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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

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
Is not the most erotic part of the body wherever the clothing affords a glimpse?
ROLAND BARTHES

Afford Appearance Body Erotic Glimpse
I call the discourse of power any discourse that engenders blame, hence guilt, in its recipient.
ROLAND BARTHES

Blame Guilty Myself Power
The text you write must prove to me that it desires me. This proof exists: it is writing. Writing is: the science of the various blisses of language, its Kama Sutra (this science has but one treatise: writing itself).
ROLAND BARTHES

Bliss Desire Language Oneself Science Writing
One must turn the tongue seven times in the mouth before speaking.
ROLAND BARTHES

Mouth Oneself Speaking Time Tongue
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
The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.
ROLAND BARTHES

Born Cost Death Reading
All those young photographers who are at work in the world, determined upon the capture of actuality, do not know that they are agents of Death.
ROLAND BARTHES

Death Determination Photography Young
Painting can feign reality without having seen it.
ROLAND BARTHES

Myself Painting Reality See
Why is it better to last than to burn?
ROLAND BARTHES

Better Burn Last Myself
It must always be considered as though spoken by a character in a novel
ROLAND BARTHES

Character Consider Myself Novel
The book creates meaning, the meaning creates life.
ROLAND BARTHES

Creation Life Meaning
The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.
ROLAND BARTHES

Culture Drawing Text
When we look at a photograph of ourselves or of others, we are really looking at the return of the dead.
ROLAND BARTHES

Death Ourselves Photography Return
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
Ultimately, Photography is subversive, not when it frightens, repels, or even stigmatizes, but when it is pensive, when it thinks.
ROLAND BARTHES

Fear Photography Scare Thinking

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