I love you is unsubtle. It removes explanations, facilities, degrees, scruples.
ROLAND BARTHESI love you is unsubtle. It removes explanations, facilities, degrees, scruples.
ROLAND BARTHESSomeone tells me: this kind of love is not viable. But how can you evaluate viability? Why is the viable a Good Thing? Why is it better to last than to burn?
ROLAND BARTHESCameras, 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.
ROLAND BARTHESIt is no longer the sexual which is indecent, it is the sentimental.
ROLAND BARTHESI encounter millions of bodies in my life; of these millions, I may desire some hundreds; but of these hundreds, I love only one.
ROLAND BARTHESPleasure 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.
ROLAND BARTHESI 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).
ROLAND BARTHESIn 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 BARTHESI call the discourse of power any discourse that engenders blame, hence guilt, in its recipient.
ROLAND BARTHESWhereas the work is understood to be traceable to a source (through a process of derivation or “filiation”), the Text is without a source – the “author” a mere “guest” at the reading of the Text.
ROLAND BARTHESAs Spectator I wanted to explore photography not as a question (a theme) but as a wound.
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 BARTHESThus every writer’s motto reads: mad I cannot be, sane I do not deign to be, neurotic I am.
ROLAND BARTHESI 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 BARTHESThis endured absence is nothing more or less than forgetfulness. I am, intermittently, unfaithful. This is the condition of my survival.
ROLAND BARTHESThe 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!
ROLAND BARTHES