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To make someone wait: the constant prerogative of all power.

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
Constant
Waiting
Someone
Power
Make
Prerogative
Wait

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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.
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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 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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There is only one way left to escape the alienation of present day society: to retreat ahead of it.
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Language is neither reactionary nor progressive it is quite simply fascist for fascism does not prevent speech, it compels speech.
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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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If I acknowledge my dependency, I do so because for me it is a means of signifying my demand: in the realm of love, futility is not a weakness or an absurdity: it is a strong sign: the more futile, the more it signifies and the more it asserts itself as strength.)
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New York... is a city of geometric heights, a petrified desert of grids and lattices, an inferno of greenish abstraction under a flat sky, a real Metropolis from which man is absent by his very accumulation.
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Is not the most erotic part of the body wherever the clothing affords a glimpse?
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A light without shadow generates an emotion without reserve.
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Painting can feign reality without having seen it.
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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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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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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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Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.
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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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As Spectator I wanted to explore photography not as a question (a theme) but as a wound.
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What love lays bare in me is energy.
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Those who fail to reread are obliged to read the same story everywhere.
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