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
desire may encounters
I encounter millions of bodies in my life; of these millions, I may desire some hundreds; but of these hundreds, I love only one.
lasts
Why is it better to last than to burn?
writing causes doe
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.
sarcastic time truth
What I claim is to live to the full the contradiction of my time, which may well make sarcasm the condition of truth.
writing speak
Who speaks is not who writes, and who writes is not who is.
writing desire language
The text you write must prove to me that it desires me. This proof exists: it is writing. Writing is: the science of the various blisses of language, its Kama Sutra (this science has but one treatise: writing itself).
block men skyscraper
The skyscraper establishes the block, the block creates the street, the street offers itself to man.
writing mad motto
Thus every writer's motto reads: mad I cannot be, sane I do not deign to be, neurotic I am.
stories whole-life whole
He who reads a story only once is condemned to read the same story his whole life.
photograph certificates
Every photograph is a certificate of presence.
photography infinity photograph
What the Photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once: the Photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially.
mother pain believe
It is said that mourning, by its gradual labour, slowly erases pain; I could not, I cannot believe this; because for me, Time eliminates the emotion of loss (I do note weep), that is all. For the rest, everything has remained motionless. For what I have lost is not a Figure (the Mother), but a being; and not a being, but a quality (a soul): not the indispensable, but the irreplaceable.
eye mirrors lenses
But I never looked like that!’ - How do you know? What is the ‘you’ you might or might not look like? Where do you find it - by which morphological or expressive calibration? Where is your authentic body? You are the only one who can never see yourself except as an image; you never see your eyes unless they are dulled by the gaze they rest upon the mirror or the lens (I am interested in seeing my eyes only when they look at you): even and especially for your own body, you are condemned to the repertoire of its images.
understanding literature trouble
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.