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Isn’t desire always the same, whether the object is present or absent? Isn’t the object always absent? -This isn’t the same languor: there are two words: Pothos, desire for the absent being, and Himéros, the more burning desire for the present being.

Roland Barthes

The best principals are not heroes; they are hero makers.
ROLAND BARTHES

Creation Education School
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
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
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
Language is never innocent.
ROLAND BARTHES

Innocent Language One Liner
The author enters into his own death, writing begins.
ROLAND BARTHES

Author Beginning Death Deep Writing
I love you is unsubtle. It removes explanations, facilities, degrees, scruples.
ROLAND BARTHES

I Love You Myself Removal
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
To eat steak rare represents both a nature and a morality.
ROLAND BARTHES

Food Moral Rare Representation
Why is it better to last than to burn?
ROLAND BARTHES

Better Burn Last Myself
Touch is the most demystifying of all senses, different from sight which is the most magical.
ROLAND BARTHES

Different Magic Sight Touch
Painting can feign reality without having seen it.
ROLAND BARTHES

Myself Painting Reality See
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 BARTHES

Desire Fingers Language Myself Skin Tremble Word
He who reads a story only once is condemned to read the same story his whole life.
ROLAND BARTHES

Himself Life Reading Story
The lover who does not forget sometimes dies from excess, fatigue, and the strain of memory (like Werther).
ROLAND BARTHES

Forget Lover Memories Strain Time

Isn’t desire always the same, whether the object is present or absent? Isn’t the object always absent? -This isn’t the same languor: there are two words: Pothos, desire for the absent being, and Himéros, the more burning desire for the present being.

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Isn’t desire always the same, whether the object is present or absent? Isn’t the object always absent? -This isn’t the same languor: there are two words: Pothos, desire for the absent being, and Himéros, the more burning desire for the present being.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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