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
agents world photographer
All those young photographers who are at work in the world, determined upon the capture of actuality, do not know that they are agents of Death.
order ideas substance
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.
infinite corrections
Flaubert had infinite correction to perform.
skins language
Le langage est une peau: je frotte mon langage contre l'autre. Language is a skin; I rub my language against another language.
jesus reality august
In 1850, August Salzmann photographed, near Jerusalem, the road to Beith-Lehem (as it was spelled at the time): nothing but stony ground, olive trees; but three tenses dizzy my consciousness: my present, the time of Jesus, and that of the photographer, all this under the instance of 'reality' - and no longer through the elaborations of the text, whether fictional or poetic, which itself is never credible down to the root.
language refusal
Tout refus du langage est une mort. Any refusal of language is a death.
memories excess doe
L'amoureux qui n'oublie pas quelquefois meurt par exce' s, fatigue et tension de me moire (tel Werther). The lover who does not forget sometimes dies from excess, fatigue, and the strain of memory (like Werther).
return looks photograph
When we look at a photograph of ourselves or of others, we are really looking at the return of the dead.
obscene
Tout ce qui est anachronique est obsce' ne. Everything anachronistic is obscene.
children glasses risk
I want to be both pathetic and admirable, I want to be at the same time a child and an adult. Thereby I gamble, I take a risk: for it is always possible that the other will simply ask no question whatever about these unaccustomed glasses; that the other will see, in the fact, no sign.
men faces imagine
The petit-bourgeois is a man unable to imagine the Other. If he comes face to face with him, he blinds himself, ignores and denies him, or else transforms him into himself.
speak where-you-are
Where you are tender, you speak your plural.
adventure literature world
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).
objects
The Text is not a definitive object.