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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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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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Someone tells me: this kind of love is not viable. But how can you evaluate viability? Why is the viable a Good Thing? Why is it better to last than to burn?
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In front of the photograph of my mother as a child, I tell myself: she is going to die: I shudder, like winnicott's psychotic patient, over a catastrophe which has already occurred. Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe.
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Eiffel saw his Tower in the form of a serious object, rational, useful men return it to him in the form of a great baroque dream which quite naturally touches on the borders of the irrational ... architecture is always dream and function, expression of a utopia and instrument of a convenience.
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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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Myth is neither a lie nor a confession: it is an inflexion.
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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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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 is that which he can not read without pain, without choking on truth.
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It must always be considered as though spoken by a character in a novel
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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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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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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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Language is neither reactionary nor progressive it is quite simply fascist for fascism does not prevent speech, it compels speech.
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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.
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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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Other countries drink to get drunk, and this is accepted by everyone in France, drunkenness is a consequence, never an intention. A drink is felt as the spinning out of a pleasure, not as the necessary cause of an effect which is sought: wine is not only a philtre, it is also the leisurely act of drinking.
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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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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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