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Don’t say mourning. It’s too psychoanalytic. I’m not mourning. I’m suffering.

Roland Barthes

New York is a city of geometric heights, a petrified desert of grids and lattices, an inferno of greenish abstraction under a flat sky, a real Metropolis from which man is absent by his very accumulation.
ROLAND BARTHES

Abstraction Desert Height Man Reality
Where you are tender, you speak your plural.
ROLAND BARTHES

Fragile Soft Talk Tender Yourself
To make someone wait: the constant prerogative of all power.
ROLAND BARTHES

Patience Power Wait
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.
ROLAND BARTHES

Beyond Death Myself Pass Reality Spectacle
We know that the war against intelligence is always waged in the name of common sense.
ROLAND BARTHES

Common Deep Intelligence Known Name Philosophy Sense War
It must always be considered as though spoken by a character in a novel
ROLAND BARTHES

Character Consider Myself Novel
Every new Fashion is a refusal to inherit, a subversion against the oppression of the preceding Fashion; Fashion experiences itself as a Right, the natural right of the present over the past.
ROLAND BARTHES

Experience Fashion Past Present Refusal
Ultimately, Photography is subversive, not when it frightens, repels, or even stigmatizes, but when it is pensive, when it thinks.
ROLAND BARTHES

Fear Photography Scare Thinking
Pleasure is continually disappointed, reduced, deflated, in favor of strong, noble values: Truth, Death, Progress, Struggle, Joy, etc. Its victorious rival is Desire: we are always being told about Desire, never about Pleasure.
ROLAND BARTHES

Desire Disappointment Pleasure Rival Truth
Someone tells me: this kind of love is not viable. But how can you evaluate viability? Why is the viable a Good Thing? Why is it better to last than to burn?
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Better Burn Evaluation Kind Love
Great portrait photographers are great mythologists.
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Fantasy Greatness Mythology Photography
The 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 BARTHES

Art History Live Mutation Pleasure
When we look at a photograph of ourselves or of others, we are really looking at the return of the dead.
ROLAND BARTHES

Death Ourselves Photography Return
Those who fail to reread are obliged to read the same story everywhere.
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Failure Obligation Reading Story
To eat steak rare represents both a nature and a morality.
ROLAND BARTHES

Food Moral Rare Representation
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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Beginning Known Love Myself Writing
The lover’s fatal identity is precisely this: I am the one who waits.
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Fatal Identify Love Myself Oneself Wait
I am interested in language because it wounds or seduces me.
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Interesting Language Myself Seduce Wound
The author enters into his own death, writing begins.
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Author Beginning Death Deep Writing
Whereas the work is understood to be traceable to a source (through a process of derivation or “filiation”), the Text is without a source – the “author” a mere “guest” at the reading of the Text.
ROLAND BARTHES

Reading Source Text Understand Work
The book creates meaning, the meaning creates life.
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Creation Life Meaning
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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Acknowledge Demand Depend Myself Sign Strength Strong
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 BARTHES

Body Destruction Goodness Identity Known Subject Voice Writing
I love you is unsubtle. It removes explanations, facilities, degrees, scruples.
ROLAND BARTHES

I Love You Myself Removal
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
Who speaks is not who writes, and who writes is not who is.
ROLAND BARTHES

Literature Poet Talk Writing
Language is neither reactionary nor progressive; it is quite simply fascist; for fascism does not prevent speech, it compels speech.
ROLAND BARTHES

Language Prevent Progression Speech

Don’t say mourning. It’s too psychoanalytic. I’m not mourning. I’m suffering.

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Don’t say mourning. It’s too psychoanalytic. I’m not mourning. I’m suffering.

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Popular Authors

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