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

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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 the question minus the answer.
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The realists do not take the photograph for a 'copy' of reality, but for an emanation of past reality, a magic, not an art.
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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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Ultimately, Photography is subversive, not when it frightens, repels, or even stigmatizes, but when it is pensive, when it thinks.
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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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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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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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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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I love you is unsubtle. It removes explanations, facilities, degrees, scruples.
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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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Henceforth I would have to cosent to combine two voices: the voice of banality (to say what everyone sees and knows) and the voice of singularity (to replenish such banality with all the élan of an emotion which belonged only to myself).
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A photograph is always invisible, it is not it that we see.
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I want a History of Looking. For the Photograph is the advent of myself as other: a cunning dissociation of consciousness from identity. Even odder: it was before Photography that men had the most to say about the vision of the double. Heautoscopy was compared with an hallucinosis for centuries this was a great mythic theme.
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Even hidden in the most squalid Parisian halls, wrestling partakes of the nature of the great solar spectacles, Greek drama and bullfights: in both, a light without shadow generates an emotion without reserve.
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The petit-bourgeois is a man unable to imagine the Other. If he comes face to face with him, he blinds himself, ignores and denies him, or else transforms him into himself.
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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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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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Those who fail to reread are obliged to read the same story everywhere.
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To eat steak rare . . . represents both a nature and a morality.
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