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

Roland Barthes

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
The art of living has no history: it does not evolve: the pleasure which vanishes vanishes for good, there is no substitute for it. Other pleasures come, which replace nothing. No progress in pleasures, nothing but mutations.
ROLAND BARTHES

Art History Live Mutation Pleasure
Touch is the most demystifying of all senses, different from sight which is the most magical.
ROLAND BARTHES

Different Magic Sight Touch
If I acknowledge my dependency, I do so because for me it is a means of signifying my demand: in the realm of love, futility is not a “weakness” or an “absurdity”: it is a strong sign: the more futile, the more it signifies and the more it asserts itself as strength.)
ROLAND BARTHES

Acknowledge Demand Depend Myself Sign Strength Strong
Architecture is always dream and function, expression of a utopia and instrument of a convenience.
ROLAND BARTHES

Architecture Convenience Dreams Function Instrument
The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.
ROLAND BARTHES

Culture Drawing Text
I am interested in language because it wounds or seduces me.
ROLAND BARTHES

Interesting Language Myself Seduce Wound
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
Language is neither reactionary nor progressive; it is quite simply fascist; for fascism does not prevent speech, it compels speech.
ROLAND BARTHES

Language Prevent Progression Speech
We can never know, for the good reason that writing is the destruction of every voice, every origin. Writing is that neuter, that composite, that obliquity into which our subject flees, the black-and-white where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body that writes.
ROLAND BARTHES

Body Destruction Goodness Identity Known Subject Voice Writing
There are people who think that wrestling is an ignoble sport. Wrestling is not sport, it is a spectacle, and it is no more ignoble to attend a wrestled performance of suffering than a performance of the sorrows of Arnolphe or Andromaque.
ROLAND BARTHES

Attend People Performance Spectacle Sports Thinking
Through the mythology of Einstein, the world blissfully regained the image of knowledge reduced to a formula.
ROLAND BARTHES

Bliss Image Knowledge Mythology World
When we look at a photograph of ourselves or of others, we are really looking at the return of the dead.
ROLAND BARTHES

Death Ourselves Photography Return
A photograph is always invisible, it is not it that we see.
ROLAND BARTHES

Invisible Photograph See
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
We know that the war against intelligence is always waged in the name of common sense.
ROLAND BARTHES

Common Deep Intelligence Known Name Philosophy Sense War

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

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

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