black
grey
blue
red
brown
white

It is no longer the sexual which is indecent, it is the sentimental.

Roland Barthes

Thus every writer’s motto reads: mad I cannot be, sane I do not deign to be, neurotic I am.
ROLAND BARTHES

Design Myself Reading Writing
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

Children Death Fear Mom Myself Patient Photography
To 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 BARTHES

Beginning Known Love Myself Writing
One must turn the tongue seven times in the mouth before speaking.
ROLAND BARTHES

Mouth Oneself Speaking Time Tongue
Today there is no symbolic compensation for old age, no recognition of a specific value: wisdom, perceptiveness, experience, vision.
ROLAND BARTHES

Age Experience Old Specific Vision
The author enters into his own death, writing begins.
ROLAND BARTHES

Author Beginning Death Deep Writing
Painting can feign reality without having seen it.
ROLAND BARTHES

Myself Painting Reality See
A picture is never anything but its own plural description.
ROLAND BARTHES

Description Photograph Plural
Every photograph is a certificate of presence.
ROLAND BARTHES

Camera Certificate Photograph Presence
Language is never innocent.
ROLAND BARTHES

Innocent Language One Liner
Whereas the work is understood to be traceable to a source (through a process of derivation or “filiation”), the Text is without a source – the “author” a mere “guest” at the reading of the Text.
ROLAND BARTHES

Reading Source Text Understand Work
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

Body Eat Origin Sing Talk
Is not the most erotic part of the body wherever the clothing affords a glimpse?
ROLAND BARTHES

Afford Appearance Body Erotic Glimpse
The photographic image is a message without a code.
ROLAND BARTHES

Code Image Message Photography
Physically, the Ventoux is dreadful. Bald, it’s the spirit of Dry: Its climate (it is much more an essence of climate than a geographic place) makes it a damned terrain, a testing place for heroes, something like a higher hell.
ROLAND BARTHES

Essence Hell Heroes High Place
I call the discourse of power any discourse that engenders blame, hence guilt, in its recipient.
ROLAND BARTHES

Blame Guilty Myself Power

It is no longer the sexual which is indecent, it is the sentimental.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

It is no longer the sexual which is indecent, it is the sentimental.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Roland Barthes Quotes