Roland Barthes Quotes - Page 4

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• 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”

  18 Copy quote

• I call the discourse of power any discourse that engenders blame, hence guilt, in its recipient.

  Roland Barthes

  Power, Guilt, Blame

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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.

  Roland Barthes

  Kissing, Add, Needs

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• 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.

  Roland Barthes

  Writing, Doe, Causes

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

  12 Copy quote

• For the photograph's immobility is somehow the result of a perverse confusion between two concepts: the Real and the Live: by attesting that the object has been real, the photograph surreptitiously induces belief that it is alive, because of that delusion which makes us attribute to Reality an absolute superior, somehow eternal value; but by shifting this reality to the past ("this-has-been"), the photograph suggests that it is already dead.

  Roland Barthes

  Real, Past, Two

  "Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography". Essay by Roland Barthes (translated by R. Howard), 1980.

  16 Copy quote

• The realists do not take the photograph for a 'copy' of reality, but for an emanation of past reality, a magic, not an art.

  Roland Barthes

  Photography, Art, Past

  6 Copy quote

• 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, Gestures, Shows

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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.

  Roland Barthes

  Looks, Return, Photograph

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• 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

  Writing, Voice, Destruction

  "Bruissement de la Langue".

  13 Copy quote

• Wine is a part of society because it provides a basis not only for a morality but also for an environment; it is an ornament in the slightest ceremonials of French daily life, from the snack to the feast, from the conversation at the local cafT to the speech at a formal dinner.

  Roland Barthes

  Wine, Snacks, Ornaments

  Roland Barthes (1973). “Mythologies”

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  9 Copy quote

• To whom could I put this question (with any hope of an answer)? Does being able to live without someone you loved mean you loved her less than you thought...?

  Roland Barthes

  Mean, Doe, Answers

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• Le toucher est le plus de mystificateur de tous les sens, a' la diffe rence de la vue, qui est le plus magique. Touch is the most demystifying of all senses, different from sight which is the most magical.

  Roland Barthes

  Sight, Different, Plus

  1957 Mythologies,'La nouvelle Citroen'.

  6 Copy quote

• The lover's fatal identity is precisely this: I am the one who waits.

  Roland Barthes

  Waiting, Identity, Lovers

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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.

  Roland Barthes

  Sarcastic, Time, Truth

  Roland Barthes (1973). “Mythologies”

  12 Copy quote

• Great portrait photographers are great mythologists.

  Roland Barthes

  Portraits, Photographer

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• Other countries drink to get drunk, and this is accepted by everyone; in France, drunkenness is a consequence, never an intention. A drink is felt as the spinning out of a pleasure, not as the necessary cause of an effect which is sought: wine is not only a philtre, it is also the leisurely act of drinking.

  Roland Barthes

  Country, Drinking, Wine

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• 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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• As Spectator I wanted to explore photography not as a question (a theme) but as a wound.

  Roland Barthes

  Photography, Theme, Wanted

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• Tout ce qui est anachronique est obsce' ne. Everything anachronistic is obscene.

  Roland Barthes

  Obscene

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• 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

  New York, Real, Men

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

  67 Copy quote

• Why is it better to last than to burn?

  Roland Barthes

  Lasts

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

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• Is not the most erotic portion of a body where the garment gapes? In perversion (which is the realm of textual pleasure) there are no "erogenous zones" (a foolish expression, besides); it is intermittence, as psychoanalysis has so rightly stated, which is erotic: the intermittence of skin flashing between two articles of clothing (trousers and sweater), between two edges (the open-necked shirt, the glove and the sleeve); it is this flash itself which seduces, or rather: the staging of an appearance-as-disappearance.

  Roland Barthes

  Sweaters, Expression, Two

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• The incapacity to name is a good symptom of disturbance.

  Roland Barthes

  Names, Symptoms, Incapacity

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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.

  Roland Barthes

  Names, Two, Profound

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