Roland Barthes
Roland Barthes
Roland Gérard Bartheswas a French literary theorist, philosopher, linguist, critic, and semiotician. Barthes' ideas explored a diverse range of fields and he influenced the development of schools of theory including structuralism, semiotics, social theory, design theory, anthropology and post-structuralism...
NationalityFrench
ProfessionPhilosopher
Date of Birth12 November 1915
CountryFrance
kissing body add
To eat, to speak, to sing (need we add: to kiss?) are operations which have the same site of the body for origin.
photography memories intellectual
A paradox: the same century invented history and photography. But history is a memory fabricated according to positive formulas, a pure intellectual discourse which abolishes mythic time; and the photograph is a certain but fugitive testimony.
book
…the book creates meaning, the meaning creates life.
mean able doe
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...?
crazy jealous men
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.
real past two
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.
taken law interesting
The photographer, like an acrobat, must defy the laws of probability or even of possibility; at the limit, he must defy those of the interesting: the photograph becomes surprising when we do not know why it has been taken.
book cost birth
The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.
hero essence dry
Physically, the Ventoux is dreadful. Bald, it's the spirit of Dry: Its climate (it is much more an essence of climate than a geographic place) makes it a damned terrain, a testing place for heroes, something like a higher hell.
society way retreat
There is only one way left to escape the alienation of present day society: to retreat ahead of it.
names incapacity symptoms
The incapacity to name is a good symptom of disturbance.
absence responsible worldliness
I make the other’s absence responsible for my worldliness.
two desire burning
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.
fun eclectic-style eclectic
I have tried to be as eclectic as I possibly can with my professional life, and so far it's been pretty fun.