A Lover's Discourse: Guglielmo Castelli

Barthes: “I dilute myself, I swoon in order to escape that density, that clogging which makes me into a responsible subject.” 3

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A second scene has the color of tobacco, stained wood, and amber light. Now, three figures are together inside a vitrine, resembling a fin di siècle store display, a fish tank, or a museum diorama. The three are so close to one another now, that the boundaries between the bodies are blurred, their hips and buttocks and legs flow into one another in a kind of dance. There is also a flow of forms like genitals, fluids, organs, not belonging to any individual but all of them, as one. They have succumbed to complete and total co-dependency, co-embodiment, ecstasy. Is this the paradise that they built for themselves, from their Edenic prison? Is this a love like fusion, a soft annihilation, a euphoria? But this too, cannot last. The disappearance of the self into others is the lover’s fantasy. For these boneless bodies, like liquid dolls, have more recombining and reforming to do, and they belong to their environment as much as to one another. In the foreground of the scene an eerie hand with a sharp knife approaches, which seems destined to cut the lovers apart. But they are survivors. They will not be lost in each other forever, will not be annihilated, but will split and swim. To continue to constitute new worlds in which to survive, from the old one. That is all we have.

Notes

1. Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse (London, Vintage, 2018), p.10. Originally published 1977, French. Translation by Richard Howard, Copyright Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc. 1978 2. In conversation with the author, 2023 3. Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse , p. 12

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