The necessity of this book is based on the following assessment: today, love discourse is characterized by extreme loneliness. Thousands of subjects (who knows, really?) speak this discourse, but no one supports it. The surrounding languages have completely abandoned it, either ignoring, underestimating, or mocking it. Thus, this discourse is disconnected not only from power but also from its mechanisms (sciences, knowledge, arts). When a discourse deviates in this way, driven by its own force towards irrelevance, and behaves outside of all herd mentality, it has no other choice: it must become the place, even the most meager one, of an affirmation. This affirmation is, in short, the subject of the book that is inaugurated here.

Roland Barthes