Myth is neither a lie nor a confession: it is an inflexion.
ROLAND BARTHESMyth is neither a lie nor a confession: it is an inflexion.
ROLAND BARTHESThe haiku reproduces the designating gesture of the child pointing at whatever it is (the haiku shows no partiality for the subject), merely saying: that!
ROLAND BARTHESThe 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.
ROLAND BARTHESPhysically, the Ventoux is dreadful. Bald, it’s the spirit of Dry: Its climate (it is much more an essence of climate than a geographic place) makes it a damned terrain, a testing place for heroes, something like a higher hell.
ROLAND BARTHESThe art of living has no history: it does not evolve: the pleasure which vanishes vanishes for good, there is no substitute for it. Other pleasures come, which replace nothing. No progress in pleasures, nothing but mutations.
ROLAND BARTHESThus every writer’s motto reads: mad I cannot be, sane I do not deign to be, neurotic I am.
ROLAND BARTHESTelevision doomed us to the Family, whose household instrument it has become-what the hearth used to be, flanked by the communal kettle.
ROLAND BARTHESTo make someone wait: the constant prerogative of all power.
ROLAND BARTHESIs not the most erotic part of the body wherever the clothing affords a glimpse?
ROLAND BARTHESMan does not exist prior to language, either as a species or as an individual.
ROLAND BARTHESWho speaks is not who writes, and who writes is not who is.
ROLAND BARTHESThe 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 BARTHESIn 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 BARTHESLanguage 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.
ROLAND BARTHESWhere you are tender, you speak your plural.
ROLAND BARTHESOne must turn the tongue seven times in the mouth before speaking.
ROLAND BARTHES