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 BARTHESLiterature is the question minus the answer.
More Roland Barthes Quotes
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Who speaks is not who writes, and who writes is not who is.
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The photographer, like an acrobat, must defy the laws of probability or even of possibility; at the limit, he must defy those of the interesting: the photograph becomes surprising when we do not know why it has been taken.
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Television doomed us to the Family, whose household instrument it has become-what the hearth used to be, flanked by the communal kettle.
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I encounter millions of bodies in my life; of these millions, I may desire some hundreds; but of these hundreds, I love only one.
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The haiku reproduces the designating gesture of the child pointing at whatever it is (the haiku shows no partiality for the subject), merely saying: that!
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All those young photographers who are at work in the world, determined upon the capture of actuality, do not know that they are agents of Death.
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Language is legislation, speech is its code. We do not see the power which is in speech because we forget that all speech is a classification, and that all classifications are oppressive.
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Where you are tender, you speak your plural.
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We know that the war against intelligence is always waged in the name of common sense.
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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).
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Great portrait photographers are great mythologists.
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How does meaning get into the image? Where does it end? And if it ends, what is there beyond?
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The best principals are not heroes; they are hero makers.
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The author enters into his own death, writing begins.
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Man does not exist prior to language, either as a species or as an individual.
ROLAND BARTHES