Love as Morality: The Non-Will-to- Possess or the Utopia of Affectivity in Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse Alexandru Matei Department of Applied Modern Languages, Lumina – The University of South-East Europe, 64b, Colentina Avenue, Bucharest, Romania alexandru.matei@lumina.org A Lover’s Discourse. Fragments is one of the most read text on love by the end of the twentieth century. Considered within the larger span of Roland Barthes’s works, his Fragments are a sort of preview for the main affective utopia Barthes ever dreamt of: the Neutral, as closeness and distance at the same time. The main trigger of Barthes febrile research of the Neutral is his conception of an affect apt to be separated from power. Love without exerting any pressure on the other. One of its origins may be considered his own difference: being homosexual in a society deprived of institutions meant to shelter homosexual affection. Keywords: love / Barthes, Roland: A Lover’s Discourse. Fragments / affect theory / language and power 31 Primerjalna književnost (Ljubljana) 39.1 (2016) Pour que la pensée du NVS puisse rompre avec le système de l’Imaginaire, il faut que je parvienne (par la détermination de quelle fatigue obscure?) à me laisser tomber quelque part hors du langage, dans l’inerte, et, d’une certaine manière, tout simplement : m’asseoir («Assis paisiblement sans rien faire, le printemps vient et l’herbe croît d’ellemême»). Et de nouveau l’Orient: ne pas vouloir saisir le nonvouloirsaisir. (Barthes, OC, V 1 286–287) One of the best known European texts on/about/with love written in the late twentieth century is Fragments d’un discours amoureux (A lover’s dis- course. Fragments). Its author was, at that time, famous: no wonder the book 1 We refer to the last edition (2002) of Roland Barthes’s complete works as “OC” (from Oeuvres complètes) plus the number of the volume (I–V).