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A light without shadow generates an emotion without reserve.

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
Light
Without
Generates
Reserve
Reserves
Shadow
Emotion

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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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What the Photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once: the Photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially.
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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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I encounter millions of bodies in my life of these millions, I may desire some hundreds but of these hundreds, I love only one.
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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.
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Pleasure is continually disappointed, reduced, deflated, in favor of strong, noble values: Truth, Death, Progress, Struggle, Joy, etc. Its victorious rival is Desire: we are always being told about Desire, never about Pleasure.
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It must always be considered as though spoken by a character in a novel
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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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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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It is no longer the sexual which is indecent, it is the sentimental.
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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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A photograph is always invisible, it is not it that we see.
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The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.
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The Text is not a definitive object.
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Is not the most erotic part of the body wherever the clothing affords a glimpse?
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Other countries drink to get drunk, and this is accepted by everyone in France, drunkenness is a consequence, never an intention. A drink is felt as the spinning out of a pleasure, not as the necessary cause of an effect which is sought: wine is not only a philtre, it is also the leisurely act of drinking.
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Eiffel saw his Tower in the form of a serious object, rational, useful men return it to him in the form of a great baroque dream which quite naturally touches on the borders of the irrational ... architecture is always dream and function, expression of a utopia and instrument of a convenience.
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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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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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To dope the racer is as criminal, as sacrilegious, as trying to imitate God it is stealing from God the privilege of the spark.
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