No sky for their dispersing

 

from Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable

eBay Chronicles

by Mark Jacob's for Mark by Mark Jacob's in collaboration with Mark Jacob's for Mark by Mark Jacob's

Roland Barthes, from A Lover's Discourse: "Tenderness"

1. There is not only need for tenderness, there is also need to be tender for the other: we shut ourselves up in a mutual kindness, we mother each other reciprocally; we return to the root of all relations, where need and desire join. The tender gesture says: ask me anything that can put your body to sleep, but also do not forget that I desire you – a little, lightly, without trying to seize anything right away.

Sexual pleasure is not metonymic: once taken, it is cut off: it was the Feast, always terminated and instituted only by a temporary, supervised lifting of the prohibition. Tenderness, on the contrary, is nothing but an infinite, insatiable metonymy; the gesture, the episode of tenderness (the delicious harmony of an evening) can only be interrupted with laceration: everything seems called into question once again: return of rhythm - vritti - disappearance of nirvana.

2. If I receive the tender gesture within the field of demand, I am fulfilled: is this gesture not a kind of miraculous crystallization of presence? But if I receive it (and this can be simultaneous) within the field of desire, I am disturbed: tenderness, by rights, is not exclusive, hence I must admit that what I receive, others receive as well (sometimes I am even afforded the spectacle of this). Where you are tender, you speak your plural.