sooo emotionally raw!! Barthes is a classic sappy, sensitive frenchman who overthinks every aspect of every encounter with his lover. but he takes it further than just harping on anxiety, he investigates the "nuance" of the origin of the feelings and ideas of "love" in his head. where do our ideas of what "love" is come from? Barthes would say, I think, that they largely come from the discourse on "love" we see in media (films, books etc.). He mainly uses psychoanalysis (Freud, Lacan etc.) and Goethe's "Werther" as lenses through which to read the experience of love, sometimes through direct quotations, sometimes through the mere reference of a name in the margin (a lone "Nietzsche" next to a paragraph with no explanation). This is the sense in which it really lives up to the name of "fragments". It can often read as disjointed ideas grouped arbitrarily in alphabetical order on a series of topics related to love from "Agony" to a linguistic analysis of the phrase "I-love-you". This also makes it more quickly readable though as it can come across as a series of notes jotted down and not always expanded upon fully, but always alluding to larger more interesting ideas.