What the Photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once: the Photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially.
ROLAND BARTHESLiterature is the question minus the answer.
More Roland Barthes Quotes
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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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Thus every writer’s motto reads: mad I cannot be, sane I do not deign to be, neurotic I am.
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It must always be considered as though spoken by a character in a novel
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Frontiers are physical as well as symbolic constructions.
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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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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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One must turn the tongue seven times in the mouth before speaking.
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I passed beyond the unreality of the thing represented, I entered crazily into the spectacle, into the image, taking into my arms what is dead, what is going to die.
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This endured absence is nothing more or less than forgetfulness. I am, intermittently, unfaithful. This is the condition of my survival.
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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.)
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Man does not exist prior to language, either as a species or as an individual.
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Is not the most erotic part of the body wherever the clothing affords a glimpse?
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Language is never innocent.
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Painting can feign reality without having seen it.
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Touch is the most demystifying of all senses, different from sight which is the most magical.
ROLAND BARTHES