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For the theatre one needs long arms it is better to have them too long than too short. An artiste with short arms can never, never make a fine gesture.

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
Needs
Long
Gesture
Make
Gestures
Never
Theatre
Short
Arms
Fine
Better

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Literature is the question minus the answer.
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To eat steak rare . . . represents both a nature and a morality.
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Every object in the world can pass from a closed, silent existence to an oral state, open to appropriation by society, for there is no law, whether natural or not, which forbids talking about things
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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 without proofs. By which it must be understood that it cannot prove, not only what it says, but even that it is worth the trouble of saying it.
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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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Usually the amateur is defined as an immature state of the artist: someone who cannot — or will not — achieve the mastery of a profession. But in the field of photographic practice, it is the amateur, on the contrary, who is the assumption of the professional: for it is he who stands closer to the (i)noeme(i) of Photography.
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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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There is only one way left to escape the alienation of present day society: to retreat ahead of it.
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When we define the Photograph as a motionless image, this does not mean only that the figures it represents do not move it means that they do not (i)emerge(i), do not (i)leave(i): they are anesthetized and fastened down, like butterflies.
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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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Myth is neither a lie nor a confession: it is an inflexion.
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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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A light without shadow generates an emotion without reserve.
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