Quote

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.

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
Living
Mutation
History
Replace
Art
Substitute
Doe
Substitutes
Come
Pleasures
Nothing
Evolve
Mutations
Good
Progress
Pleasure
Vanishes

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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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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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What I claim is to live to the full the contradiction of my time, which may well make sarcasm the condition of truth.
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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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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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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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Literature is like phosphorus: it shines with its maximum brilliance and the moment when it attempts to die.
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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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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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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!
Roland Barthes
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All official institutions of language are repeating machines: school, sports, advertising, popular songs, news, all continually repeat the same structure, the same meaning, often the same words: the stereotype is a political fact, the major figure of ideology.
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Literature is the question minus the answer.
Roland Barthes
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The discourse on the Text should itself be nothing other than text, research, textual activity, since the Text is that social space which leaves no language safe, outside, nor any subject of the enunciation in position as judge, master, analyst, confessor, decoder. The theory of the Text can coincide only with a practice of writing.
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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.
Roland Barthes
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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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The author enters into his own death, writing begins.
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Why is it better to last than to burn?
Roland Barthes
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As Spectator I wanted to explore photography not as a question (a theme) but as a wound.
Roland Barthes
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Through the mythology of Einstein, the world blissfully regained the image of knowledge reduced to a formula.
Roland Barthes
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I call the discourse of power any discourse that engenders blame, hence guilt, in its recipient.
Roland Barthes