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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.
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
Less
Intermittently
Nothing
Unfaithful
Endured
Forgetfulness
Condition
Absence
Survival
Conditions
More quotes by Roland Barthes
Is not the most erotic part of the body wherever the clothing affords a glimpse?
Roland Barthes
What I claim is to live to the full the contradiction of my time, which may well make sarcasm the condition of truth.
Roland Barthes
Painting can feign reality without having seen it.
Roland Barthes
I think that cars today are almost the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals: I mean the supreme creation of an era, conceived with passion by unknown artists, and consumed in image if not in usage by a whole population which appropriates them as a purely magical object.
Roland Barthes
For me the noise of Time is not sad: I love bells, clocks, watches — and I recall that at first photographic implements were related to techniques of cabinetmaking and the machinery of precision: cameras, in short, were clocks for seeing, and perhaps in me someone very old still hears in the photographic mechanism the living sound of the wood.
Roland Barthes
Why is it better to last than to burn?
Roland Barthes
A photograph is always invisible, it is not it that we see.
Roland Barthes
Tout ce qui est anachronique est obsce' ne. Everything anachronistic is obscene.
Roland Barthes
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.
Roland Barthes
Myth is neither a lie nor a confession: it is an inflexion.
Roland Barthes
It must always be considered as though spoken by a character in a novel
Roland Barthes
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.
Roland Barthes
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).
Roland Barthes
Those who fail to reread are obliged to read the same story everywhere.
Roland Barthes
The unary Photograph has every reason to be banal, 'unity' of composition being the first rule of vulgar (and notably, of academic) rhetoric: 'The subject,' says one handbook for amateur photographers, 'must be simple, free of useless accessories this is called the Search for Unity.
Roland Barthes
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
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.)
Roland Barthes
Historically and politically, the petit-bourgeois is the key to the century. The bourgeois and proletariat classes have become abstractions: the petite-bourgeoisie, in contrast, is everywhere, you can see it everywhere, even in the areas of the bourgeois and the proletariat, what's left of them.
Roland Barthes
When we define the Photograph as a motionless image, this does not mean only that the figures it represents do not move it means that they do not (i)emerge(i), do not (i)leave(i): they are anesthetized and fastened down, like butterflies.
Roland Barthes
Literature is like phosphorus: it shines with its maximum brilliance and the moment when it attempts to die.
Roland Barthes