I try to busy myself elsewhere, to arrive late; but I always lose at this game. Whatever I do, I find myself there, with nothing to do, punctual, even ahead of time.
ROLAND BARTHESThe 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).
More Roland Barthes Quotes
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Touch is the most demystifying of all senses, different from sight which is the most magical.
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The best principals are not heroes; they are hero makers.
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Every new Fashion is a refusal to inherit, a subversion against the oppression of the preceding Fashion; Fashion experiences itself as a Right, the natural right of the present over the past.
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Myth is neither a lie nor a confession: it is an inflexion.
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How does meaning get into the image? Where does it end? And if it ends, what is there beyond?
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Don’t say mourning. It’s too psychoanalytic. I’m not mourning. I’m suffering.
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A picture is never anything but its own plural description.
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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.
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The author enters into his own death, writing begins.
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Pleasure is continually disappointed, reduced, deflated, in favor of strong, noble values: Truth, Death, Progress, Struggle, Joy, etc. Its victorious rival is Desire: we are always being told about Desire, never about Pleasure.
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I cannot classify the other, for the other is, precisely, Unique, the singular Image which has miraculously come to correspond to the speciality of my desire. The other is the figure of my truth, and cannot be imprisoned in any stereotype (which is the truth of others).
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A photograph is always invisible, it is not it that we see.
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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.
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The photographer, like an acrobat, must defy the laws of probability or even of possibility; at the limit, he must defy those of the interesting: the photograph becomes surprising when we do not know why it has been taken.
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The realists do not take the photograph for a ‘copy’ of reality, but for an emanation of past reality, a magic, not an art.
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The haiku reproduces the designating gesture of the child pointing at whatever it is (the haiku shows no partiality for the subject), merely saying: that!
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As Spectator I wanted to explore photography not as a question (a theme) but as a wound.
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The new is not a fashion, it is a value.
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Cameras, in short, were clocks for seeing, and perhaps in me someone very old still hears in the photographic mechanism the living sound of the wood.
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When we look at a photograph of ourselves or of others, we are really looking at the return of the dead.
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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 photographic image is a message without a code.
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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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Every exploration is an appropriation.
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The lover who does not forget sometimes dies from excess, fatigue, and the strain of memory (like Werther).
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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.
ROLAND BARTHES