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
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.
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.
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...?