The aim of this book is to explore the gendering of desire in the songs of the trouvères, with the accent in particular on feminine desire. It will consider desire as an aspect of register and genre in the light of the Saussurian understanding that signification is established through difference. While this understanding is often acknowledged, it is difficult to follow into practice. Positivity has a way of creeping back; the semantic emptiness of terms on their own – the lack in the Other of language – is a difficult matter to embrace. This project constitutes an attempt to follow seriously the logic of signification as difference. A path from Saussure's Course in General Linguistics could take many directions. I have chosen to read the songs in connection with Lacanian psychoanalytic theory because of the way this theory responds to issues raised in the songs of signification, sexual difference and unconscious desire.

The Trouvères and Desire

Desire and the desiring subject in trouvère song are constituted within a system of generic differentiation. Desire is an effect of the organization of a text's rhetoric, as Simon Gaunt has observed (‘Discourse Desired’).