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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
Thinks
Photography
Even
Thinking
Repels
Pensive
Frightens
Subversive
Ultimately

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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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A photograph is always invisible, it is not it that we see.
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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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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.
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Literature is that which he can not read without pain, without choking on truth.
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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 make someone wait: the constant prerogative of all power.
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Each photograph is read as the private appearance of its referent: the age of Photography corresponds precisely to the explosion of the private into the public, or rather into the creation of a new social value, which is the publicity of the private: the private is consumes as such, publicly.
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The author enters into his own death, writing begins.
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The politician being interviewed clearly takes a great deal of trouble to imagine an ending to his sentence: and if he stopped short? His entire policy would be jeopardized!
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Each of us has his own rhythm of suffering.
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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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Those who fail to reread are obliged to read the same story everywhere.
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Le langage est une peau: je frotte mon langage contre l'autre. Language is a skin I rub my language against another language.
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Is not the most erotic part of the body wherever the clothing affords a glimpse?
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It is no longer the sexual which is indecent, it is the sentimental.
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A light without shadow generates an emotion without reserve.
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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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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 art of living has no history: it does not evolve: the pleasure which vanishes vanishes for good, there is no substitute for it. Other pleasures come, which replace nothing. No progress in pleasures, nothing but mutations.
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