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.
ROLAND BARTHESEvery exploration is an appropriation.
More Roland Barthes Quotes
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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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A photograph is always invisible, it is not it that we see.
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Ultimately, Photography is subversive, not when it frightens, repels, or even stigmatizes, but when it is pensive, when it thinks.
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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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Who speaks is not who writes, and who writes is not who is.
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If I had to create a god, I would lend him a “slow understanding”: a kind of drip-by-drip understanding of problems. People who understand quickly frighten me.
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Man does not exist prior to language, either as a species or as an individual.
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There are people who think that wrestling is an ignoble sport. Wrestling is not sport, it is a spectacle, and it is no more ignoble to attend a wrestled performance of suffering than a performance of the sorrows of Arnolphe or Andromaque.
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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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A picture is never anything but its own plural description.
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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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The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.
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The lover’s fatal identity is precisely this: I am the one who waits.
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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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Great portrait photographers are great mythologists.
ROLAND BARTHES