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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.

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
Cannot
Prove
Without
Understood
Must
Worth
Even
Says
Saying
Trouble
Literature
Proofs
Understanding
Proof

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To eat steak rare . . . represents both a nature and a morality.
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What the Photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once: the Photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially.
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The realists do not take the photograph for a 'copy' of reality, but for an emanation of past reality, a magic, not an art.
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Rarely do outside of school remedies work their way into the fabric of the schools or into the teachers lives, and more rarely into the classrooms. Therefore they only offer a modest hope of influencing the basic culture of the school
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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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Every object in the world can pass from a closed, silent existence to an oral state, open to appropriation by society, for there is no law, whether natural or not, which forbids talking about things
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Even hidden in the most squalid Parisian halls, wrestling partakes of the nature of the great solar spectacles, Greek drama and bullfights: in both, a light without shadow generates an emotion without reserve.
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There is only one way left to escape the alienation of present day society: to retreat ahead of it.
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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).
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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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When we look at a photograph of ourselves or of others, we are really looking at the return of the dead.
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Flaubert had infinite correction to perform.
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Every new Fashion is a refusal to inherit, a subversion against the oppression of the preceding Fashion Fashion experiences itself as a Right, the natural right of the present over the past.
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This endured absence is nothing more or less than forgetfulness. I am, intermittently, unfaithful. This is the condition of my survival.
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Tout ce qui est anachronique est obsce' ne. Everything anachronistic is obscene.
Roland Barthes
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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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The Text is not a definitive object.
Roland Barthes
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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.
Roland Barthes
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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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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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