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
ethical-questions our-world desire
One of the marks of our world is perhaps this reversal: we live according to a generalized image-repertoire. Consider the United Sates, where everything is transformed into images: only images exist and are produced and are consumes ... Such a reversal necessarily raises the ethical question: not that the image is immoral, irreligious, or diabolic (as some have declared it, upon the advent of the Photograph), but because, when generalized, it completely de-realizes the human world of conflicts and desires, under cover of illustrating it.
clouds trying would-be
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.
erotic body glimpse
Is not the most erotic part of the body wherever the clothing affords a glimpse?
people understanding kind
If I had to create a god, I would lend him a “slow understanding”: a kind of drip-by-drip understanding of problems. People who understand quickly frighten me.
love writing hysteria
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.
arms unreality dies
I passed beyond the unreality of the thing represented, I entered crazily into the spectacle, into the image, taking into my arms what is dead, what is going to die...
doe ends ifs
How does meaning get into the image? Where does it end? And if it ends, what is there beyond?
language innocent
...language is never innocent.
literature world-literature answers
Literature is the question minus the answer.
games play waiting
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.
speech language forget
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.
war names common-sense
We know that the war against intelligence is always waged in the name of common sense.
photography messages code
The photographic image... is a message without a code.
energy lays
What love lays bare in me is energy.