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Touch is the most demystifying of all senses, different from sight which is the most magical.

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.
ROLAND BARTHES

Dinner Environment Formal Moral Society Talk Wine
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 BARTHES

Art Magic Photography Reality
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.
ROLAND BARTHES

Children Death Fear Mom Myself Patient Photography
If I acknowledge my dependency, I do so because for me it is a means of signifying my demand: in the realm of love, futility is not a “weakness” or an “absurdity”: it is a strong sign: the more futile, the more it signifies and the more it asserts itself as strength.)
ROLAND BARTHES

Acknowledge Demand Depend Myself Sign Strength Strong
The author enters into his own death, writing begins.
ROLAND BARTHES

Author Beginning Death Deep Writing
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.
ROLAND BARTHES

Abstraction Desert Height Man Reality
To know that one does not write for the other, to know that these things I am going to write will never cause me to be loved by the one I love (the other), to know that writing compensates for nothing, sublimates nothing, that it is precisely there where you are not–this is the beginning of writing.
ROLAND BARTHES

Beginning Known Love Myself Writing
Every new Fashion is a refusal to inherit, a subversion against the oppression of the preceding Fashion; Fashion experiences itself as a Right, the natural right of the present over the past.
ROLAND BARTHES

Experience Fashion Past Present Refusal
A light without shadow generates an emotion without reserve.
ROLAND BARTHES

Emotion Light Reserve Shadow
Thus every writer’s motto reads: mad I cannot be, sane I do not deign to be, neurotic I am.
ROLAND BARTHES

Design Myself Reading Writing
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.
ROLAND BARTHES

Creation Fear God Problem Scare Slow Understand Understanding
The best principals are not heroes; they are hero makers.
ROLAND BARTHES

Creation Education School
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.
ROLAND BARTHES

Attend People Performance Spectacle Sports Thinking
What the Photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once: the Photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially.
ROLAND BARTHES

Existence Oneself Repeat Reproduction
To eat steak rare represents both a nature and a morality.
ROLAND BARTHES

Food Moral Rare Representation
One must turn the tongue seven times in the mouth before speaking.
ROLAND BARTHES

Mouth Oneself Speaking Time Tongue

Touch is the most demystifying of all senses, different from sight which is the most magical.

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Touch is the most demystifying of all senses, different from sight which is the most magical.

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