Abstract The article re-reads Werther’s legendary love with Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy. It discovers a constitutive dimension of address and (postal) transfer that not only shapes Werther’s love, but also connects it to the often neglected form of the epistolary novel. Werther’s love is not tragic, and it is not all about Lotte – it is postal. Writing and loving share the constitutive dimension of addressing ‘the other’: distance does not indicate love’s failure; it turns out to be its productive principle. Werther’s love is thus not a ‘warning example,’ not the moral message of a tale – it exhibits and affirms the way modern love works. Anticipating psychoanalytic insight, love does not take place between two specific human beings, but circulates in a complex system of shifting addressees. The readers become involved in this postal system: the epistolary novel also addresses this love to us. Will we really ‘not be able to withhold [our] admiration and love’ as the editor tells us at the very beginning of Werther’s story? However – we seem to be the perfect match – as philo-logists...

中文翻译：

---

Werthers verbriefte Liebe

摘要 文章重读了维特与罗兰·巴特、雅克·德里达和让-吕克·南希的传奇爱情。它发现了地址和（邮政）转移的构成维度，它不仅塑造了维特的爱情，而且将它与经常被忽视的书信体小说形式联系起来。维特的爱情并不悲惨，也不全是关于乐天的——它是邮政的。写作和爱分享了称呼“他者”的构成维度：距离并不表示爱的失败；事实证明，这是它的生产原则。因此，维特的爱情不是一个“警告的例子”，也不是一个故事的道德信息——它展示并肯定了现代爱情的运作方式。预见到精神分析的洞察力，爱不会发生在两个特定的人之间，而是在一个复杂的转移对象系统中循环。读者参与了这个邮政系统：书信体小说也向我们表达了这种爱。我们真的会“无法抑制[我们的]钦佩和爱”，就像编辑在维特故事的开头告诉我们的那样吗？然而——我们似乎是完美的搭档——作为语言学家......