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 BARTHESThere is only one way left to escape the alienation of present day society: to retreat ahead of it.
More Roland Barthes Quotes
-
-
How does meaning get into the image? Where does it end? And if it ends, what is there beyond?
ROLAND BARTHES -
I love you is unsubtle. It removes explanations, facilities, degrees, scruples.
ROLAND BARTHES -
It must always be considered as though spoken by a character in a novel
ROLAND BARTHES -
I make the other’s absence responsible for my worldliness.
ROLAND BARTHES -
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 -
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 -
We don’t forget, but something vacant settles in us.
ROLAND BARTHES -
I try to busy myself elsewhere, to arrive late; but I always lose at this game. Whatever I do, I find myself there, with nothing to do, punctual, even ahead of time.
ROLAND BARTHES -
Language is neither reactionary nor progressive; it is quite simply fascist; for fascism does not prevent speech, it compels speech.
ROLAND BARTHES -
The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.
ROLAND BARTHES -
Where you are tender, you speak your plural.
ROLAND 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 BARTHES -
To eat, to speak, to sing (need we add: to kiss?) are operations which have the same site of the body for origin.
ROLAND BARTHES -
Architecture is always dream and function, expression of a utopia and instrument of a convenience.
ROLAND BARTHES -
The author enters into his own death, writing begins.
ROLAND BARTHES -
Through the mythology of Einstein, the world blissfully regained the image of knowledge reduced to a formula.
ROLAND BARTHES -
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 -
To make someone wait: the constant prerogative of all power.
ROLAND BARTHES -
The photographic image is a message without a code.
ROLAND BARTHES -
There is only one way left to escape the alienation of present day society: to retreat ahead of it.
ROLAND BARTHES -
When we look at a photograph of ourselves or of others, we are really looking at the return of the dead.
ROLAND 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 BARTHES -
Someone tells me: this kind of love is not viable. But how can you evaluate viability? Why is the viable a Good Thing? Why is it better to last than to burn?
ROLAND BARTHES -
The Ventoux is a god of Evil, to which sacrifices must be made. It never forgives weakness and extracts an unfair tribute of suffering.
ROLAND BARTHES -
A light without shadow generates an emotion without reserve.
ROLAND BARTHES -
I am interested in language because it wounds or seduces me.
ROLAND BARTHES