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How does meaning get into the image? Where does it end? And if it ends, what is there beyond?

Roland Barthes

Each of us has his own rhythm of suffering.
ROLAND BARTHES

Hard Time Ourselves Suffering
Is not the most erotic part of the body wherever the clothing affords a glimpse?
ROLAND BARTHES

Afford Appearance Body Erotic Glimpse
I am interested in language because it wounds or seduces me.
ROLAND BARTHES

Interesting Language Myself Seduce Wound
Language is legislation, speech is its code. We do not see the power which is in speech because we forget that all speech is a classification, and that all classifications are oppressive.
ROLAND BARTHES

Classification Forget Language Oppression Power Speech
To try to write love is to confront the muck of language: that region of hysteria where language is both too much and too little, excessive and impoverished.
ROLAND BARTHES

Excession Language Love Try Writing
Don’t say mourning. It’s too psychoanalytic. I’m not mourning. I’m suffering.
ROLAND BARTHES

Mourning Myself Suffering
A paradox: the same century invented history and photography. But history is a memory fabricated according to positive formulas, a pure intellectual discourse which abolishes mythic time; and the photograph is a certain but fugitive testimony.
ROLAND BARTHES

History Invention Photography Review
Architecture is always dream and function, expression of a utopia and instrument of a convenience.
ROLAND BARTHES

Architecture Convenience Dreams Function Instrument
Every object in the world can pass from a closed, silent existence to an oral state, open to appropriation by society, for there is no law, whether natural or not, which forbids talking about things
ROLAND BARTHES

Existence Law Natural Object Silence Society State
The politician being interviewed clearly takes a great deal of trouble to imagine an ending to his sentence: and if he stopped short? His entire policy would be jeopardized!
ROLAND BARTHES

Himself Imagination Policy Politics Trouble
The book creates meaning, the meaning creates life.
ROLAND BARTHES

Creation Life Meaning
A light without shadow generates an emotion without reserve.
ROLAND BARTHES

Emotion Light Reserve Shadow
I passed beyond the unreality of the thing represented, I entered crazily into the spectacle, into the image, taking into my arms what is dead, what is going to die.
ROLAND BARTHES

Beyond Death Myself Pass Reality Spectacle
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
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

Art Magic Photography Reality
Pleasure is continually disappointed, reduced, deflated, in favor of strong, noble values: Truth, Death, Progress, Struggle, Joy, etc. Its victorious rival is Desire: we are always being told about Desire, never about Pleasure.
ROLAND BARTHES

Desire Disappointment Pleasure Rival Truth

How does meaning get into the image? Where does it end? And if it ends, what is there beyond?

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How does meaning get into the image? Where does it end? And if it ends, what is there beyond?

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