ABSTRACT
Romance narratives are regulated by a dynamics of secrecy and confession. This genre takes the strained relations of knowing and unknowing as its impetus and force. Analysis of 'I love you' as the romantic speech act reveals a contradictory or illogical relationship between the subject's formal insistence on his or her radical inaccessibility, and the necessity to couple in order to so insist. The notion of a "performative" utterance or "speech act" was first introduced by British philosopher J. L. Austin in his Harvard lectures of 1955 'I love you' is a performative in the terms of Austin's initial definition of the category. Romantic love is an individualizing secret which cannot exist without the presence, or, to adopt Foucault's phrase, the 'virtual presence', of another individual. Foucault demonstrates that the cultural demand for confession is endemic to the West, passing through innumerable points and determining our relation to 'truth' and 'identity'.
