Under the Sign of Cliché: A Lover’s Discourse, A Lover’s Discourse, A Lover’s Discourse…

What do I do when I title my work after another's? Is it a greeting, a probing or a parody? A self-deprecating or self-aggrandizing joke? A confession of love?

When Susan Sontag titled her 1978 essay on Walter Benjamin "Under the Sign of Saturn," and gave the collection in which it appeared the same name two years later, she was tacitly claiming for herself a Benjaminian "Saturnine" spirit and putting herself under the sign of Benjamin.1 Over the years, many writers and scholars have felt the same urge for identification or fellowship with Roland Barthes, titling their works after his late and unusual text of 1977, Fragments d'un discours amoureux (translated by Richard Howard and published in English as A Lover's Discourse: Fragments). This essay takes these ambiguous acts of textual mirroring as a starting point in its explorations and focuses on two contemporary works: Xiaolu Guo's A Lover's Discourse, published in 2020, and Anahid Nersessian's Keats's Odes: A Lover's Discourse, published the following year. Ultimately, I will suggest that the intertextual interaction between these works and Barthes's reveals something we might call 'the potential of cliché'; a potential I will relate to the affordances of critical theory.

Barthes's original Lover's Discourse is an encyclopedic, alphabetized selection of items appearing in a lover's "imaginaire" (or "Image-Repertoire," in Howard's translation).2 They comprise selected phrases, attitudes and poses adopted by the lover. Barthes's "arguments" expand on and consider these items, making the text a kind of meditation on the lover's complaint, from "s'abîmer" ("to be engulfed") all the way to "vouloir-saisir" ("will-to-possess").3 There is some ambiguity about the phrase 'discourse' in English and French: a discourse can signify both a way of communicating (eg: political discourse), and a specific instance of communication between two or more people. Barthes's subject is the former kind of discourse: the work describes the fraught language of a hypothetical lover, rather than staging a conversation between lovers. Yet many voices are present in the text, for the project demonstrates a marked interest in iteration. The work itself is a catalogue of clichés — phrases uttered by lovers over and over again, made novel through renewed attention — and it is also full of loving allusions to works of philosophy and literature. This is what Barthes calls "a discourse whose occasion is indeed the memory of the sites (books, encounters) where such and such a thing has been read, spoken, heard." ⁴ Rather than always choosing to directly quote from the writers who have inspired him, Barthes often incorporates their reflections on love into his own arguments in a series of ventriloquisms, with the only indication of their source being a writer's name floating ambiguously in the margin of the main text (such as "Proust" or "Lacan"). Ardent literary identification is a trait Barthes associates with the lover: "A long chain of equivalences links all the lovers in the world... I cling to the image of the lover, shut up with this image in the very enclosure of the book."5 Thus, the Discourse appears as a tapestry of other works, a commonplace-book on love in which all Barthes's favorites feature.

Moreover, Barthes draws attention to the capacity of his Discourse itself to be reiterated:

What we have been able to say below about waiting, anxiety, memory is no more than a modest supplement offered to the reader to be made free with, to be added to, subtracted from, and passed on to others... Ideally, the book would be a co-operative: "To the United Readers and Lovers."6

Those of us who do not speak French read the Discourse already iterated and already versioned in Howard's translation. Barthes positions his work as an addition and a subtraction, which itself can be added to and subtracted from, one entry in a discourse that stretches backwards and forwards in time. In this spirit, much of the work responding to the Discourse seems to happen under the aegis of imitation rather than analysis. Though there is as much a case for reading Barthes's lyrical, aphoristic text as a literary experiment as there is a work of applicable theory, much scholarship on the Discourse has more to do with extending or responding to Barthes's experiment than analyzing his strategies.7 Wherever the Discourse is read, a stream of reproductions seem to unspool.

Barthes's investment in iteration is a way into considering another of the Discourse's key concerns: the relation of the general to the particular. Lovers across time and space may speak the same phrases again and again, but each love and lover is different. This will prove important when considering our plural lovers' discourses. On the one hand, Barthes is keen to stress the aspects of his discourse that signal something untranslatable, irreducibly particular: the inexpressible remainder gestured to by the lover's word for his beloved, "adorable!", or the way the beloved always appears beyond classification, "atopos."8 There is no grand universalizing theory of love to be found here, "one might say that the figures are distributional but not integrative; they always remain on the same level: the lover speaks in bundles of sentences but does not integrate these sentences on a higher level, into a work; his is a horizontal discourse."9 There is an almost solipsistic privacy to the discourse, it is "my little sacred history that I declaim to myself."10 On the other hand, the very idea of a lover's discourse implies transferability: something that can travel across contexts. Often, Barthes mingles anecdotes of friends and lovers with his philosophical and literary touchstones. At times, the Discourse seems on the brink of erupting into disarmingly personal and specific territory as, for example, when a story is related about the lover's jealousy as "X" buys a watch and the sales clerk flirts with him.11 After all, Barthes suggests "that every discussion of love (however detached its tonality) inevitably involves a secret allocution (I am addressing someone whom you do not know but who is there, at the end of my maxims)."12 Yet Barthes is keen that this allocution remain "secret": these moments of personal specificity are fleeting and dissolved or integrated into the wider discourse, from which one cannot pick out the chronology of a single love story. Characters coded as "X" and "Y" remain X and Y, figures of shadowy anonymity, to be transformed in the image of the reader's own beloved.

The animating tension that the Discourse discovers between the general and the particular is the trace of other tensions involved in interpreting Barthes. Is he to be read primarily as a major structuralist critic, who honed semiotics as a tool for decoding all culture and literature? Or alternatively, to be interpreted as a writer who later disavowed the systematicity of his earlier thought, to be remembered primarily for his unabashed pleasure in literary analysis and for his stylish aphorisms? Was Barthes a describer and devisor of systems, or one who relished their explosion and worshipped the scattered items of his own personal taste, the "Fragments" evoked by the title of the Discourse? As Jonathan Culler points out, Barthes can be read as moving away from a systematic, politically motivated cultural and literary critique with The Pleasure of the Text in 1973, a work primarily interested in theorizing the reader's individual affective attachments.13 Indeed, there is a strain in A Lover's Discourse that seems distinctly suspicious of the traditional vocabulary of critical theory. Barthes explicitly lets us know that "Amorous discursus is not dialectical; it turns like a perpetual calendar, an encyclopedia of affective culture."14 Nor is love itself "dialectical," and the way that lovers argue is "neither practical nor dialectical."15 If one of the primary ways in which we designate Barthes is as a "theorist," then the Barthes of the Discourse seems wary of leaving the specifics of the love story in favor of the kind of expansive, general and generalizing work we call, in a catch-all term, "theory." We might almost spy in the Discourse a presage of theory's historical dissolution.

But if Barthes's Discourse ostentatiously rejects the possibility of the dialectical, the the responses to the work I will examine here are emphatically dialectical, in the sense that they involve mediation-for-the-sake-of-development, a teasing out of material latent in Barthes's text, an ongoing conversation.16 The Discourse rolls along into the twenty-first century and picks up deadbeats, dreamers and doctoral students, all drawn by a sense of affinity: amorous, stylistic or quirkily personal. Giving one's work an identical or near-identical title to Barthes's is a way of expressing affinity and playing with Barthes's (un)original equation of discourse with iteration, but, as with all acts of iteration, it also involves marking one's difference, as if to say: "here is my addition, here is something beyond that contained within the original Discourse." A cliché uttered for the thousandth time will resonate differently in each new context. For example, both "Lover's Discourses" of the 2020s explored here are written by women of color: their positionality in the intellectual and commercial marketplace is different before we even open their covers (whatever we make of the useful and vexed Barthesian concept of the death of the author). In this essay, I am going to explore these iterations-with-a-difference, and come to argue that the kind of iteration we call "cliché" — "A phrase or expression regarded as unoriginal or trite due to overuse", according to the OED — might be an exciting and fruitful way to think about that old method for relating the general to the particular, critical theory.17

The word "cliché" is, of course, loaded with negative connotations. Sociologist Anton Zijderveld sees clichés as the reified "containers of past experiences," or as the stale sayings and habits of the past, which have been handed down because of their social "function," but have lost true "meaning."18 Zijderveld, writing in the late seventies, depicts modernity as the era of the cliché, insofar as cultural products become clichéd ("unoriginal or trite due to overuse") in the era of mass-reproduction. Moreover, dwindling social ties to the institutions that traditionally ordered life (such as the church) mean that "clichés will have the tendency to function as substitutes for institutions."19 We cling to the wan and trivial clichés of bygone eras as a substitute for more profound ways of ordering our lives, and modernity, dominated by cliché, loses its Benjaminian aura, its rich specialness.20 Zijderveld rather neuters Walter Benjamin's complex attitude to the loss of "aura" in mechanical reproduction, and I would question his claim that clichés necessarily lack aura. After all, who has not found themselves uttering a truism, not without thinking, but because they were powerfully struck by its relevance in context? Because it seemed to glow with accrued truth? Who has not sensed, on some level, the auratic power of uttering those words again?

In fact, clichés are both useful and worthy of reflection (possess "function" and "meaning"), precisely because of their antiquity, their hand-me-down nature. Philosopher and media theorist Marshall McLuhan is more ambivalent than Zijderveld about the cliché. For McLuhan, clichés belong to the "rag-and-bone shop of history," and yet fascinating and useful things turn up in such rag-and-bone shops.21 Clichés, fished out of the rag-and-bone shop and used ingeniously by artists and writers in new contexts, can function fantastically as critical "probes" that help us to make breakthroughs in our understanding of the world.22 McLuhan gives the example of Eugene Ionesco's The Bald Soprano (1948), the script of which is composed entirely of "idiomatic English clichés" recast in "literary French," thus revealing the shallowness of a certain suburban discourse.23 "It is the worn-out cliché," writes McLuhan, "that reveals the creative or archetypal processes in language as in all other processes and artifacts."24 The spirit of Benjamin also seems present here: for Benjamin, insight is based on the recognition of the piled "wreckage upon wreckage" that constitutes history; revelation is powered by the "debris" of "catastrophe."25 The mistakes of the past can be a probe for making the future, and McLuhan shows us that critical engagement — rather than embarrassed abandonment — is the way to make cliché work for us. In a sideways argument-by-analogy, I will suggest that theory — like cliché — gives us ways to mediate the world that involve both recognition and development as we work our own experiences and perspectives into a critical conversation that constitutes an ongoing "lover's discourse." Titling one's work A Lover's Discourse is an act related to cliché's original meaning as a nineteenth-century word for a printing type used in mechanical reproduction, and therefore indelibly associated with repetition in print.26 We can imagine the words stamped on endless book-covers extending into the future: A Lover's Discourse, A Lover's Discourse, A Lover's Discourse... 

Xiaolu Guo: A Dialectical Discourse

Guo's novel A Lover's Discourse enacts a transplant of Barthes's text into a complex multilingual context. The narrator is a young Chinese woman who comes to London for her PhD and finds herself lonely in 2016's Brexit Britain; the novel subsequently charts her relationship with a man of German and Australian heritage. The epigraph Guo chooses from the original Discourse runs "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 tips of my words. My language trembles with desire."27 Language and languages are constantly "rub[bing]" against one another in the novel as words become disputed territories and sites of exchange: from the chapter-headings, which juxtapose Chinese characters with English words, to the couple's discussions of the moon's gender or the German word "Spüren" as against the English "feel."28 The narrator's doctoral project in film anthropology uses the Benjaminian idea of mechanical reproduction to examine a Chinese village where the majority of households are engaged in crafting commercial reproductions of Western art.29 In much the same way, the novel establishes itself as an iterated version of the Discourse, or an ambiguous double of a western text touched by Chinese culture and language.

Guo differentiates her text from Barthes's in a number of ways. Stylistically, the novel is a marked departure from Barthes, who takes sumptuous delight in his punning native French, while Guo's narrator writes in a stripped-back, unfussy English-as-second-language. The narrator explicitly addresses Empire of Signs, Barthes's 1970 book about travelling in Japan, and stresses her alienation rather than delight at being immersed in a foreign language.30 For Guo, moreover, language may well be a "skin," but she recognizes other kinds of touch, such as the "Skin to skin" contact the narrator is encouraged to have with her baby after giving birth for the first time: childbearing itself is a gendered aspect of romantic relationships completely without place, undreamt, within the original Discourse.31 But there are equally important continuities between the texts. Like Barthes, the narrator likes to experiment with mapping literary models of love onto personal ones, and muses on why she identifies with the young French woman over her Chinese lover in Marguerite Duras's The Lover ("For me, being female trumped everything else").32 Like Barthes, Guo incorporates autobiographical elements into her text, which can be measured against what is known of the author (who really did make a film about Chinese copyists of Western paintings).33 Ultimately, the narrator identifies warmly with Barthes, whom she regards as the "sole exception" to the "barrier" she feels when she reads books by male authors.34

Affirming parts of the original Discourse and rejecting others, Guo's novel amounts to a dialectical engagement with Barthes. Three of the short chapters in the middle of the novel constitute a direct wrestling with Barthes (Barthesian Discourse 1, 2 and 3), a discourse with the Discourse. The narrator realizes she has misunderstood something important about the work:

Everyone, including me, believed the book had been about two points of view: man/woman and woman/man thinking about each other and reflecting on their desire. I had always identified myself with the supposed woman in the discourse. But in fact the book was a homosexual man's view of love and desire. There was no discourse, at least no dialogue between men and women. Nor was there between men and men. It was like a solipsistic monologue. For all these years, the book had been a personal document for me, speaking to me. But now I had to admit it wasn't speaking to me, or of me, exactly. Or not in the way I thought it had. What should I make of it after this?35

There is an obvious irony to the phrase "Everyone, including me": the narrator assumes her own perspective to be universal, but the emphasis in the original Discourse on codedness and anonymity would read to many as unquestionably queer (Barthes even alludes to viewing Achilles and Patroclus as the ideal lovers "not according to a homosexual parti pris").36 However, rather than abandon the Discourse as remote from a (heterosexual, female) perspective, the narrator researches Barthes and searches for new ways in which he might be "speaking to" her. She discusses this with her lover, with whom she is living an itinerant life on an East London canal boat:

"As I understand it, for Barthes, the deepest love was not sexual", you remarked. "It was beyond sexual." "Ah. Beyond sexual!" I looked at you. That was exactly how I felt after being with you for almost a year [...] My love for you was to do with this boat life, this water, this landscape, and where we would finally moor.37

Something of Barthes (reinterpreted by and through the narrator's lover) still resonates strongly for the narrator: there has been a conflict and a progression, with some elements of the Discourse abandoned, some proving fertile in "this boat life, this water, this landscape." This process is presented as possible partly because the novel gives the "beloved" a chance to answer back, incorporating the voice of the narrator's partner, and thus circumventing what the narrator sees as the "solipsistic" quality of the original Discourse. Some of this reworking turns on the aforementioned ambiguity of the word "discourse": rather than being an exploration of the kind of speech typical to lovers, Guo's novel comprises a particular conversation. Unlike Barthes's tacit third-person references to "X," this novel is in the second person, and is directly addressed to the narrator's lover, offering an explicit and specific invitation to correspond. The chapters in which the narrator works out her relationship with Barthes turn out to function as a microcosm of the whole novel, which charts an ongoing push-and-pull between the lovers, only resolved at the novel's end when they finally decide where to settle; to "moor."

Of course, however strongly Guo's narrator rejects solipsism, her novel is still sensitive to the practical and philosophical thorniness of ever truly incorporating the other. This is not a co-authored text, and the problem of ventriloquism persists. There is a passage in which the narrator vividly imagines a conversation with her partner ("I imagined my frustration with your answer"), with each taking antagonistic sides in a debate about architecture, which gives the reader reason to wonder how many of the novel's other recorded conversations are imagined or partly imagined by the narrator: an interpolation of the other, just like Guo's treatment of Barthes.38 But these ambiguities are all part of Guo's sustained wrestling with the problems of what it means to write a "lover's discourse," a struggle which in itself becomes an interrogation of, and love letter to, the original Discourse. This means rifling around in the "rag and bone shop" of cliché that constitutes Barthes's text and adopting some elements while abandoning others. From the novel's first page, Guo probes the old formula "love at first sight": is it a "hypnosis," as Barthes calls it, or a fantasy, or rather "doesn't love always start from first sight?."39 Using the novel as a space for the generative marriage of clashing positions and ideas, Guo continues Barthes's conversation in a new form and context, unpacking the clichés of love handed down to us.

Anahid Nersessian: Love Triangles 

Nersessian's Keats's Odes: A Lover's Discourse is a work of autotheory that combines what the author herself calls "fairly conventional pieces of scholarship" on Keats's odes with the narration of a personal love story that is told "indirectly, in fits and starts, through words I borrowed when I couldn't use my own."40 Her introduction of Barthes into this already complex literary exchange, forming a triangle with herself and Keats, has to do with anatomizing love:

The problem, in Barthes's phrasing, is this: "not... make it stop! but: I want to understand (what is happening to me)!" Each of Keats's odes plumbs states of feeling that accompany the drama of this inquiry... it's hard for me to say what I must, that I wrote to understand what was happening to me ... Although this book is not a memoir but a work of literary criticism, the whole of a particular love is folded inside it.41

This working-out of love and the other can be a strangely solitary process, one in which transtemporal communication with long-gone writers can feel more vivid than human interaction in the present ("you spend a lot of time with dead people," a spiritual medium tells Nersessian).42 "The necessity for this book is to be found in the following consideration: that the lover's discourse is today of an extreme solitude" writes Barthes, stressing the intellectual homelessness of the language of love, which is spoken "by thousands of subjects" but sanctioned by no institutional or academic discourses, and so "exiled from all gregarity."43 Nersessian digs into this paradoxical loneliness, interested, like Guo, not only in the solitariness of the discourse itself, but the silence of the other. Here is Nersessian citing Barthes, drawing attention to the parallel between the apostrophic call of the odes to an absent interlocutor and the way Barthes

suggests that love is marked by a strange compulsion to speak to those who aren't there. This is a "preposterous situation": "You have gone (which I lament), you are here (since I am addressing you.)"... "Absence persists," and if we have to endure it we might as well "manipulate it: transform the distortion of time into an oscillation, produce rhythm," delaying "as long as possible the moment when the other might topple sharply from absence into death," might cross the line between not there now and never here again.44

Barthes himself functions as a kind of medium for Nersessian's readings of Keats, as a way of adding to a chorus and making lonely love less lonely. However, these metaphors are somewhat insufficient, for as we shall see, though Barthes is not frequently cited in this Discourse, he is not merely an elegant frame or channel for its personal and Keatsian meditations, but integral to its composition.

If Guo encourages her reader to speculate on the line between fiction and reality by incorporating verifiably autobiographical elements into her novel, an obvious function of the original Discourse for Nersessian is Barthes's oblique constellation of the academic and the personal. This is perhaps best illustrated in Nersessian's chapter on "Ode on Melancholy," which includes a cryptic personal anecdote about staying on an island in what is implied to be the fall-out of a romantic relationship. Nersessian writes of sustaining a minor injury on a walk; she gets

a thorn a little over a centimeter long stuck in the middle finger of my right hand, just above and to the left of my top knuckle... All of this, by the way, is true. The island is a real place, the woods there are real, and I really did get a thorn stuck in my finger. None of this is written in code. I'm sorry I can't be more specific, won't use names or say the year, who was president, or how old I was. Honestly I'm not trying to be coy, just decent, since this is not only my story to tell.45

The thorn stays embedded in Nersessian's skin as she travels and visits different friends, and she explicitly cites Barthes in order to talk about how her "wound" feels different around different people. "'The resistance of the wood varies,' warns Barthes, 'depending on the place where we drive in the nail.'"46 The quotation comes from Barthes's entry "Flayed," which describes "The particular sensibility of the amorous subject, which renders him vulnerable, defenseless to the slightest injuries."47 We are in the realm of skin again, or rather skinlessness, an encounter with other and text almost horribly intimate, and connected to that quality that lovers possess, a phrase Nersessian uses to describe Keats: "thin-skinned."48 In Barthes's original discourse, the lines on wood continue: "wood is not isotropic. Nor am I; I have my 'exquisite points.' The map of these points is known to me alone, and it is according to them that I make my way, avoiding or seeking this or that, depending on externally enigmatic counsel; I should like this map of moral acupuncture to be distributed preventively to my new acquaintances (who, moreover, could also utilize it to make me suffer more)."49 We return to the fetish of the specific and the acutely personal (a personal hidden behind the impersonality of a universal "lover's discourse"; an "I" that could easily be a "you," that could be, supposedly, any lover). If only you could see my particular "map," Barthes and Nersessian seem to taunt; if only you knew the island, the woods, the real name of X, but that, dear reader, is "known to me alone."

There is something of the "striptease" at work here (a word Nersessian herself uses to describe "Ode on Indolence"), and it can be hard to know how to read this bashful showiness.50 Susan Eilenberg, also citing the episode of the thorn, is very doubtful about Nersessian's tactics, not, it must be said, entirely unfairly:

This is not reading but teasing. It shocks us and withdraws... [Nersessian] speaks of herself as private, but it is not privacy that she uses, it is power — the power to display and to withhold. It is clear only that she is daring her readers to call her out on what she is doing. We cannot, though, because though her subject is ostensibly in the realm of public discourse, it is mined with private, secret things... It would be a violation of her and others' privacy to ask what any of this means. Why then does she set this before the public eye?51

Nersessian's writing does indeed raise questions around the ethics of readership; her work turns out to be figuratively and literally thorny. But if this Discourse is a "trap" for the reader (as Eilenberg elsewhere calls it), it is rather an ingenious one, luring the reader in with the sticky promise of revealed intimacies only to keep her ever-suspended in the problem of what kind of text she is reading, and to bring her, perhaps, into an unexpected intimacy with Keats.52 This bait-and-switch is strongly reminiscent of the original Discourse's swift movements between personal anecdote and readings of, say, Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther. In fact, Barthes is the missing figure in Eilenberg's critique of how Nersessian uses her "power to display and to withhold." The mobilization of a cliché iterated in Barthes's Discourse — that of the coy writer, who hints with a form of rhetorical paralipsis that they couldn't possibly spill their secrets — turns out to be productive ground for Nersessian's rich, unusual readings of Keats. These readings take us from the gendered horrors of sexual predation in the classroom, to canny constellations of "Ode to Melancholy" with Robert Burton and John Milton.53 In producing a new perspective on a much-studied poet, certain Barthesian clichés prove useful probes. Yet again, the Discourse is reworked as the grounds of innovation in a new context.

Barthes himself borrows Keats's words from "Ode to a Nightingale" — "half in love with easeful death" — to describe the lover's longing for engulfment and for a blissfully unknowing near-death that could alleviate love's pain.54 There is a sense in which, with the mediation of Barthes and Nersessian, Keats glosses and answers himself between these texts: the rightness of the match between Keats and Barthes is disclosed in the original Discourse. But it is, of course, this very mediation — this rewriting and reinterpreting — that makes Nersessian's loving study of Keats's studies of love worth reading. Thus, one makes oneself a place in an established discourse, while also creating the possibility of one for new readers. Nersessian writes:

As far as the past is concerned, we exceptionally modern people— the immigrant, the feminist, the communist, the differently desiring— will always be unsubstantiated, a possibility no one thought to put a frame around... You could describe this state of being unimaginable as a kind of unrequited love but even that implies a relationship, or at least a relation. What I have in mind is a more absolute sense of not mattering. I love Keats not because I belong in his poetry, but because his poetry wants so much to belong to us.55

What Nersessian loves about Keats is not his capacity to anticipate her — she who is "unimaginable" — but rather his openness to possibility, or what Keats himself might have called his "negative capability", which welcomes those with a shared sense of possibility.56 Nersessian loves Keats's openness and so opens their lover's discourse up to new subjects, who read her words and become acquainted with Keats anew.

Lyric poems such as Keats's have been described as involving triangulated address, in which apostrophe to a specific "you" (such as Petrarch's Laura or Sidney's Stella) also implicitly addresses the reader.57 In the intertextual encounters staged by Guo and Nersessian, address is at least squared, thus interpolating a biographical or fictional "you"; the contemporary reader; Barthes himself as an interlocutor, and, in Nersessian's case, Keats, so that the text calls backwards and forwards in time, with a porosity to the past, present, and future. We can judge for ourselves the individual success of Guo and Nersessian's Barthesian experiments (I am inclined to read both, like the original Discourse, as flawed, interesting works). What matters is the fact of experimentation with Barthes: the way these new Discourses reflect the text and depart from it for their own ends, in the operation Jacques Derrida refers to as différance; that is, a combined difference and deferral, leaving the conversation open.58 Carolyn Dinshaw, in a landmark work of queer literary criticism that mobilizes a Barthesian framework, describes herself as "lovingly cite[ing]" Barthes's own words to describe the mutual touch between certain writers and readers, a touch that extends across time:

[W]ere I a writer, and dead, how I would love it if my life, through the pains of some friendly and detached biographer... were to reduce itself to a few details, a few preferences, a few inflections, let us say: to "biographemes" whose distinction and mobility might go beyond any fate and come to touch, like Epicurean atoms, some future body, destined to the same dispersion.59

Here is one way of reading that generative tension in Barthes's work between the general and the particular. Readers and lovers of Barthes love him ardently, personally, particularly, but with a love that in the act of reading and writing transforms him into a newly modified version of himself, with a "mobility" to travel far beyond any particular context; with a love that can also give him to others.60 This, suggests Barthes, is the same for all writers, including his inheritors; all corporeal and literary bodies are "destined to the same dispersion." Remember Barthes's dedication, "To the United Readers and Lovers": if the historically situated beloved is a silent interlocutor in the Discourse, then the reader need not be; rather, she is its true addressee and conversant.61

Theory and Cliché: "there is a bliss in doubled, in redoubled speech"

What, you might ask, has all this to do with cliché? So far, I have described Barthes's Lover's Discourse as a probing catalogue of love's clichés with a built-in interest in iteration, and explored how two contemporary texts, titling themselves after the Discourse, respond to Barthes's work. These texts both iterate and interrogate the figures laid out in the "original" Discourse (a textual tapestry that can only be considered "original" in a very specific sense). From the conversational ("you can't judge a book by its cover") to the literary (which tend to fill books you can quite easily tell by their covers), clichés are hard to eliminate; by definition, they have some staying power. Clichés have a temporal transferability that our more idiosyncratic pronouncements elude, but this is a transferability that inevitably and excitingly accrues the new. "I love you," "I want you," "It's not you, it's me": iterated in different texts and contexts, these words have different meanings and produce different effects, as we have found in our three rather different Discourses. Type "cliché" into a search engine and you find thousands of helpful results letting you know how to avoid it. But what might cliché do for us? How might we lean into cliché, write in a way that makes cliché productive?

Rita Felski has followed Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's championing of "reparative reading" over "paranoid reading," by applying Paul Ricoeur's coinage, the "hermeneutics of suspicion," to literary critique.62 "Why are we so hyperarticulate about our adversaries," asks Felski, "and so excruciatingly tongue-tied about our loves?".63 The phrase "critique" most obviously connotes Marxist and materialist ways of reading (as in "critical theory"), but scholars like Felski are often equally disaffected with other theoretically-inflected scholarly practices: the "hermeneutics of suspicion" includes all "symptomatic reading, ideology critique, Foucauldian historicism, various techniques of scanning texts for signs of transgression or resistance."64 For Felski and her peers, literary theory has become the most tired methodological cliché of all. We have had enough of theory's unworkable abstractions, paranoid suspicions, and emperor's-new-clothes-posturing. Instead, such arguments run, let us return to the granular surface of the text and pick pleasurably through its terrain, paying particular attention to our own affective responses and never lifting our eyes to the presumptuous diagnosis of higher meaning. Let us make what Barthes might have called a "map" of "exquisite points" between ourselves and the text. And indeed, the postcritical tradition owes something major to Barthes, who, as I have already noted, turned away from his earlier, systematizing thought and towards considerations of the reader's affective experience in his later works.65 And yet, as we have explored, one of the most powerful things about the Discourse's clichés is their ability to hold both the specific and the general, to refresh themselves in new contexts and to interpolate new subjects. As Felski aptly points out elsewhere, readerly recognition always involves an acknowledgment of alterity as well as sympathy; this is the essence of its generative tension.66 What Guo's theoretically inclined novel and Nersessian's work of autotheory can tell us is that this very renewability is exactly why our stormy critical love affair with theory is not over. Rather than dwelling in the irreducible texture of the moment (the particular text, the particular time, the particular encounter), isn't it more thrilling to rub our language against the other and to extend our personal writing so that it becomes more than merely personal, so that it resounds in contexts beyond us? Theoretical works may contain any number of individual clichés, but we can also draw an analogy between the way we make use of theory to describe the world and the way we make use of cliché. Like (and as) cliché — that which is 'regarded as unoriginal or trite due to overuse' — theory may seem like received wisdom, may make us roll our eyes, and may be equally mobile and slippery, but it can still, paradoxically, surprise us, and still provide us with opportunities for fresh recognition.67

Contact with theory can rearrange the world, can strike like the lightning of love; even if, when we come out of the honeymoon period, we realize that much escapes any totalizing schema and that we will need additional equipment for reading both the world and the text. This has surely been my own experience, from the shock of my first teenage encounters with Marxist, feminist, and postcolonial writings, to the thrill I still feel when I come across a fresh theoretical approach to writing the world's wrongness. Anna Kornbluh's recent work of cultural theory, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late Capitalism (2024), produced this effect; I was energized by the plasticity of purpose to which Kornbluh put the concept of immediacy — by the sheer usefulness of her critique — and perhaps most attentive and interested at the points I found myself disagreeing with the book. Often, being what Felski calls "hyperarticulate about our adversaries" is tied up, part and parcel, with confessing our "loves." A figure in the Lover's Discourse is established, Barthes tells us, "if at least someone can say: 'That's so true! I recognize that scene of language.'"68 And through this recognition, love, yes: complicated, weird, electric love, for the gift of critical vision, for being incorporated into a way of seeing. 'Is it possible,' asks a character in Ali Smith's novel Autumn (2016), "to be in love not with someone but with their eyes. I mean, with how eyes that aren't yours let you see where you are, who you are."69 And here's Barthes again, whispering to us in parenthesis: "Love is blind: the proverb is false. Love opens his eyes wide, love produces clear-sightedness: I have, about you, of you, absolute knowledge."70

Aphorisms, clichés and theoretical maxims help us to see — even if what we end up seeing is more complex than that which could be contained within the original aphorism. For example, there is much more to be said of contemporary life in the neoliberal west than could ever be contained within the phrase "capitalist realism," but "capitalist realism" certainly gets us started.71 Similarly, the language of Barthes's Discourse serves as a useful provocation for Guo and Nersessian to examine their respective subjects (love, immigration, Keats) from a fresh perspective. These theoretical phrases also help us to speak, and to feel. Barthes writes of the paradoxical pleasure the lover derives from working himself up into a state:

I take a role: I am the one who is going to cry; and I play this role for myself, and it makes me cry: I am my own theater. And seeing me cry this way makes me cry all the more; and if the tears tend to decrease, I quickly repeat to myself the lacerating phrase that will set them flowing again. I have two speakers in myself, busy raising the tone, from one utterance to the next, as in the old stichomythias: there is a bliss in doubled, in redoubled speech, taken to the final din.72

Barthes seems to be thinking of Proust here, as he often is, though this passage does not cite the Recherche directly. Swann's Way describes "sobs which a beautiful line of poetry or a sad piece of news will wring from us, not when we are alone, but when we impart them to friends in whom we see ourselves reflected like a third person whose probable emotion affects them too."73 Though Barthes's lover, nakedly and unashamedly self-indulgent, "play[s] this role for [him]self" rather than confiding in a friend, it is the fact of the "two speakers" in him, externalizing his pain in speech, that allow him to feel it. Seeing oneself "reflected" in a poem or person can clarify our feelings, giving us just enough mediatory distance to experience what was within us all along. Similarly, speaking the much-iterated language of cultural and literary theory can work as a distancing mechanism that gives us a way to describe and understand what was always before us, producing the frisson of rightness. Bliss in doubled and redoubled speech.

Certainly, this "bliss" of recognition must be coupled with critical nuance; what McLuhan might have called attention to the cliché-as-probe. In order to determine the use of a particular theoretical cliché, we need to think historically. Paying attention to the way something becomes a cliché is somewhat subversive to the (pejoratively viewed) concept of cliché itself. The idea that a saying, concept, or style inherently "is" clichéd is misleading — clichés are in fact dependent on all sorts of historically and culturally situated factors; they do not spring fully-formed into being. For example, Barthes cites frequently from Werther to exemplify the tropes of the Discourse, but it would be difficult to claim that Werther himself was a type of lover who has existed eternally: Goethe's creation was particular to, and helped to inaugurate, a Romantic sensibility in Europe. Meanwhile, some of our most common idiomatic clichés are actually quite bizarre and particular ("elephant in the room," or "straight from the horse's mouth"). There is no inherent reason that these phrases should be the most usual way of expressing the sentiments to which they are tied; their coinage is part of a contingent historical process. Dismissing an idea or particular use of language as "clichéd" without examination can, in fact, be an ahistorical move: turning our backs with derision, we shut down the possibility of contextualization, experimentation, and analysis.

In the realm of literary and cultural theory, once-radical, fresh, and suggestive ideas become worn with time; become part of the linguistic pool in which newly spawned generations of critics swim. This necessitates an identification of our critical and theoretical truisms; it necessitates reconsiderations, paradigm shifts and often rejections. So it is, and so it should be. But rather than summarily dismiss the findings of literary criticism's most fertile decades, and try to slip the perceived unwieldiness of theory's great perceptual grids in favor of heady affective attachments to the text, better to ask: why is this a cliché? What is actually "clichéd" about a particular idea or term (its style, its content, the fact of its frequent iteration)? What has this cliché afforded us in the past? And is there a time when it might have sounded brand new?

Of course, there is something of a paradox at work here. If we examine clichés closely when we use them, don't they cease to be clichés, become thoughtful rather than hackneyed? However, what we are really talking about when we talk about cliché is the relationship between the world and the language we use to describe it; we are talking, in other words, about mediation. Kornbluh's book, which I mention being so struck by above, is a passionate argument for a return to ways of thinking, writing, and making art that prioritize mediation. For Kornbluh, immediacy is the contemporary period's "cultural dominant," holding the seductive promise of digital immersion, proximity to cults of personality, and an effacement of artistic medium, all of which prevent us from thinking with critical distance about the dire political and social realities before us.74 Hence the general interest in surface and affect in the humanities: in her words, "today's immediatist art aspires to void itself, and theory has been following in its wake," but "Like art itself, critical theory defamiliarizes and reconceptualizes in order to build [...] Artforms and theory alike demand the slow and uncertain work of making sense, countering immediacy with mediation."75 Art and theory are both ways of holding something at arm's length to gain perspective.

Barthes describes the "argument" that corresponds to each word in his Discourse as an "instrument of distancing, signboard à la Brecht"; his arguments are mediatory mechanisms.76 And isn't theory-as-cliché, practiced reflexively, a kind of mediation par excellence? Both theory and cliché give us ways of describing the world beyond ourselves that are at once personal and impersonal; that are as interesting when they fail as when they fit. When we, as literary critics, work with theory, we work under the sign of cliché: with all the limitations and, perhaps more interestingly, simmering potential that this position affords. Crucially, we need to think critically — is this indeed a piece of received wisdom that needs to be unpacked and perhaps abandoned (as will often be the case), or is this piece of theory-turned-cliché, when examined again at its source in a longer text, fresher than we could have imagined, and still capable of renewing our perceptions? Only by returning to the text and writing back will we find out — back to the rag-and-bone shop to root through the litter, back to compose one's amorous/enraged/amused response, one's dialectical addition, to the lover's discourse. Potential examples of this reappropriation of "received wisdom": when we use words like bourgeoisie or proletariat in a contemporary context; when we speak in the freighted Freudian language of the unconscious; when we speak of the [un]dead nature of the author. Couldn't there be something refreshing about encountering such ideas in dynamic contemporary criticism, after what is now a couple of decades of taboo? Is this not especially the case as we witness the escalating horrors of the 2020s, most starkly embodied in Israel's genocidal onslaught on Gaza, and reach for a vocabulary with which we might connect structural injustice with the cultural production that surrounds it? Couldn't the mediation provided by this old-new language prove crucial in our probing of word and world?

In Conclusion: Shoot for the Moon

This essay has explored the place of theory in the "lover's discourse" that constitutes critical practice, reading our use of theory through the figure of the cliché. I have explored two new works in this "lover's discourse," works that title themselves after Barthes's original text, and find in it the material for both imitation and departure. Examining Barthes's own work and that of his respondents tells us something important about the purpose theory serves in the process of being passed down and modified by new thinkers and writers. Theoretical work can unlock the potential of cliché; a potential that is poised between critique and iteration.

My argument is a case for the use of literary and cultural theory — as opposed to postcritical and adjacent ways of reading — that uses the language of the lover, and so derives some of its momentum from a principle of affect. Taking in the pleasures as well as the pragmatics of theoretical thought, it owes something to those reparative arguments about which it expresses doubt. Can we, in another cliché, have our cake and eat it too? Barthes certainly did: torn, as he was, between a love of the grandly systematic and the intimately specific. Theoretical thought need not involve an abandonment of the sensual or the thrilling: the work of Guo and Nersessian constitutes just a couple of examples of art and criticism engaging thoughtfully, and with evident personal pleasure, with theory. But it is nonetheless worth acknowledging that this essay has been an experiment in justifying the use of critical theory from "the other side," making use of a thinker who is not consistently associated with critique. It is the affirmation of a particular kind of work, rather than a demonstration, and as such, it rather abolishes the need for itself by its own end. I would rather read — and write — works of literary criticism that make dexterous use of theory than many more personal paeans to theory itself. But one last indulgence, before we kick away the ladder.

If I, like Nersessian, have tried to fold the whole of a particular love inside this essay, it is a particular love of the general. Or rather, a love of the movement between the general and the particular; the way that speaking about others can be a way of speaking about oneself, and speaking about oneself can be a way of speaking about others. Perhaps that sounds embarrassingly abstract or affected: I am confessing to a love of abstraction, lovers are affected (in every sense), and love is embarrassing. In the role of the lover, Barthes likens himself to a "very bad tenor": "like a huge animal, obscene and stupid, brightly lighted as in a show window, I declaim an elaborately encoded aria, without looking at the one I love, to whom I am supposed to be addressing myself."77 Embarrassment, ritual humiliation, and self-flagellation are among the key moods of the Discourse. Perhaps there is an element of the lover's embarrassment about contemporary reactions to theory: we are embarrassed by how well a theoretical truism or a ritual piety (much easier to tear down than to celebrate), describes the world as we experience it. We may feel ourselves exposed by emotion, "obscene and stupid," like Barthes's tenor. As Christopher Ricks observes, "Indignation stands interestingly to embarrassment; the one hot flush drives out the other, as fire fire, so that a common way of staving off embarrassment one would otherwise feel is by inciting oneself to indignation."78 Certainly, embarrassment over cliché dogs discussion of theory, especially theory that is feared to be somehow old-hat: better to be too-quick to censor, allowing indignation to follow embarrassment, and cast aside childish things, than risk looking passé. There is also something embarrassing — gauche — about utopianism. A Lover's Discourse, like so much of Barthes's work, has a utopian aspect: it is the imperfect, worldly realization of the "utopia of language," which is the perfect but inexpressible language of the imaginaire.79 Working with theory is a little like this: theory gestures to a perfectly neat world, which our real world will always be slightly messier than, slightly in excess of — but the utopian drive of theory for the perfect system and the perfect description goes some way to conjuring the world as it is. Theory is a gift of language with which to encounter reality. Or, a final cliché: shoot for the moon, and land among the stars.

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Olivia Sutherland is is the incoming Isenberg Junior Research Fellow in twentieth-century fiction at Worcester College, University of Oxford. Her work focuses largely on the political affordances of the novel form and the aesthetics of the contemporary period. Her first monograph, currently in progress, is provisionally entitled The Vatic Mode: Allusion and Prophetic Encounter in the Contemporary Novel. It explores the way allusive contemporary novels might position themselves as open-source spaces of shared reference, granting their readers a historical vantage-point for confronting the uncertain future. Her writing has appeared in Textual Practice.

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Banner Image is taken from "Tobias and the Angel," from the workshop of Andrea del Verrocchio, 1470-75, The National Gallery, London.

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References

1. Susan Sontag, "Under the Sign of Saturn" in Under the Sign of Saturn (Penguin, 2009), 109-36.[⤒]
2. Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse: Fragments, trans. Richard Howard (Penguin, 1978), 4.[⤒]
3. Barthes, A Lover's Discourse, 5, 10, 232.[⤒]
4. Barthes, A Lover's Discourse, 9.[⤒]
5. Barthes, A Lover's Discourse, 131.[⤒]
6. Barthes, A Lover's Discourse, 5.[⤒]
7. Simon Park, "New Fragments of a Lover's Discourse: A Creative-Critical Experiment," Exemplaria, 33, no. 3 (2021): 296-311.
   Robert C. Solomon, "A Lover's Reply (to Roland Barthes's A Lover's Discourse)" in In Defense of Sentimentality (Oxford University Press, 2004), 219-234.[⤒]
8. Barthes, A Lover's Discourse, 19, 35.[⤒]
9. Barthes, A Lover's Discourse, 7.[⤒]
10. Barthes, A Lover's Discourse, 94.[⤒]
11. Barthes, A Lover's Discourse, 53.[⤒]
12. Barthes, A Lover's Discourse, 74.[⤒]
13. Jonathan Culler, Barthes: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2002), 76-84.[⤒]
14. Barthes, A Lover's Discourse, 7.[⤒]
15. Barthes, A Lover's Discourse, 51, 207.[⤒]
16. Rather than attempting, within the constraints of this essay, a substantial engagement with the history of dialectics as a concept, I refer here to a couple of G.W.F. Hegel's definitions of dialectical reason. For Hegel, dialectical reasoning involves "the self-sublation of ... finite determinations by themselves and their transition into their opposites." Hegel, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Basic Outline, Part 1: Science of Logic, trans. and ed. Klaus Brinkmann and Daniel O. Dahlstrom (Cambridge University Press, 2010), 128. This "self-sublation" happens through recognition of an "immanent" contradiction within a concept; dialectical movement is thus "the immanent development of the concept, is the absolute method of the concept, the absolute method of cognition and at the same time the immanent soul of the content." Dialectical thought "negates the simple" in order to produce from within it a more developed concept, in a linear process of elucidation. Hegel, "Preface to the First Edition," The Science of Logic [1812], trans. and ed. George Di Giovanni (Cambridge University Press, 2015), 10. Readings of the Discourse that acknowledge and wrestle with its contradictions in order to produce modified versions of the original text can be considered "dialectical" in this sense.[⤒]
17. "Cliché," Oxford English Dictionary Online.[⤒]
18. Anton Zijderveld, On Clichés: The Supersedure of Meaning by Function in Modernity (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), 15, 10.[⤒]
19. Zijderveld, On Clichés, 34, 47.[⤒]
20. Zijderveld, On Clichés, 27-36.[⤒]
21. Marshall McLuhan and Wilfred Watson, From Cliché to Archetype (Pocket Books, 1971), 158.[⤒]
22. McLuhan and Watson, From Cliché to Archetype, 52.[⤒]
23. McLuhan and Watson, From Cliché to Archetype, 4-5.[⤒]
24. McLuhan and Watson, From Cliché to Archetype, 127.[⤒]
25. Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History" in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (Penguin, 2015), 245-255, 249.[⤒]
26. "Cliché", OED.[⤒]
27. Xiaolu Guo, A Lover's Discourse (Vintage, 2020), epigraph.[⤒]
28. Guo, A Lover's Discourse, 37, 69.[⤒]
29. Guo, A Lover's Discourse, 26.[⤒]
30. Guo, A Lover's Discourse, 198.[⤒]
31. Guo, A Lover's Discourse, 231.[⤒]
32. Guo, A Lover's Discourse, 91.[⤒]
33. As noted by Phoebe Mogharei in "Copies and Originals in 'A Lover's Discourse,'" Chicago Review of Books, October 16, 2020.[⤒]
34. Guo, A Lover's Discourse, 91-92.[⤒]
35. Guo, A Lover's Discourse, 81.[⤒]
36. Barthes, A Lover's Discourse, 227.[⤒]
37. Guo, A Lover's Discourse, 87.[⤒]
38. Guo, A Lover's Discourse, 111.[⤒]
39. Guo, A Lover's Discourse, 1.[⤒]
40. Anahid Nersessian, Keats's Odes: A Lover's Discourse (University of Chicago Press, 2021), 19.[⤒]
41. Nersessian, Keats's Odes, 18.[⤒]
42. Nersessian, Keats's Odes, 12.[⤒]
43. Barthes, A Lover's Discourse, 2.[⤒]
44. Nersessian, Keats's Odes, 16-17.[⤒]
45. Nersessian, Keats's Odes, 87.[⤒]
46. Nersessian, Keats's Odes, 88.[⤒]
47. Barthes, A Lover's Discourse, 95.[⤒]
48. Nersessian, Keats's Odes, 2.[⤒]
49. Barthes, A Lover's Discourse, 95.[⤒]
50. Nersessian, Keats's Odes, 66. Barthes himself understood the paradox of display and withdrawal at the heart of striptease: "Striptease [...] is based on a contradiction: Woman is desexualized at the very moment when she is stripped naked," Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1972), 84.[⤒]
51. Susan Eilenberg, "Hooted from the Stage," London Review of Books 46, no. 2 (25 January 2024).[⤒]
52. Eilenberg, "Hooted from the Stage."[⤒]
53. Nersessian, Keats's Odes, 52-55, 82-86.[⤒]
54. Barthes, A Lover's Discourse, 12.[⤒]
55. Nersessian, Keats's Odes, 15.[⤒]
56. John Keats, Letters of John Keats, ed. Robert Gittings (Oxford University Press, 1970), 43.[⤒]
57. See Jonathan Culler, Theory of the Lyric (Harvard University Press, 2015), 186, 243.[⤒]
58. Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl's Theory of Signs, trans. David B. Allison and Newton Garver (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 88.[⤒]
59. Carolyn Dinshaw, Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern (Duke University Press, 1999), 49-50.[⤒]
60. John Lurz has also written powerfully on the relation between identification and mediation in the citations of the Discourse specifically: citation "allow[s] us to articulate ourselves as a verbal hallucination, to identify ourselves with the distance of signification, to grasp ourselves at a remove," The Barthes Fantastic: Literature, Criticism and the Practice of Language (University of Chicago Press, 2025), 125.[⤒]
61. Barthes, A Lover's Discourse, 5.[⤒]
62. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Duke University Press Books, 2003). Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (University of Chicago Press, 2015), 1.[⤒]
63. Felski, The Limits of Critique, 13.[⤒]
64. Felski, The Limits of Critique, 3.[⤒]
65. See C. Namwali Serpell, "A Heap of Cliché" in Critique and Postcritique, eds. Elizabeth S. Anker and Rita Felski (Duke University Press, 2017), 153-82. In an argument that functions as an uncanny inversion of the one I am about to make (reproductions unspool), Serpell suggests persuasively that is precisely Barthes's use of cliché in his Discourse that discloses the possibility of a phenomenologically-tuned, postcritical methodology; one that draws attention to cliché as "a signifier of nonsignification," "a material form of language that affords cumulative effects" in "a paean to linguistic materiality," 165-67. But, as I argue in the latter part of my essay, clichés are not only ways of thinking about the particularly tactile pleasures of the text, but also portals to the thrill of abstraction...[⤒]
66. Felski, Uses of Literature (Wiley-Blackwell, 2008), 25.[⤒]
67. 'Cliché', OED.[⤒]
68. Barthes, A Lover's Discourse, 4.[⤒]
69. Ali Smith, Autumn (Hamish Hamilton, 2016), 160.[⤒]
70. Barthes, A Lover's Discourse, 228.[⤒]
71. Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Zer0 Books, 2009).[⤒]
72. Barthes, A Lover's Discourse, 161.[⤒]
73. Marcel Proust, Swann's Way, In Search of Lost Time, Volume 1, trans. Scott Moncrieff (Everyman, 2001), 482.[⤒]
74. Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late Capitalism (Verso Books, 2024), 11.[⤒]
75. Kornbluh, Immediacy, 20-21. One aspect of Kornbluh's argument to bear in mind is the complicity of "autotheory" in the aesthetics of immediacy (84), meaning she would almost certainly disapprove of Nersessian's book. Whether autotheory is, indeed, irredeemably lacking in mediatory capacity is matter for another essay.[⤒]
76. Barthes, A Lover's Discourse, 5.[⤒]
77. Barthes, A Lover's Discourse, 176.[⤒]
78. Christopher Ricks, Keats and Embarrassment (Oxford University Press, 1976), 3.[⤒]
79. Barthes, A Lover's Discourse, 99. On utopia, see Diana Knight, Barthes and Utopia: Space, Travel, Writing (Clarendon Press, 1997).[⤒]