Roland Barthes Quotes About Language

Quotes about: Language

• 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.

  Roland Barthes

  Desire, Skins, Language And Power

  "A Lover's Discourse (Talking)". Bok by Roland Barthes, 1977.

• I am interested in language because it wounds or seduces me.

  Roland Barthes

  Language, Seducing, Wounds

• To try to write love is to confront the muck of language: that region of hysteria where language is both too much and too little, excessive and impoverished.

  Roland Barthes

  Love, Writing, Hysteria

  Roland Barthes (1990). “A lover's discourse: fragments”, Penguin Books

• ...language is never innocent.

  Roland Barthes

  Language, Innocent

  Roland Barthes (1984). “Writing degree zero ; &, Elements of semiology”, Random House (UK)

• ...what I enjoy in a narrative is not directly its content or even its structure, but rather the abrasions I impose upon the fine surface: I read on, I skip, I look up, I dip in again. Which has nothing to do with the deep laceration the text of bliss inflicts upon language itself, and not upon the simple temporality of its reading.

  Roland Barthes

  Reading, Simple, Looks

• Man does not exist prior to language, either as a species or as an individual.

  Roland Barthes

  Men, Doe, Language

  Roland Barthes, Richard Howard (1989). “Bruissement de la Langue”, p.13, Univ of California Press

• 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.

  Roland Barthes

  Speech, Language, Forget

• All official institutions of language are repeating machines: school, sports, advertising, popular songs, news, all continually repeat the same structure, the same meaning, often the same words: the stereotype is a political fact, the major figure of ideology.

  Roland Barthes

  Sports, Song, School

• The 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 Barthes

  Writing, Desire, Language

• As a language, Garbo's singularity was of the order of the concept, that of Audrey Hepburn is of the order of the substance; the face of Garbo is an Idea, that of Hepburn, an Event.

  Roland Barthes

  Order, Ideas, Events

  Roland Barthes (1973). “Mythologies”

• Isn’t the most sensitive point of this mourning the fact that I must lose a language — the amorous language? No more ‘I love you’s.

  Roland Barthes

  Love You, Mourning, Facts

  Roland Barthes (1990). “A lover's discourse: fragments”, Penguin Books

• 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).

  Roland Barthes

  Adventure, Literature, World

  Roland Barthes (1994). “Roland Barthes”

• Language is neither reactionary nor progressive; it is quite simply fascist; for fascism does not prevent speech, it compels speech.

  Roland Barthes

  Doe, Speech, Language

• Contemporary poetry ... tries to transform the sign back into meaning:
  its ideal, ultimately, would be to reach not the meaning of words, but the
  meaning of things themselves. This is why it clouds the language, increases
  as much as it can the abstractness of the concept and the arbitrariness
  of the sign and stretches to the limit the link between signifier and signified.

  Roland Barthes

  Clouds, Trying, Would Be

  Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag (1983). “Barthes: Selected Writings”

• Tout refus du langage est une mort. Any refusal of language is a death.

  Roland Barthes

  Language, Refusal

• Le langage est une peau: je frotte mon langage contre l'autre. Language is a skin; I rub my language against another language.

  Roland Barthes

  Skins, Language

• The discourse on the Text should itself be nothing other than text, research, textual activity, since the Text is that social space which leaves no language safe, outside, nor any subject of the enunciation in position as judge, master, analyst, confessor, decoder. The theory of the Text can coincide only with a practice of writing.

  Roland Barthes

  Writing, Practice, Space

  "From Work to Text". Book by Roland Barthes. Conclusion, 1971.

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