The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.
The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.
The Text is plural. Which is not simply to say that it has several meanings, but that it accomplishes the very plural of meaning: an irreducible (and not merely an acceptable) plural. The Text is not a co-existence of meanings but a passage, an overcrossing; thus it answers not to an interpretation, even a liberal one, but to an explosion, a dissemination.
Each of us has his own rhythm of suffering.
How does meaning get into the image? Where does it end? And if it ends, what is there beyond?
Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.
To make someone wait: the constant prerogative of all power.
The author enters into his own death, writing begins.
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.
We know that the war against intelligence is always waged in the name of common sense.
Literature is the question minus the answer.
Every photograph is a certificate of presence.
...language is never innocent.
Every exploration is an appropriation.
Am I in love? --yes, since I am waiting. The other one never waits. Sometimes I want to play the part of the one who doesn't wait; I try to busy myself elsewhere, to arrive late; but I always lose at this game. Whatever I do, I find myself there, with nothing to do, punctual, even ahead of time. The lover's fatal identity is precisely this: I am the one who waits.
Who speaks is not who writes, and who writes is not who is.
A light without shadow generates an emotion without reserve.
We don't forget, but something vacant settles in us.
The photographic image... is a message without a code.
Man does not exist prior to language, either as a species or as an individual.
I am interested in language because it wounds or seduces me.
The photograph is literally an emanation of the referent. From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here; the duration of the transmission is insignificant; the photograph of the missing being, as Sontag says, will touch me like the delayed rays of a star.
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.
A photograph is always invisible, it is not it that we see.
Where you are tender, you speak your plural.
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