorsque aucune langue connue n'est à votre disposition, il faut bien se résoudre à voler un langage - comme on volait autrefois un pain. Tous ceux - légion - qui sont hors du Pouvoir, sont contraints au vol de langage.

As proffering, I love you is on the side of expenditure. Those who seek the proffering of the word (lyric poets, liars, wanderers) are subjects of expenditure; they spend the word as if it were impertinent (base) that it be recovered somewhere; they are at the extreme limit of language, where language itself...recognizes that it is without backup or guarantee, working without a net

The dream: to know a foreign language yet not to understand it: to perceive the difference in it without that difference ever being recuperated by the superficial sociality of discourse, communication or vulgarity... to undo our own "reality" under the effect of other formulations, other syntaxes... in a word, to descend into the untranslatable.

Writing, on the contrary, is always rooted in something beyond language, it develops like a seed, not like a line, it manifests an essence and holds the threat of a secret, it is an anti­ communication, it is intimidating.

Aucun n'est d'un métal si pur qu'il laisse l'autre sans voix.

Nije li najbolnija to?ka tog žalovanja u tome što moram izgubiti jedan jezik - ljubavni jezik? Svršeno je s onim 'Volim te.')

This is the meaning of what is euphemistically called *dialogue*: not to listen to each other, but to submit in common to an egalitarian principle of the distribution of language goods.