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Language is neither reactionary nor progressive it is quite simply fascist for fascism does not prevent speech, it compels speech.

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
Neither
Compels
Speech
Reactionary
Simply
Reactionaries
Quite
Fascist
Language
Fascists
Doe
Fascism
Progressive
Prevent

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Where you are tender, you speak your plural.
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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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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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Literature is like phosphorus: it shines with its maximum brilliance and the moment when it attempts to die.
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Tout refus du langage est une mort. Any refusal of language is a death.
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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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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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Through the mythology of Einstein, the world blissfully regained the image of knowledge reduced to a formula.
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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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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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In an initial period, Photography, in order to surprise, photographs the notable but soon, by a familiar reversal, it decrees notable whatever it photographs. The 'anything whatever' then becomes the sophisticated acme of value.
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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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What the Photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once: the Photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially.
Roland Barthes
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For the theatre one needs long arms it is better to have them too long than too short. An artiste with short arms can never, never make a fine gesture.
Roland Barthes
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A light without shadow generates an emotion without reserve.
Roland Barthes
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A photograph is always invisible, it is not it that we see.
Roland Barthes
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Literature is the question minus the answer.
Roland Barthes
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To make someone wait: the constant prerogative of all power.
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Tout ce qui est anachronique est obsce' ne. Everything anachronistic is obscene.
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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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