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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.

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
Body
Origin
Need
Site
Needs
Operations
Kiss
Add
Kissing
Sing
Speak

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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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A photograph is always invisible, it is not it that we see.
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I call the discourse of power any discourse that engenders blame, hence guilt, in its recipient.
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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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Literature is that which he can not read without pain, without choking on truth.
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The haiku reproduces the designating gesture of the child pointing at whatever it is (the haiku shows no partiality for the subject), merely saying: that!
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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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Those who fail to reread are obliged to read the same story everywhere.
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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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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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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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What I claim is to live to the full the contradiction of my time, which may well make sarcasm the condition of truth.
Roland Barthes
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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.
Roland Barthes
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Literature is the question minus the answer.
Roland Barthes
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Painting can feign reality without having seen it.
Roland Barthes
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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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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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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 encounter millions of bodies in my life of these millions, I may desire some hundreds but of these hundreds, I love only one.
Roland Barthes
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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
Roland Barthes