Suddenly, a French critic, literary theorist, semiologist and structuralist philosopher was consecrated "man of the month" in Playboy magazine. Roland Barthes had written and published Fragments of a Love Speech. It was a best-seller. Why? According to the author himself, the need for this book was based on the following consideration: "the discourse of love is today of extreme loneliness". And he chose not to describe it, but to simulate the discourse of love, to simulate its portrait, not psychological, structural, in a book that "gives to read a place of word: the place of someone who speaks in himself, lovingly, in front of another (the beloved object), who does not speak". Barthes gave language—not voice—to lovers. He presented figures intrinsic to love, such as Absence, Heart, Dedication, or, my favorite, Wait, systemically, consecutively, ordered alphabetically and developed through fragments, quotations and recites, of the literary and philosophical tradition in dialogue with the feeling of loving and being in love. Then it was 1977. Today, Roland Barthes, has a bot on Twitter: barthes the lover (@bot_del_amor). His latest tweet: "Now there are no resonances; everything is calm, and it is worse" of the figure Exile. Since Thursday, April 6, he does not tweet, it does not work. Exiled, he no longer responds and no longer consoles the laments of his followers.
Now there are no resonances; Everything is calm, and it is worse.
— Barthes the Lover (@bot_del_amor) April 6, 2023
Beyond the bot as a program that is used in social networks to generate messages automatically and that publish permanent content of any concrete and specific type, beyond the bots that one can find on Twitter, writers and poets, some movies and series, creators of memes and creators of polemics, beyond the bot of Fragments of a love speech From Barthes, the interesting thing is how this bot operates like this book and why and how a book operates like a bot. The answer encompasses two main conceptions, the ideal: in the lover, the infatuation is a bot in the same way that in History, love is a bot. The second conception, the technique: the fragmentation of the discourse of love proposed by Roland Barthes, in a structural sense, of style, that is, authentically, in form and content, marked by impulsivity and the subjugation of the intertextuality of thoughts, memories, desires, some of their own, others alien to friends or great authors, is exactly the same fragmentation that characterizes the bot of Barthes the lover who, impulsive, automatic, systematically overwhelms or goes quoting fragments of the fragments of the love discourse intertextualizing them infinitely and particularly according to whom it overwhelms and to whom it goes.
It follows that in every man who says the absence of the other, the feminine declares itself: this man who hopes and suffers, is miraculously feminized.
— Barthes the Lover (@bot_del_amor) April 6, 2023
And this is how the thought of the lover works, intertextualizing any glimpse that moves him close to the loving subject, close to the one who loves himself. Impulsive, automatic, systematic, internal or external glimpses that overwhelm the mind and heart of the one who loves or go to his supplications. As Roland Barthes himself warns, he does not describe, he simulates. This third conception, may well be considered as such, would be the sentimental one. And it is this conception, the simplest, the most human, the sentimental or that of feeling, the most erratic and imperfect, no less real, less ideal or technical, less material, which made Barthes, clinging to the rules of seriousness, discretion and sobriety that academic protocols prescribed, discover himself improvising on "divine love" before an editor of Elle magazine. . We return, inevitably, to the first conception: love as a bot, as a program of the gods, persistent and intrusive, noble and disloyal, unpredictable, which to ancient and modern condemns us to sentimental intertextuality and the meme and spam of the romantic for ever and ever.