Quote

I want a History of Looking. For the Photograph is the advent of myself as other: a cunning dissociation of consciousness from identity. Even odder: it was before Photography that men had the most to say about the vision of the double. Heautoscopy was compared with an hallucinosis for centuries this was a great mythic theme.

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
Looking
Compared
History
Theme
Photograph
Dissociation
Great
Identity
Mythic
Even
Photography
Advent
Men
Consciousness
Cunning
Century
Double
Vision
Centuries

More quotes by Roland Barthes

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I cannot classify the other, for the other is, precisely, Unique, the singular Image which has miraculously come to correspond to the speciality of my desire. The other is the figure of my truth, and cannot be imprisoned in any stereotype (which is the truth of others).
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Every photograph is a certificate of presence.
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A light without shadow generates an emotion without reserve.
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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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...language is never innocent.
Roland Barthes
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What love lays bare in me is energy.
Roland Barthes
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The photograph is literally an emanation of the referent. From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here the duration of the transmission is insignificant the photograph of the missing being, as Sontag says, will touch me like the delayed rays of a star.
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One must turn the tongue seven times in the mouth before speaking.
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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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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.
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L'amoureux qui n'oublie pas quelquefois meurt par exce' s, fatigue et tension de me moire (tel Werther). The lover who does not forget sometimes dies from excess, fatigue, and the strain of memory (like Werther).
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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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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.
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I have not a desire but a need for solitude.
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Literature is like phosphorus: it shines with its maximum brilliance and the moment when it attempts to die.
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Literature is the question minus the answer.
Roland Barthes
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I encounter millions of bodies in my life of these millions, I may desire some hundreds but of these hundreds, I love only one.
Roland Barthes
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The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.
Roland Barthes
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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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There are two kinds of liberalism. A liberalism which is always, subterraneously authoritative and paternalistic, on the side of one's good conscience. And then there is a liberalism which is more ethical than political one would have to find another name for this. Something like a profound suspension of judgment.
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