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It is no longer the sexual which is indecent, it is the sentimental.

Roland Barthes

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.
ROLAND BARTHES

Children Death Fear Mom Myself Patient Photography
The Ventoux is a god of Evil, to which sacrifices must be made. It never forgives weakness and extracts an unfair tribute of suffering.
ROLAND BARTHES

Evil Forgiveness God Ourselves Suffering Weakness
Physically, 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 BARTHES

Essence Hell Heroes High Place
Painting can feign reality without having seen it.
ROLAND BARTHES

Myself Painting Reality See
There are people who think that wrestling is an ignoble sport. Wrestling is not sport, it is a spectacle, and it is no more ignoble to attend a wrestled performance of suffering than a performance of the sorrows of Arnolphe or Andromaque.
ROLAND BARTHES

Attend People Performance Spectacle Sports Thinking
Today there is no symbolic compensation for old age, no recognition of a specific value: wisdom, perceptiveness, experience, vision.
ROLAND BARTHES

Age Experience Old Specific Vision
Language is never innocent.
ROLAND BARTHES

Innocent Language One Liner
To make someone wait: the constant prerogative of all power.
ROLAND BARTHES

Patience Power Wait
Don’t say mourning. It’s too psychoanalytic. I’m not mourning. I’m suffering.
ROLAND BARTHES

Mourning Myself Suffering
Where you are tender, you speak your plural.
ROLAND BARTHES

Fragile Soft Talk Tender Yourself
Man does not exist prior to language, either as a species or as an individual.
ROLAND BARTHES

Existence Language Man Position
Isn’t desire always the same, whether the object is present or absent? Isn’t the object always absent? -This isn’t the same languor: there are two words: Pothos, desire for the absent being, and Himéros, the more burning desire for the present being.
ROLAND BARTHES

Absence Burning Desire Object Present
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.
ROLAND BARTHES

Creation Fear God Problem Scare Slow Understand Understanding
What the Photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once: the Photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially.
ROLAND BARTHES

Existence Oneself Repeat Reproduction
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!
ROLAND BARTHES

Children Poem Poetry Reproduction Subject
I make the other’s absence responsible for my worldliness.
ROLAND BARTHES

Absence Myself Responsibility World

It is no longer the sexual which is indecent, it is the sentimental.

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It is no longer the sexual which is indecent, it is the sentimental.

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