To make someone wait: the constant prerogative of all power.
ROLAND BARTHESLiterature is the question minus the answer.
More Roland Barthes Quotes
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A light without shadow generates an emotion without reserve.
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A photograph is always invisible, it is not it that we see.
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It is no longer the sexual which is indecent, it is the sentimental.
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Where you are tender, you speak your plural.
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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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Man does not exist prior to language, either as a species or as an individual.
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I am interested in language because it wounds or seduces me.
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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.
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Who speaks is not who writes, and who writes is not who is.
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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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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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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.
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When we look at a photograph of ourselves or of others, we are really looking at the return of the dead.
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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.
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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