The word [figures] is to be understood, not in the rhetorical sense, but rather in its gymnastic or choreographic acceptation . . . in a much livelier way, the body’s gesture caught in action and not contemplated in repose: the body of athletes, orators, statues: what in the straining body can be immobilized. So it is with the lover at grips with his figures: he struggles in a kind of lunatic sport, he spends himself, like an athlete; he “phrases.” like an orator; he is caught, stuffed into a role, like a statue. The figure is the lover at work.

Figures take shape insofar as we can recognize, in passing discourse, something that has been read, heard, felt. The figure is outlined (like a sign) and memorable (like an image or tale) . . . in order to constitute figures, we require neither more nor less than this guide: amorous feeling.

Throughout any love life, figures occur to the lover without any order, for on each occasion they depend on an (internal or external) accident. Confronting each of these incidents (what “befalls” him), the amorous subject draws on the reservoir (the thesaurus?) of figures, depending on the needs, the injunctions, or the pleasures of his image-repertoire. Each figure explodes, vibrates in and out of itself like a sound severed from any tune—or is repeated to satiety, like the motif of a hovering music. No logic links the figures, determines their contiguity . . . they stir collide, subside, return, vanish with no more order than the flight of mosquitoes. Amorous dis-cursus is not dialectical; it turns like a perpetual calendar, an encyclopedia of affective culture . . .

ROLAND BARTHES, from A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments

Pictured: April’s trove

*or (what “befalls” him)