Quote

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.

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
Emotion
Reserve
Nature
Reserves
Light
Halls
Parisian
Without
Wrestling
Partakes
Great
Greek
Squalid
Even
Hidden
Generates
Drama
Spectacles
Shadow
Solar

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Tout ce qui est anachronique est obsce' ne. Everything anachronistic is obscene.
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Pleasure is continually disappointed, reduced, deflated, in favor of strong, noble values: Truth, Death, Progress, Struggle, Joy, etc. Its victorious rival is Desire: we are always being told about Desire, never about Pleasure.
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Is not the most erotic part of the body wherever the clothing affords a glimpse?
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The unary Photograph has every reason to be banal, 'unity' of composition being the first rule of vulgar (and notably, of academic) rhetoric: 'The subject,' says one handbook for amateur photographers, 'must be simple, free of useless accessories this is called the Search for Unity.
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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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To know that one does not write for the other, to know that these things I am going to write will never cause me to be loved by the one I love (the other), to know that writing compensates for nothing, sublimates nothing, that it is precisely there where you are not--this is the beginning of writing.
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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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I passed beyond the unreality of the thing represented, I entered crazily into the spectacle, into the image, taking into my arms what is dead, what is going to die.
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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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Literature is like phosphorus: it shines with its maximum brilliance and the moment when it attempts to die.
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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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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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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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Painting can feign reality without having seen it.
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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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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!
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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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Myth is neither a lie nor a confession: it is an inflexion.
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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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