Quotes from Roland Barthes

Robar a un hombre su lenguaje en nombre del propio lenguaje: todos los crímenes legales comienzan así.

the first thing we love is a *scene*. For love at first sight requires the very sign of its suddenness...what is immediate stands for what is fulfilled: I am initiated: the scene *consecrates* the thing I am going to love

l'amour avait fait de lui un déchet social, ce dont il se réjouissait.

Only the Mother can regret: to be depressed, it is said, is to resemble the Mother as I imagine her regretting me eternally

A squeeze of the hand—enormous documentation—a tiny gesture within the palm, a knee which doesn't move away, an arm extended, as if quite naturally, along the back of a sofa and against which the other's head gradually comes to rest—this is the paradisiac realm of subtle and clandestine signs: a kind of festival not of the senses but of meaning.)

Is not any other desire but mine insane?

Askesis is addressed to the other: turn back, look at me, see what you have made of me. It is a blackmail: I raise before the other the figure of my own disappearance, as it will surely occur, if the other does not yield.

I am caught in this contradiction: on the one hand, I believe I know the other better than anyone and triumphantly assert my knowledge to the other ( I know you—I'm the only one who really knows you!); and on the other hand, I am often struck by the obvious fact that the other is impenetrable, intractable, not to be found; I cannot open up the other, trace back the other's origins, solve the riddle. Where does the other come from? Who is the other? I wear myself out, I shall never know.

I never know the loved being's voice except when it is dead, remembered, recalled inside my head, way past the ear; a tenuous yet monumental voice, since it is one of those objects which exist only once they have disappeared

Neither knows the other yet. Hence they must tell each other: *This is who I am.* This is narrative bliss, the kind which both fulfills and delays knowledge, in a word, restarts it. In the amorous encounter, I keep rebuilding-- I am *light*

The lover's fatal identity is precisely: I am the one who waits.

la vérité est impossible avec le langage

the amorous subject wonders, not whether he should declare his love to the loved being,..., but to what degree he should conceal the turbulences of his passion, his desires, his distresses: in short, his excesses.

Every contact, for the lover, raises the question of an answer: the skin is asked to reply.

Toys here reveal the list of all the things the adult does not find unusual: war, bureaucracy, ugliness, Martians, etc. It is not so much, in fact, the imitation which is the sign of an abdication, as its literalness: French toys are like a Jivaro head, in which one recognises, shrunken to the size of an apple, the wrinkles and hair of an adult.

Neither knows the other yet. Hence they must tell each other: This is what I am. This is narrative bliss, the kind which both fulfills and delays knowledge, in a word, restarts it. In the amorous encounter, I keep rebounding - I am light.

French toys are usually based on imitation, they are meant to produce children who are users, not creators.

To know that one does not write for the other, to know that these things that 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 *where you are not*--that is the beginning of writing.

I seek to harm myself, I expel myself from my paradise, busily provoking within myself the images (of jealousy, abandonment, humiliation) which can injure me; and I keep the wound open, I feed it with other images, until another wound appears and produces a diversion.

Photographs thrust home the fact of our mortality. We look at faces and limbs warm or tense with life, knowing full well that they are now dust. Sound haunts me even more. I can look at a photo of Maria Callas and accept the fact that she is dead, but I am bewildered when I hear her voice coming out of my CD player. For that voice, quivering with immediacy and passion, is the quintessence of life-of what it means to be fully alive.

Henceforth, toys are chemical in substance and colour; their very material introduces one to a coenaethesis of use, not pleasure. These toys die in fact very quickly, and once dead, they have no posthumous life for the child.

What is a hero? The one who has the last word. Can we think of a hero who does not speak before dying?

Om aan de ontwerkelijking te ontsnappen - om de komst ervan uit te stellen - probeer ik me met de wereld te verenigen door middel van het slechte humeur.

Gossip reduces the other to he/she, and this reduction is intolerable to me. For me the other is neither *he* nor *she* The other has only a name of his own, and her own name. The third person pronoun is a wicked pronoun; it is a pronoun of the non-person, it absents, it annuls.