Love empties all possibilities of recovery. Falling in love is a one way ticket to the end of health. Barthes suggests that love is cyclic. /…/ This cycle strikes me not as love but flirtation, flirtation with survival. /…/ But love’s sole enthusiasm lies in consuming every possibility of falling in love again. /…/ The Love-Recovery cycle that Barthes maps in his works is of course Proustian but deeply resembles the ever refining self-fertilizing cycle of Aristotle (nothing must be wasted as it is needed in the next phase of the cycle, the next love, the next recovery from the last love). /…/ Love is only thinkable as one and only one tyrannical possibility: falling in love once and for all. R.N.
