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 BARTHESOne must turn the tongue seven times in the mouth before speaking.
More Roland Barthes Quotes
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To make someone wait: the constant prerogative of all power.
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What love lays bare in me is energy.
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I encounter millions of bodies in my life; of these millions, I may desire some hundreds; but of these hundreds, I love only one.
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Today there is no symbolic compensation for old age, no recognition of a specific value: wisdom, perceptiveness, experience, vision.
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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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In an initial period, Photography, in order to surprise, photographs the notable; but soon, by a familiar reversal, it decrees notable whatever it photographs. The ‘anything whatever’ then becomes the sophisticated acme of value.
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Who speaks is not who writes, and who writes is not who is.
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What the Photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once: the Photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially.
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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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He who reads a story only once is condemned to read the same story his whole life.
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Great portrait photographers are great mythologists.
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I love you is unsubtle. It removes explanations, facilities, degrees, scruples.
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New York is a city of geometric heights, a petrified desert of grids and lattices, an inferno of greenish abstraction under a flat sky, a real Metropolis from which man is absent by his very accumulation.
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Language is never innocent.
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The best principals are not heroes; they are hero makers.
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The politician being interviewed clearly takes a great deal of trouble to imagine an ending to his sentence: and if he stopped short? His entire policy would be jeopardized!
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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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The lover’s fatal identity is precisely this: I am the one who waits.
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We know that the war against intelligence is always waged in the name of common sense.
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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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Why is it better to last than to burn?
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Is not the most erotic part of the body wherever the clothing affords a glimpse?
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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
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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 photographic image is a message without a code.
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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