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 BARTHESWhat love lays bare in me is energy.
More Roland Barthes Quotes
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The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.
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Today there is no symbolic compensation for old age, no recognition of a specific value: wisdom, perceptiveness, experience, vision.
ROLAND BARTHES -
He who reads a story only once is condemned to read the same story his whole life.
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I call the discourse of power any discourse that engenders blame, hence guilt, in its recipient.
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To eat, to speak, to sing (need we add: to kiss?) are operations which have the same site of the body for origin.
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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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To eat steak rare represents both a nature and a morality.
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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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Frontiers are physical as well as symbolic constructions.
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Television doomed us to the Family, whose household instrument it has become-what the hearth used to be, flanked by the communal kettle.
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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.
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This endured absence is nothing more or less than forgetfulness. I am, intermittently, unfaithful. This is the condition of my survival.
ROLAND BARTHES -
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.
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A light without shadow generates an emotion without reserve.
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Literature is the question minus the answer.
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There is only one way left to escape the alienation of present day society: to retreat ahead of it.
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All official institutions of language are repeating machines: school, sports, advertising, popular songs, news, all continually repeat the same structure, the same meaning, often the same words: the stereotype is a political fact, the major figure of ideology.
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I am interested in language because it wounds or seduces me.
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Thus every writer’s motto reads: mad I cannot be, sane I do not deign to be, neurotic I am.
ROLAND BARTHES -
Wine is a part of society because it provides a basis not only for a morality but also for an environment; it is an ornament in the slightest ceremonials of French daily life, from the snack to the feast, from the conversation at the local cafT to the speech at a formal dinner.
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A photograph is always invisible, it is not it that we see.
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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 -
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.
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The book creates meaning, the meaning creates life.
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How does meaning get into the image? Where does it end? And if it ends, what is there beyond?
ROLAND BARTHES -
The photographic image is a message without a code.
ROLAND BARTHES