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The realists do not take the photograph for a ‘copy’ of reality, but for an emanation of past reality, a magic, not an art.

Roland Barthes

We don’t forget, but something vacant settles in us.
ROLAND BARTHES

Forget Ourselves Settle
Every new Fashion is a refusal to inherit, a subversion against the oppression of the preceding Fashion; Fashion experiences itself as a Right, the natural right of the present over the past.
ROLAND BARTHES

Experience Fashion Past Present Refusal
Who speaks is not who writes, and who writes is not who is.
ROLAND BARTHES

Literature Poet Talk Writing
He who reads a story only once is condemned to read the same story his whole life.
ROLAND BARTHES

Himself Life Reading Story
Wine is a part of society because it provides a basis not only for a morality but also for an environment; it is an ornament in the slightest ceremonials of French daily life, from the snack to the feast, from the conversation at the local cafT to the speech at a formal dinner.
ROLAND BARTHES

Dinner Environment Formal Moral Society Talk Wine
To eat steak rare represents both a nature and a morality.
ROLAND BARTHES

Food Moral Rare Representation
Every exploration is an appropriation.
ROLAND BARTHES

Appropriate Exploration
The haiku reproduces the designating gesture of the child pointing at whatever it is (the haiku shows no partiality for the subject), merely saying: that!
ROLAND BARTHES

Children Poem Poetry Reproduction Subject
There is only one way left to escape the alienation of present day society: to retreat ahead of it.
ROLAND BARTHES

Escape Present Way
I call the discourse of power any discourse that engenders blame, hence guilt, in its recipient.
ROLAND BARTHES

Blame Guilty Myself Power
To make someone wait: the constant prerogative of all power.
ROLAND BARTHES

Patience Power Wait
If I had to create a god, I would lend him a “slow understanding”: a kind of drip-by-drip understanding of problems. People who understand quickly frighten me.
ROLAND BARTHES

Creation Fear God Problem Scare Slow Understand Understanding
Cameras, in short, were clocks for seeing, and perhaps in me someone very old still hears in the photographic mechanism the living sound of the wood.
ROLAND BARTHES

Camera Living Myself Old Photography Sound
To know that one does not write for the other, to know that these things I am going to write will never cause me to be loved by the one I love (the other), to know that writing compensates for nothing, sublimates nothing, that it is precisely there where you are not–this is the beginning of writing.
ROLAND BARTHES

Beginning Known Love Myself Writing
Man does not exist prior to language, either as a species or as an individual.
ROLAND BARTHES

Existence Language Man Position
Isn’t desire always the same, whether the object is present or absent? Isn’t the object always absent? -This isn’t the same languor: there are two words: Pothos, desire for the absent being, and Himéros, the more burning desire for the present being.
ROLAND BARTHES

Absence Burning Desire Object Present

The realists do not take the photograph for a ‘copy’ of reality, but for an emanation of past reality, a magic, not an art.

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The realists do not take the photograph for a ‘copy’ of reality, but for an emanation of past reality, a magic, not an art.

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