Writing subjects me to a severe exclusion, not only because it separates me from current (“popular”) language, but more essentially because it forbids me to “express myself”: who could express? By bringing to life the inconsistency of the subject, its atopy, dispelling the lure of the imagination, it makes all lyricism unsustainable (as the diction of a central “emotion”). Writing is an arid, ascetic enjoyment, not at all effusive. Now, in the case of an amorous perversion, this dryness becomes lacerating: I am obstructed, I cannot pass the spell (pure image) of a seduction into my writing: how can we talk about who, to whom we love? How to make affection resonate, if not through such complicated procedures, that it will lose all publicity, and therefore all joy? Here is a very subtle speech dysfunction, analogous to the fading stressful that, in a telephone conversation, sometimes affects only one of the two interlocutors. Proust described it very well – about something quite other than love (isn’t the heterological example often the best?). When the aunts Céline and Flora want to thank Swann for his Asti wine, they do so, in search of the right moment, excess of discretion, euphoria of language, somewhat insane astiism, in such an allusive way that no one understands it; they produce a double discourse, but, alas, not at all ambiguous, because the public side is as it were canceled and made totally insignificant: communication fails, not for lack of intelligibility, but because a true schizo operates between the subject’s emotion – complimenting or amorous – and the nullity, the aphony of its expression.
Taken from: Barthes by Roland Barthes