Roland Barthes Quotes
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There are two kinds of liberalism. A liberalism which is always, subterraneously authoritative and paternalistic, on the side of one's good conscience. And then there is a liberalism which is more ethical than political; one would have to find another name for this. Something like a profound suspension of judgment.
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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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Cameras, in short, were clocks for seeing, and perhaps in me someone very old still hears in the photographic mechanism the living sound of the wood.
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The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.
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The skyscraper establishes the block, the block creates the street, the street offers itself to man.
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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.
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It must always be considered as though spoken by a character in a novel
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Those who fail to reread are obliged to read the same story everywhere.
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To eat, to speak, to sing (need we add: to kiss?) are operations which have the same site of the body for origin.
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Fashion postulates an achrony, a time which does not exist; here the past is shameful and the present is constantly "eaten up" by the Fashion being heralded.
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A picture is never anything but its own plural description.
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I call the discourse of power any discourse that engenders blame, hence guilt, in its recipient.
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What I claim is to live to the full the contradiction of my time, which may well make sarcasm the condition of truth.
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Myth is neither a lie nor a confession: it is an inflexion.
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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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Is not the most erotic part of the body wherever the clothing affords a glimpse?
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Literature can no longer be either Mimesis or Mathesis but merely Semiosis, the adventure of what is impossible to language, in a word: Text (it is wrong to say that the notion of 'text' repeats the notion of 'literature': literature represents a finite world, the text figures the infinite of language).
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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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Rarely do outside of school remedies work their way into the fabric of the schools or into the teachers lives, and more rarely into the classrooms. Therefore they only offer a modest hope of influencing the basic culture of the school
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The Photograph is violent: not because it shows violent tings, but because on each occasion (i)it fills the sight by force(i), and because in it nothing can be refused or transformed (that we can sometimes call it mild does not contradict its violence: many say that sugar is mild, but to me sugar is violent, and I call it so).
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Every photograph is a certificate of presence.
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When we look at a photograph of ourselves or of others, we are really looking at the return of the dead.
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The realists do not take the photograph for a 'copy' of reality, but for an emanation of past reality, a magic, not an art.
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…the book creates meaning, the meaning creates life.
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I make the other’s absence responsible for my worldliness.
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It is as if the Photograph always carries its referent with itself, both affected by the same amorous or funereal immobility, at the very heart of the moving world: they are glued together, limb by limb, like the condemned man and the corpse in certain tortures; or even like those pairs of fish (sharks, I think, according to Michelet) which navigate in convoy, as though united by an eternal coitus.
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For me the noise of Time is not sad: I love bells, clocks, watches — and I recall that at first photographic implements were related to techniques of cabinetmaking and the machinery of precision: cameras, in short, were clocks for seeing, and perhaps in me someone very old still hears in the photographic mechanism the living sound of the wood.
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The gesture of the amorous embrace seems to fulfill, for a time, the subject's dream of total union with the loved being: The longing for consummation with the other.
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Tout ce qui est anachronique est obsce' ne. Everything anachronistic is obscene.
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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.
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Related Authors
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Umberto Eco Essayist -
Walter Benjamin Literary critic -
Mikhail Bakhtin Philosopher -
Roman Jakobson Linguist -
Julia Kristeva Philosopher -
Claude Levi-Strauss Anthropologist -
Susan Sontag Writer -
Jean-Paul Sartre Philosopher -
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Tzvetan Todorov Philosopher -
Jacques Lacan Psychoanalyst -
Maurice Blanchot Writer -
Louis Althusser Philosopher -
Jean Baudrillard Philosopher -
Jacques Derrida Philosopher -
Philippe Sollers Writer -
Michel Foucault Philosopher -
Georges Bataille Author -
Charles Sanders Peirce Philosopher -
Gilles Deleuze Philosopher