Quote

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.

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
Comes
Transforms
Else
Denies
Men
Bourgeois
Unable
Deny
Imagine
Petit
Face
Blinds
Faces
Ignores

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Where you are tender, you speak your plural.
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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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The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.
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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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The gesture of the amorous embrace seems to fulfill, for a time, the subject's dream of total union with the loved being: The longing for consummation with the other.
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The art of living has no history: it does not evolve: the pleasure which vanishes vanishes for good, there is no substitute for it. Other pleasures come, which replace nothing. No progress in pleasures, nothing but mutations.
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A photograph is always invisible, it is not it that we see.
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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 try to write love is to confront the muck of language: that region of hysteria where language is both too much and too little, excessive and impoverished.
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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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Rarely do outside of school remedies work their way into the fabric of the schools or into the teachers lives, and more rarely into the classrooms. Therefore they only offer a modest hope of influencing the basic culture of the school
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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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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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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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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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Ultimately, Photography is subversive, not when it frightens, repels, or even stigmatizes, but when it is pensive, when it thinks.
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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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