One must turn the tongue seven times in the mouth before speaking.
ROLAND BARTHESOne must turn the tongue seven times in the mouth before speaking.
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 BARTHESA 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 BARTHESPainting can feign reality without having seen it.
ROLAND BARTHESThe art of living has no history: it does not evolve: the pleasure which vanishes vanishes for good, there is no substitute for it. Other pleasures come, which replace nothing. No progress in pleasures, nothing but mutations.
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).
ROLAND BARTHESLanguage 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.
ROLAND BARTHESGreat portrait photographers are great mythologists.
ROLAND BARTHESWhy is it better to last than to burn?
ROLAND BARTHESLanguage is neither reactionary nor progressive; it is quite simply fascist; for fascism does not prevent speech, it compels speech.
ROLAND BARTHESI call the discourse of power any discourse that engenders blame, hence guilt, in its recipient.
ROLAND BARTHESTouch is the most demystifying of all senses, different from sight which is the most magical.
ROLAND BARTHESThis endured absence is nothing more or less than forgetfulness. I am, intermittently, unfaithful. This is the condition of my survival.
ROLAND BARTHESI am interested in language because it wounds or seduces me.
ROLAND BARTHESThe lover who does not forget sometimes dies from excess, fatigue, and the strain of memory (like Werther).
ROLAND BARTHESI love you is unsubtle. It removes explanations, facilities, degrees, scruples.
ROLAND BARTHES