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 trembles with desire. The emotion derives from a double contact: on the one hand, a whole activity of discourse discreetly, indirectly focuses upon a single signified, which is ‘I desire you,’ and releases, nourishes, ramifies it to the point of explosion (language experiences orgasm upon touching itself); on the other hand, I enwrap the other in my words, I caress, brush against, talk up this contact, I extend myself to make the commentary to which I submit the relation endure. —Roland Barthes, from A Lover’s Discourse, quoted in the essay “Eros and the Erotics of Writing,” Radiant Lyre: Essays on Lyric Poetry, ed. by David Baker and Ann Townsend (Graywolf Press, 2007)
Posted on: Sat, 08 Mar 2014 10:53:44 +0000
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