Television doomed us to the Family, whose household instrument it has become-what the hearth used to be, flanked by the communal kettle.
ROLAND BARTHESTelevision doomed us to the Family, whose household instrument it has become-what the hearth used to be, flanked by the communal kettle.
ROLAND BARTHESTo know that one does not write for the other, to know that these things I am going to write will never cause me to be loved by the one I love (the other), to know that writing compensates for nothing, sublimates nothing, that it is precisely there where you are not–this is the beginning of writing.
ROLAND BARTHESThrough the mythology of Einstein, the world blissfully regained the image of knowledge reduced to a formula.
ROLAND BARTHESThe text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.
ROLAND BARTHESToday there is no symbolic compensation for old age, no recognition of a specific value: wisdom, perceptiveness, experience, vision.
ROLAND BARTHESGreat portrait photographers are great mythologists.
ROLAND BARTHESTo eat, to speak, to sing (need we add: to kiss?) are operations which have the same site of the body for origin.
ROLAND BARTHESI call the discourse of power any discourse that engenders blame, hence guilt, in its recipient.
ROLAND BARTHESHow does meaning get into the image? Where does it end? And if it ends, what is there beyond?
ROLAND BARTHESI love you is unsubtle. It removes explanations, facilities, degrees, scruples.
ROLAND BARTHESThe photographic image is a message without a code.
ROLAND BARTHESTo 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 BARTHESI 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 BARTHESIsn’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 BARTHESLanguage is neither reactionary nor progressive; it is quite simply fascist; for fascism does not prevent speech, it compels speech.
ROLAND BARTHESTo eat steak rare represents both a nature and a morality.
ROLAND BARTHES