A lover’s discourse in Liber Amoris

Abstract

Bringing Roland Barthes into dialogue with William Hazlitt’s Liber Amoris – into Hazlitt’s circle – is not an unprecedented move. Gregory Dart does this briefly in his introduction to Liber Amoris when he describes the book as an exploration of ‘“that madness we want’” in love.1

‘[T]hat madness we want’ is a phrase adapted from Roland Barthes’s question in A Lover’s Discourse, ‘shall I deliberate if I must go mad (is love, then, that madness I want?)’, and the subtle change of Barthes’s first person singular ‘I’ to Dart’s plural ‘we’ is significant.2

Dart’s suggestion, which is in tune with Barthes’s ideas about love, is that the madness of love is not only Hazlitt’s. It is, in other words, also ours.