In most classical analyses of Ronsard's Amours one encounters a certain critical reductiveness, the temptation to reduce the passion of the desiring subject to the Petrarchan dialectic of conquest and servitude. Although this assessment can undoubtedly be substantiated, it must certainly be nuanced by situating Ronsard's poetry within the framework of a discourse on sexuality. Let us begin with a basic hypothesis: the ronsardian text problematizes male sexuality; it takes the liberty of putting into question certain aspects of the so-called “masculinity” of the desiring subject in order to uncover the phallocentric masquerade that is inscribed in the text. If Ronsard disarms man and strips him of his power, it is because the fiction of amorous conquest is nothing more than a charade that dissimulates a profound sexual ambivalence. My reading of the ronsardian text does not deny the importance of cultural stereotypes such as those found, for example, in the intertextual traditions of Plato, Petrarch, Horace, and Ariosto; on the contrary, it aims to demonstrate how the inscription of the corporeal topos functions within poetic discourse (what codes are responsible for meaning) and creates fictions of the body in the symbolic tapestry of the text. And as in the case of dreams, this network is destined to constitute a corporeal object whose language is its subject in the ontological meaning of the term. If a narrative articulates nothing more than the absence of the subject in a text for which it acts as a substitute, it is because all love stories are defined, as Michel de Certeau claims, as a discourse articulated by bodies.