Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire

The heart is the organ of desire (the heart swells, weakens, etc., like the sexual organs), as it is held, enchanted, within the domain of the Image-repertoire. What will the world, what will the other do with my desire? That is the anxiety in which are gathered all the heart's movements, all the heart's 'problems.

Mass culture is a machine for showing desire; here is what must interest you, it says, as if it guessed that men are incapable of finding what to desire themselves.

But isn't desire always the same, whether the object is present or absent? Isn't the object always absent?

(I was looking at everything in the other's face, the other'sbody, coldly : lashes, toenail, thin eyebrows, thin lips, theluster of the eyes, a mole, a way of holding a cigarette; Iwas fascinated-fascination being, after all, only the extremeof detachment-by a kind of colored ceramicized,vitrified figurine in which I could read, without understandinganything about it, the cause of my desire. )

Language is a skin : I rub my language against theother. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers atthe tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.

Absence is the figure of privation; simultaneously, I desire and I need. Desire is squashed against need: that is the obsessive phenomenon of all amorous sentiment.

As a general rule, desire is always marketable: we don’t do anything but sell, buy, exchange desires. . . . And I think of Bloy’s words: “there is nothing perfectly beautiful except what is invisible and above all unbuyable.