Roland Barthes on source
“Whereas the work is understood to be traceable to a source (through a process of derivation or “filiation”), the Text is without a source – the “author” a mere “guest” at the reading of the Text.”
More Roland Barthes quotes
The author enters into his own death, writing begins.
Roland BarthesRoland Barthes What love lays bare in me is energy.
Roland BarthesRoland Barthes A photograph is always invisible, it is not it that we see.
Roland BarthesRoland Barthes New York is a city of geometric heights, a petrified desert of grids and lattices, an inferno of greenish abstraction under a flat sky, a real Metropolis from which man is absent by his very accumulation.
Roland BarthesRoland Barthes I have tried to be as eclectic as I possibly can with my professional life, and so far it’s been pretty fun.
Roland BarthesRoland Barthes I cannot classify the other, for the other is, precisely, Unique, the singular Image which has miraculously come to correspond to the speciality of my desire. The other is the figure of my truth, and cannot be imprisoned in any stereotype (which is the truth of others).
Roland BarthesRoland Barthes Isn’t the most sensitive point of this mourning the fact that I must lose a language – the amorous language? No more ‘I love you’s.
Roland BarthesRoland Barthes 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 BarthesRoland Barthes To whom could I put this question (with any hope of an answer)? Does being able to live without someone you loved mean you loved her less than you thought?
Roland BarthesRoland Barthes Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.
Roland BarthesRoland Barthes We don’t forget, but something vacant settles in us.
Roland BarthesRoland Barthes I love you is unsubtle. It removes explanations, facilities, degrees, scruples.
Roland BarthesRoland Barthes The text you write must prove to me that it desires me. This proof exists: it is writing. Writing is: the science of the various blisses of language, its Kama Sutra (this science has but one treatise: writing itself).
Roland BarthesRoland Barthes 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 BarthesRoland Barthes When we look at a photograph of ourselves or of others, we are really looking at the return of the dead.
Roland BarthesRoland Barthes In front of the photograph of my mother as a child, I tell myself: she is going to die: I shudder, like winnicott’s psychotic patient, over a catastrophe which has already occurred. Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe.
Roland BarthesRoland Barthes
