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

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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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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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Today there is no symbolic compensation for old age, no recognition of a specific value: wisdom, perceptiveness, experience, vision.
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Where you are tender, you speak your plural.
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Tout refus du langage est une mort. Any refusal of language is a death.
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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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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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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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I think that cars today are almost the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals: I mean the supreme creation of an era, conceived with passion by unknown artists, and consumed in image if not in usage by a whole population which appropriates them as a purely magical object.
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Is the scene always visual? It can be aural, the frame can be linguistic: I can fall in love with a sentence spoken to me: and not only because it says something which manages to touch my desire, but because of its syntactical turn (framing), which will inhabit me like a memory.
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It is no longer the sexual which is indecent, it is the sentimental.
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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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Ultimately, Photography is subversive, not when it frightens, repels, or even stigmatizes, but when it is pensive, when it thinks.
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...language is never innocent.
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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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To make someone wait: the constant prerogative of all power.
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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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Literature can no longer be either Mimesis or Mathesis but merely Semiosis, the adventure of what is impossible to language, in a word: Text (it is wrong to say that the notion of 'text' repeats the notion of 'literature': literature represents a finite world, the text figures the infinite of language).
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One must turn the tongue seven times in the mouth before speaking.
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Why is it better to last than to burn?
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