Of course, the “serenade” is above all a declaration of love:

one takes the risk of declaring himself to the other. In the best-case scenario, a love story ensues.

But if you think about it, our love stories don’t consist of a single inaugural serenade: they are peppered with declarations, they are just an infinite series of declarations. The first reason for this is so clearly identified by Barthes in his Fragments d’un discours amoureux: “After the first confession, ‘I love you’ no longer means anything; it merely repeats in an enigmatic way, so empty does it seem, the old message (which perhaps did not pass through these words). I’m repeating it out of all relevance; it’s out of language, it’s rambling, where? Yes, “I love you” is said thousands of times. By definition. Just as you can only kiss someone once. So we declare our desire, our pleasure, we declare our lack of the other, our pain, and sometimes also our resentment, our hatred… So there’s a woman. She appears before the window of the man she loves. Juliet downstairs, Romeo upstairs. She wants him. She will do anything. The serenade can begin.

Arnaud Cathrine