Quote

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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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
Understand
Drip
Problem
Frighten
Kind
Lend
Would
Slow
People
Quickly
Problems
Create
Understanding

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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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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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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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There is only one way left to escape the alienation of present day society: to retreat ahead of it.
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I passed beyond the unreality of the thing represented, I entered crazily into the spectacle, into the image, taking into my arms what is dead, what is going to die.
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For the theatre one needs long arms it is better to have them too long than too short. An artiste with short arms can never, never make a fine gesture.
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What love lays bare in me is energy.
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As Spectator I wanted to explore photography not as a question (a theme) but as a wound.
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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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Death of the Father would deprive literature of many of its pleasures. If there is no longer a Father, why tell stories? Doesn't every narrative lead back to Oedipus? Isn't storytelling always a way of searching for one's origin, speaking one's conflicts with the Law, entering into the dialectic of tenderness and hatred?
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We don't forget, but something vacant settles in us.
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Is not the most erotic part of the body wherever the clothing affords a glimpse?
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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.
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It is no longer the sexual which is indecent, it is the sentimental.
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