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 BARTHESLiterature is the question minus the answer.
More Roland Barthes Quotes
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The new is not a fashion, it is a value.
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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.
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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.
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Language is neither reactionary nor progressive; it is quite simply fascist; for fascism does not prevent speech, it compels speech.
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There is only one way left to escape the alienation of present day society: to retreat ahead of it.
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The book creates meaning, the meaning creates life.
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To make someone wait: the constant prerogative of all power.
ROLAND BARTHES -
To eat steak rare represents both a nature and a morality.
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I encounter millions of bodies in my life; of these millions, I may desire some hundreds; but of these hundreds, I love only one.
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The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.
ROLAND BARTHES -
A photograph is always invisible, it is not it that we see.
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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?
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Television doomed us to the Family, whose household instrument it has become-what the hearth used to be, flanked by the communal kettle.
ROLAND BARTHES -
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 -
The lover’s fatal identity is precisely this: I am the one who waits.
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He who reads a story only once is condemned to read the same story his whole life.
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The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.
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The author enters into his own death, writing begins.
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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?
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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 -
It is no longer the sexual which is indecent, it is the sentimental.
ROLAND BARTHES -
The best principals are not heroes; they are hero makers.
ROLAND BARTHES -
A light without shadow generates an emotion without reserve.
ROLAND BARTHES -
This endured absence is nothing more or less than forgetfulness. I am, intermittently, unfaithful. This is the condition of my survival.
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Those who fail to reread are obliged to read the same story everywhere.
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