Madeleine, of Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Marriage Plot, on A Lover’s Discourse by Roland Barthes: A Lover’s Discourse was the perfect cure for lovesickness. It was a repair manual for the heart, its one tool of the brain. If you used your head, if you became aware of how love was culturally constructed and began to see your symptoms as purely mental, if you recognize that being “in love” was only an idea, then you could liberate yourself from its tyranny. Madeleine knew all that. The problem was, it didn’t work. She could read Barthes’ deconstructions of love all day without feeling her love for Leosnard diminish the teeniest little bit. The more of A Lover’s Discourse she read, the more in love she felt. She recognized herself on every page. She identified with Barthes’ shadowy “I.” She didn’t want to be liberated from her emotions but to have their importance confirmed. Here was a book addressed to lovers, a book about being in love that contained the word love in just about every sentence. And, oh, how she loved it! (via This ideal reader « Sasha & The Silverfish)
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Madeleine, of Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Marriage Plot, on A Lover’s Discourse by Roland Barthes:

A Lover’s Discourse was the perfect cure for lovesickness. It was a repair manual for the heart, its one tool of the brain. If you used your head, if you became aware of how love was culturally constructed and began to see your symptoms as purely mental, if you recognize that being “in love” was only an idea, then you could liberate yourself from its tyranny. Madeleine knew all that. The problem was, it didn’t work. She could read Barthes’ deconstructions of love all day without feeling her love for Leosnard diminish the teeniest little bit. The more of A Lover’s Discourse she read, the more in love she felt. She recognized herself on every page. She identified with Barthes’ shadowy “I.” She didn’t want to be liberated from her emotions but to have their importance confirmed. Here was a book addressed to lovers, a book about being in love that contained the word love in just about every sentence. And, oh, how she loved it!

(via This ideal reader « Sasha & The Silverfish)

Source: silverfysh.wordpress.com

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  1. justanaccidentalhappiness reblogged this from sashawantsmore and added:
    Ah! That damn curse, the idea of
  2. sashawantsmore posted this