HOME | DD

Description
1. "Werther identifies himself with every lost lover: he is the madman who loved Charlotte and goes out picking flowers in midwinter; he is the young footman in love with a widow, who has just killed his rival—indeed, Werther wants to intercede for this youth, whom he cannot rescue from the law: "Nothing can save you, poor wretch! Indeed, I see that nothing can save us." Identification is not a psychological process; it is a pure structural operation: I am the one who has the same place I have.

2. I devour every amorous system with my gaze and in it discern the place which would be mine if I were a part of that system. I perceive not analogies but homologies: I note, for instance, that I am to X what Y is to Z; everything I am told about Y affects me powerfully, though Y's person is a matter of indifference to me, or even unknown; I am caught in a mirror which changes position and which reflects me wherever there is a dual structure. Worse still: it can happen that on the other structure. Worse still: it can happen on the other hand I am loved by something I do not love; now, far from helping me(by the gratification it implies or the diversion it might constitute), this situation is painful to me: I see myself in the other who loves without being loved, I recognise in him the very gestures of my own unhappiness, but this time it is I myself who am the active agent of this unhappiness: I experience myself both as victim and executioner."

watercolour and pencil on paper.
Bettie Page.

Description
1. "Werther identifies himself with every lost lover: he is the madman who loved Charlotte and goes out picking flowers in midwinter; he is the young footman in love with a widow, who has just killed his rival—indeed, Werther wants to intercede for this youth, whom he cannot rescue from the law: "Nothing can save you, poor wretch! Indeed, I see that nothing can save us." Identification is not a psychological process; it is a pure structural operation: I am the one who has the same place I have.

2. I devour every amorous system with my gaze and in it discern the place which would be mine if I were a part of that system. I perceive not analogies but homologies: I note, for instance, that I am to X what Y is to Z; everything I am told about Y affects me powerfully, though Y's person is a matter of indifference to me, or even unknown; I am caught in a mirror which changes position and which reflects me wherever there is a dual structure. Worse still: it can happen that on the other structure. Worse still: it can happen on the other hand I am loved by something I do not love; now, far from helping me(by the gratification it implies or the diversion it might constitute), this situation is painful to me: I see myself in the other who loves without being loved, I recognise in him the very gestures of my own unhappiness, but this time it is I myself who am the active agent of this unhappiness: I experience myself both as victim and executioner."

watercolour and pencil on paper.
Bettie Page.