Roland Barthes
What I claim is to live to the full the contradiction of my time, which may well make sarcasm the condition of truth.Collection: Truth
There is only one way left to escape the alienation of present day society: to retreat ahead of it.Collection: Society
Myth is neither a lie nor a confession: it is an inflexion.
To eat steak rare... represents both a nature and a morality.
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.
Literature is the question minus the answer.
The New is not a fashion, it is a value.
The skyscraper establishes the block, the block creates the street, the street offers itself to man.
I call the discourse of power any discourse that engenders blame, hence guilt, in its recipient.
The bastard form of mass culture is humiliated repetition... always new books, new programs, new films, news items, but always the same meaning.
Literature is without proofs. By which it must be understood that it cannot prove, not only what it says, but even that it is worth the trouble of saying it.
I have tried to be as eclectic as I possibly can with my professional life, and so far it's been pretty fun.
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.
A photograph is always invisible, it is not it that we see.
What the public wants is the image of passion, not passion itself.
The photographic image... is a message without a code.
The politician being interviewed clearly takes a great deal of trouble to imagine an ending to his sentence: and if he stopped short? His entire policy would be jeopardized!
For the theatre one needs long arms; it is better to have them too long than too short. An artiste with short arms can never, never make a fine gesture.
Through the mythology of Einstein, the world blissfully regained the image of knowledge reduced to a formula.
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.
The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.Collection: Book
The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.Collection: 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.Collection: Answers
How does meaning get into the image? Where does it end? And if it ends, what is there beyond?Collection: Doe
Each of us has his own rhythm of suffering.Collection: Sad
The author enters into his own death, writing begins.Collection: Writing
To make someone wait: the constant prerogative of all power.Collection: Waiting
We know that the war against intelligence is always waged in the name of common sense.Collection: War
Every photograph is a certificate of presence.Collection: Photograph
...language is never innocent.Collection: Language
Every exploration is an appropriation.Collection: Exploration
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.Collection: Games
We don't forget, but something vacant settles in us.Collection: Forget
Who speaks is not who writes, and who writes is not who is.Collection: Writing
A light without shadow generates an emotion without reserve.Collection: Light
Man does not exist prior to language, either as a species or as an individual.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Stars
I am interested in language because it wounds or seduces me.Collection: Language
Where you are tender, you speak your plural.Collection: Speak
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.Collection: Two
What love lays bare in me is energy.Collection: Energy
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.Collection: Mother
The best principals are not heroes; they are hero makers.Collection: Hero
Painting can feign reality without having seen it.Collection: Reality
Is the scene always visual? It can be aural, the frame can be linguistic: I can fall in love with a sentence spoken to me: and not only because it says something which manages to touch my desire, but because of its syntactical turn (framing), which will inhabit me like a memory.Collection: Falling In Love
To hide a passion totally (or even to hide, more simply, its excess) is inconceivable: not because the human subject is too weak, but because passion is in essence made to be seen: the hiding must be seen: I want you to know that I am hiding something from you, that is the active paradox I must resolve: at one and the same time it must be known and not known: I want you to know that I don't want to show my feelings: that is the message I address to the other.Collection: Passion
To eat steak rare . . . represents both a nature and a morality.Collection: Pregnancy
In an initial period, Photography, in order to surprise, photographs the notable; but soon, by a familiar reversal, it decrees notable whatever it photographs. The 'anything whatever' then becomes the sophisticated acme of value.Collection: Photography
As a jealous man, I suffer four times over: because I am jealous, because I blame myself for being so, because I fear that my jealousy will wound the other, because I allow myself to be subject to a banality: I suffer from being excluded, from being aggressive, from being crazy, and from being common.Collection: Crazy
Ultimately, Photography is subversive, not when it frightens, repels, or even stigmatizes, but when it is pensive, when it thinks.Collection: Photography