Quote

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.

Roland Barthes

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Roland Barthes
Age: 64 †
Born: 1915
Born: November 12
Died: 1980
Died: March 25
Diarist
Essayist
Linguist
Literary Critic
Literary Scholar
Literary Theorist
Mythographer
Non-Fiction Writer
Philosopher
Screenwriter
Roland Gérard Barthes
Language
Write
Muck
Littles
Impoverished
Little
Hysteria
Writing
Excessive
Trying
Confront
Much
Region
Love
Regions

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The politician being interviewed clearly takes a great deal of trouble to imagine an ending to his sentence: and if he stopped short? His entire policy would be jeopardized!
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I call the discourse of power any discourse that engenders blame, hence guilt, in its recipient.
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To eat, to speak, to sing (need we add: to kiss?) are operations which have the same site of the body for origin.
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Why is it better to last than to burn?
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New York... is a city of geometric heights, a petrified desert of grids and lattices, an inferno of greenish abstraction under a flat sky, a real Metropolis from which man is absent by his very accumulation.
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Le langage est une peau: je frotte mon langage contre l'autre. Language is a skin I rub my language against another language.
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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.
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Ultimately, Photography is subversive, not when it frightens, repels, or even stigmatizes, but when it is pensive, when it thinks.
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A photograph is always invisible, it is not it that we see.
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If I acknowledge my dependency, I do so because for me it is a means of signifying my demand: in the realm of love, futility is not a weakness or an absurdity: it is a strong sign: the more futile, the more it signifies and the more it asserts itself as strength.)
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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.
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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.
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The gesture of the amorous embrace seems to fulfill, for a time, the subject's dream of total union with the loved being: The longing for consummation with the other.
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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.
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In front of the photograph of my mother as a child, I tell myself: she is going to die: I shudder, like winnicott's psychotic patient, over a catastrophe which has already occurred. Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe.
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Tout refus du langage est une mort. Any refusal of language is a death.
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The haiku reproduces the designating gesture of the child pointing at whatever it is (the haiku shows no partiality for the subject), merely saying: that!
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The art of living has no history: it does not evolve: the pleasure which vanishes vanishes for good, there is no substitute for it. Other pleasures come, which replace nothing. No progress in pleasures, nothing but mutations.
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Isn’t the most sensitive point of this mourning the fact that I must lose a language — the amorous language? No more ‘I love you’s.
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Today there is no symbolic compensation for old age, no recognition of a specific value: wisdom, perceptiveness, experience, vision.
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