The Mind of a Lover

To be called a lover is to be an object of loving. A being with devotion and craving, enraptured in making mental monologues about what have been, and what should have not. Roland Barthes revealed what it means to stand as a lover. An extreme solitude, he said. Owned or disowned, he dwells in that position and speaks his language. Offering a subjective yet resonant monologue of thousands, perhaps millions, of lovers’ minds. Barthes is known for his structuralist semiotics ; How langue (language) and parole (speech) systems and how denotation (literal meaning of words) also connotation (personal meaning) can be attuned to conversations.

But in Lover’s Discourse, Barthes became almost romantically irrational as if an architect of semiotics had stepped on his own building’s debris. This article is a review, a immersed read of a lover’s discourse, where Barthes departed from the notion of structuralism, established signs, to an ambiguous, post-structural language of love. Certain dialogues and scenes in movies can certainly relate to this such as Wong Kar Wai’s In The Mood for Love, or Past Lives. In the introduction, he emphasized that to be a lover is to be exiled from a herd, a community, a segragation. The loneliest of loneliness.

The semiotics of love 

In fragments, Barthes signifies the ways of a lover, measuring her way here and there, mind racing with plans and schemes. Even making plots against herself is a discourse of a lover. A monologue hidden in a lover’s mind. Sometimes spoken, sometimes hidden, but like a body or figures, these languages have gestures. It is conjured and built to its shape. The figures in the form of words are the signs, and it represent a memory of a picture, a story. We recognized love from the feelings of a lover wrapped in their spoken languages. “It is said that words alone have specific uses, not sentences; but underneath each figure lies a sentence, frequently an unknown (unconscious?) one, which has its use in the signifying economy of the amorous subject”(Barthes,1978,6).

An example Barthes uses is when we are waiting for the love object and then anxiously we say things we do not bother to explain, such as; “he/she knows perfectly well. . .”, but knows what was never needed to be elaborated in a sense that fulfilled the emotions bluntly. Lacan called it verbal hallucinations.

In a structure of language, there is an order, but not in the figures of a lover. “The amorous subject draws on the reservoir (the thesaurus?) of figures, depending on the needs, the injunctions, or the pleasures of his image-repertoire¹.” He or she can blow words ubiquitously on any moment they need to. It doesn’t even have to be syntagmatically in order, or paradigmatically consecutive, but it comes and goes without permission, the pleasure, the suspense, the pain.   

But it certainly never comes out of indifference. Never an ennui.

The Great Narrative Other

Barthes explains how when love devastates us in each of our life scenes, forming a tragedy, it carries a meaning, but then it dies. In today’s sense, it indicates we want to move on, and sometimes between fear and hypocrisy, a vow uttered, as Barthes says: “Love is a trap which must be avoided from now on”. But before that, lovers endured agony from the moment they opened their eyes. Lovers had to go to a war of thought aggression every day with their mind. 

“This is the love story, subjugated to the great narrative Other.” As Barthes declares it. The lover wishes nothing but a disruption to their imaginary current, which is far from rational, and an effort to reduce the orderless or chaotic stream. This, will then, lead to a crisis that must be ‘gotten over’ with.

Comprendre/ Want to Understand

It was absurd to accept the state of our thoughts, to comprehend what is going on inside the existence of love. The amorous subject, we, wanted to understand love to be familiar with its language. The lover’s discourse. It seems there is an error in the network of our reasoning. As Barthes mentions repression as to “look in the face” of what drives our usual self to disappear. The Interpretation of being embraced by ‘whatever broken we are‘ in our cries. The longing to be understood and carried away by someone. 

Grasping consciousness as the medicine of our delirium. Barthes was playing with psychoanalysis in this fragment. Consciousness can stroll between the manifest and latent content, explained by the freudian slip or lapsus as the whistleblower, the “new unheard form of consciousness.”

Physical Attention Turn 

‘The other’s body,’ as Barthes wrote in fragments of A Lover’s Discourse, is a thorough scanning of the love object’s body parts. It is the act of noticing the hair, their palm gestures, the lips, the stare of their eyes, unfavorably. To scrutinize is how Barthes describes it. A mechanical search, an inspection in a calm, ‘no longer afraid’ manner, but often I have to add, as unnoticeably as possible. Even the movement of our love object can cause a desire to exchange its form for a different kind. From a perverse desire, back to our imaginary; our perception of reality.

Sometimes, coldly we stare at their lips moving around, the way they tucked her blouse, but ever so swiftly letting some of the first rows of buttons undone. The way their eyes glared at you. And, it was always the voice; the voice that made the initial alarm of the love object’s identity appear as the strongest form of existence. A fascination, without the need to be understood.

How do we declare love? The declaration is never as simple as talking to reach a certain conclusion or an answer. It was the relation that was made in between, as Barthes wrote:

“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” (Barthes,1978,p.73).

A prolonged pleasure was deliberately aimed by extending any form of literary in language. Talking or declaring it is a release, but also a never-ending discourse about a certain individual.

Barthes would call it Love atopia. Is that no one wants to have a conversation about love when no specific object is in their mind? The discourse is always for someone.

‘Looking Embarrassed’ in a Lover’s Discourse

The word Barthes used was : embarrassed, not shy. He explained it as a group scene, which constraints and at the same time, provoking an unspoken embarrassment. Like a silent movie, the amorous subject understood and being fully conscious of the role he have. There is an alert of the fascination in which he withheld. And by that, without being able to take the situations into account in front of the object, there is a silent knowledge; “I know that you know that I know.” Sometimes an awkwardness, and at other perverse moments, a pleasure. 

Then came the unbearable feeling of not wanting it to be continue. Yet it still went on, there is the patience in love of waiting in denial, sacrificing happiness in times of harsh truth, but soon drawn again into the swirl of hope and a tiny hint of exhilaration. Driven by the force of love? Barthes entails it in a Japanese folk poem on the Daruma doll. The legless figure, poked around but remains successful to regain its balance(ibid, 141) :

“Such is life, Falling over seven times, And getting up eight.” 

Jealousy in Lover’s Discourse

Jealousy never came in the early encounters with The Other. The threat of losing the undivided love becomes closer and closer, and more vivid. “A sentiment which is born in love and which is produced by the fear that the loved person prefers someone else (Émile Littré, 1958)”. This is the definition Barthes chose for jalousie. In this spectrum of jealousy, Barthes wasn’t exactly solid or honestly accurate in signifying it. Though he quoted from Freud, “When I love, I am very exclusive,” to which he interprets as giving in to conformity, while rejecting it, is straying from the law.

Barthes recallsy the story of Zuleikha seducing Joseph, while her husband,Potiphar, was never portrayed to be jealous was something that needed to be investigated. A scandal that requires an explanation. Barthes even lingers with his joke, that since the Joseph scene took place in Egypt, where Egypt was known under the zodiac sign of Gemini, the sign that excludes jealousy. The core of jealousy is known to came from a hint of being a loser, which abruptly invokes shame. In mythology, jealousy is known from the word zeal (zealous). Jealousy seem like an unworthy fuss; to suffer from it is like going crazy, a frivolous banality of the common; therefore, many did not want to admit it. But hey, that’s also contemplating to another diction of love : adoration.

Breaking The Spell or Remaining in The Unknown Territory of Obsession.

Sabotaging this love is in demand of a master plan. It was almost cruel to ourselves. The barbaric grip to keep engulfing our mind in a world between excitement and torturous languages, which in reality did not always reciprocate. A world where the language of love-longing can one day lead to the forefront of a conspicuous act. A defamation to ourselves concealed in a delusional membrane. An unhealed system in your mind told you to create a trauma bond with what you perceived as love. When instead it isn’t love, a form of coping with neglect in your childhood days. It reappears, and puzzles around with your rational perception of love. A thinking of “being chosen” as the ultimate goal of love, pursued in life. It feels good to chase, but it is devastating to accept the truth that it was merely nothing but a love spell, an illusion without reasoning. 

Why yes, because love isn’t supposed to be completely rational. Who could ever dispel fantasies even from their own consciousness? A Mechanical Creature certainly can programmed it. Zombies maybe, A Robot perhaps can delete it, store it in their darkest folder of files. But humans? Hardly.

Image Repertoire¹ : the condition of never being able to see yourself as others see you – a dynamic, mobile subject – but instead as a fleeting series of glimpses captured in the lens or mirror.

References :

Barthes, Roland, and Richard Howard. A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments. New York, Hill and Wang, 1978.

Matt Locke. “Image Repertoires.” TEST, 24 Nov. 2003, test.org.uk/2003/11/24/image-repertoires/. Accessed 5 July 2025.

Stanislas Aquarone. The Life and Works of Émile Littré, 1801-1881. 1958.

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