Quote

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.

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
Going
Passed
Image
Arms
Taking
Crazily
Beyond
Unreality
Dead
Spectacle
Dies
Represented
Thing
Entered

More quotes by Roland Barthes

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It is no longer the sexual which is indecent, it is the sentimental.
Roland Barthes
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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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...language is never innocent.
Roland Barthes
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Tout refus du langage est une mort. Any refusal of language is a death.
Roland Barthes
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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.
Roland Barthes
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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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I love you is unsubtle. It removes explanations, facilities, degrees, scruples.
Roland Barthes
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Tout ce qui est anachronique est obsce' ne. Everything anachronistic is obscene.
Roland Barthes
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There are two kinds of liberalism. A liberalism which is always, subterraneously authoritative and paternalistic, on the side of one's good conscience. And then there is a liberalism which is more ethical than political one would have to find another name for this. Something like a profound suspension of judgment.
Roland Barthes
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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.
Roland Barthes
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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.
Roland Barthes
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To make someone wait: the constant prerogative of all power.
Roland Barthes
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Is not the most erotic part of the body wherever the clothing affords a glimpse?
Roland Barthes
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Flaubert had infinite correction to perform.
Roland Barthes
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I want to be both pathetic and admirable, I want to be at the same time a child and an adult. Thereby I gamble, I take a risk: for it is always possible that the other will simply ask no question whatever about these unaccustomed glasses that the other will see, in the fact, no sign.
Roland Barthes
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It must always be considered as though spoken by a character in a novel
Roland Barthes
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To eat steak rare . . . represents both a nature and a morality.
Roland Barthes
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The Text is not a definitive object.
Roland Barthes
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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
Roland Barthes
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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.
Roland Barthes