To visit the Tower, then, is to enter into contact not with a historical Sacred, as is the case for the majority of monuments, but rather with a new nature, that of human space: the Tower is not a trace, a souvenir, in short culture; but an immediate consumption of a humanity made natural by that glance which transforms it into space.
Any demand is frigid until desire, until neurosis forms in it.
I have a disease; I see language.
It exists only for me. For you, it would be nothing but an indifferent picture.
Despite the difficulties of my story, despite discomforts, doubts, despairs, despite impulses to be done with it, I unceasingly affirm love, within myself, as a value.
My claim is to live to the full contradiction of my time.
The portrait-photograph is a closed field of forces. Four image-repertoires intersect here, oppose and distort each other. In front of the lens, I am at the same time: the one I think I am, the one I want others to think I am, the one the photographer thinks I am, and the one he makes use of to exhibit his art.
I counter whatever ‘doesn’t work’ in love with the affirmation of what is worthwhile. This stubbornness is love’s protest: for all the wealth of ‘good reasons’ for loving differently, loving better, loving without being in love, etc., a stubborn voice is raised which lasts a little longer: the voice of the intractable lover.
I limp along through my mourning.
Horrible figure of mourning: acedia, hard-heartedness: irritability, impotence to love. Anguished because I don’t know how to restore generosity to my life – or love. How to love?
A cold winter night. I’m warm enough, yet I’m alone. And I realize that I’ll ‘have’ to get used to existing quite ‘naturally’ within the solitude, functioning there, working there, accompanied by, ‘fastened to’ the “presence of absence.
The pleasure of the sentence is to a high degree cultural. The artifact created by rhetors, grammarians, linguists, teachers, writers, parents – this artifact is mimicked in a more or less ludic manner; we are playing with an exceptional object, whose paradox has been articulated by linguistics: immutably structured and yet infinitely renewable: something like chess.
To expend oneself, to bestir oneself for an impenetrable object is pure religion. To make the other into an insoluble riddle on which my life depends is to consecrate the other as a god; I shall never manage to solve the question the other asks me, the lover is not Oedipus. Then all that is left for me to do is to reverse my ignorance into truth.
This would be the structure of the “successful” couple: a little prohibition, a good deal of play; to designate desire and then to leave it alone, like those obliging natives who show you the path but don’t insist on accompanying you on your way.
What is a hero? The one who has the last word. Can we think of a hero who does not speak before dying?
The measurement of mourning: eighteen months for mourning a father, a mother.
The lover’s discourse is usually a smooth envelope which encases the Image, a very gentle glove around the loved being.
It is said that Time soothes mourning – No, Time makes nothing happen; it merely makes the emotivity of mourning pass.
If I like a photograph, if it disturbs me, I linger over it. What am I doing, during the whole times I remain with it? I look at it, I scrutinize it, as if I wanted to know more about the thing or the person it represents... I want to outline the loved face by thought, to make it into the unique field of an intense observation; I want to enlarge this face in order to see it better, to understand it better, to know its truth.
Miseries of a birth.