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Ultimately, Photography is subversive, not when it frightens, repels, or even stigmatizes, but when it is pensive, when it thinks.

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
Thinking
Repels
Pensive
Frightens
Subversive
Ultimately
Thinks
Photography
Even

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Why is it better to last than to burn?
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Myth is neither a lie nor a confession: it is an inflexion.
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Painting can feign reality without having seen it.
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I want to be both pathetic and admirable, I want to be at the same time a child and an adult. Thereby I gamble, I take a risk: for it is always possible that the other will simply ask no question whatever about these unaccustomed glasses that the other will see, in the fact, no sign.
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What love lays bare in me is energy.
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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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Through the mythology of Einstein, the world blissfully regained the image of knowledge reduced to a formula.
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Literature is the question minus the answer.
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Flaubert had infinite correction to perform.
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Tout ce qui est anachronique est obsce' ne. Everything anachronistic is obscene.
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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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Each of us has his own rhythm of suffering.
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Those who fail to reread are obliged to read the same story everywhere.
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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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Language is neither reactionary nor progressive it is quite simply fascist for fascism does not prevent speech, it compels speech.
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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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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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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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The gesture of the amorous embrace seems to fulfill, for a time, the subject's dream of total union with the loved being: The longing for consummation with the other.
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A light without shadow generates an emotion without reserve.
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