25 July

“There is, then, a contradiction of love. We cannot intercept the signs of a loved person without proceeding from worlds that have not waited for us to take form, that formed themselves with other persons, and in which we are at first only an object among the rest. The lover wants his beloved to devote to him her preferences, her gestures, her caresses. But the beloved’s gestures, at the very moment they are addressed to us, still express that unknown world that excludes us. …jealousy is deeper than love, it contain’s love’s truth. This is because jealousy goes further in the apprehension and interpretation of signs. It is the destination of love, its finality. Indeed, it is inevitable that the signs of a loved person, once we ‘explicate’ them, should be revealed as deceptive: addressed to us, applied to us, they nonetheless express worlds that exclude us and that the beloved will not and cannot make us know. Not by virtue of any particular ill will on the beloved’s part, but of a deeper contradiction, which inheres in the nature of love…” Gilles Deleuze Proust and Signs