absence / absence
Any episode of language which stages the absence of the loved object - whatever its cause and its duration - and which tends to transform this absence into an ordeal of abandonment.
"Now, absence can exist only as a consequence of the other: it is the other who leaves, it is I who remain. The other is in a condition of perpetual departure, of journeying; ... I - I who love, by converse vocation, am sedentary, motionless, at hand, in expectation, nailed to the spot, in suspense - like a package in some forgotten corner of a railway station. Amorous absence functions in a single direction, expressed by the one who stays, never by the one who leaves: an always present I is constituted only by confrontation with an always absent you...
In great haste, I reconstitute a memory, a confusion. A (classic) word comes from the body, which expresses the emotion of absence: to sigh: "to sigh for the bodily presence": the two halves of the androgyne sighs for each other, as if each breath, being incomplete, sought to mingle with the other: the image of the embrace, in that it melts the two images into a single one: in amorous absence, I am, sadly, an unglued image that dries, yellows, shrivels."
- Roland Barthes
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