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

Roland Barthes

I call the discourse of power any discourse that engenders blame, hence guilt, in its recipient.
ROLAND BARTHES

Blame Guilty Myself Power
When we look at a photograph of ourselves or of others, we are really looking at the return of the dead.
ROLAND BARTHES

Death Ourselves Photography Return
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 BARTHES

Body Destruction Goodness Identity Known Subject Voice Writing
This endured absence is nothing more or less than forgetfulness. I am, intermittently, unfaithful. This is the condition of my survival.
ROLAND BARTHES

Absence Condition Endurance Faith Myself Survival
To eat steak rare represents both a nature and a morality.
ROLAND BARTHES

Food Moral Rare Representation
To make someone wait: the constant prerogative of all power.
ROLAND BARTHES

Patience Power Wait
Isn’t the most sensitive point of this mourning the fact that I must lose a language – the amorous language? No more ‘I love you’s.
ROLAND BARTHES

I Love You Language Lose Myself Point
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 BARTHES

Bliss Desire Language Oneself Science Writing
Literature is the question minus the answer.
ROLAND BARTHES

Answer Literature Question
The author enters into his own death, writing begins.
ROLAND BARTHES

Author Beginning Death Deep Writing
Language 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 BARTHES

Desire Fingers Language Myself Skin Tremble Word
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.
ROLAND BARTHES

Notable Order Photography Sophistication Value
A light without shadow generates an emotion without reserve.
ROLAND BARTHES

Emotion Light Reserve Shadow
Someone 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 BARTHES

Better Burn Evaluation Kind Love
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
Myth is neither a lie nor a confession: it is an inflexion.
ROLAND BARTHES

Confession Inflexion Lying

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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