Quotes from Roland Barthes

But if one fears or despises so much the philosophical foundations of a book, and if one demands so insistently the right to understand nothing about them and to say nothing on the subject, why become a critic?

though the subject rejects the notion of repeating it elsewhere later on, he sometimes discovers in himself a kind of diffusion of amorous desire; he then realises he is doomed to wander until he dies, from love

There are thus very engaging myths which are however not innocent.

I could read my nonexistence in the clothes my mother had worn before I can remember her.

a ship is a habitat before being a means of transport.

Though each love is experienced as unique and though the subject rejects the notion of repeating it elsewhere later on, he sometimes discovers in himself a kind of diffusion of amorous desire; he then realises he is doomed to wander until he dies, from love

Au Japon - dans ce pays que j'appelle le Japon - la sexualité est dans le sexe et non ailleurs ; aux États-Unis, c'est le contraire : le sexe est partout, sauf dans la sexualité. L'Empire des signes.

True wrestling, wrong called amateur wrestling, is performed in second-rate halls, where the public spontaneously attunes itself to the spectacular nature of the contest, like the audience at a suburban cinema.

This is why myth is experienced as innocent speech: not because its intentions are hidden—if they were hidden, they could not be efficacious—but because they are naturalised.

I always behave--I insist upon behaving, whatever I am told and whatever my own discouragements may be, as if love someday might be fulfilled, as if the Sovereign Good were possible

Magic consultations, secret rites, and votive actions are not absent from the amorous subject's life, whatever culture he belongs to.

El placer del texto es ese momento en que mi cuerpo comienza a seguir sus propias ideas, pues mi cuerpo no tiene las mismas ideas que yo

Embarrassed and almost guilty because sometimes I feel that my mourning is merely a susceptibility to emotion. But all my life haven't I been just that: moved?

The lover's discourse is in a sense a series of No Exits

Elle morte, je n'avais plus aucune raison de m'accorder à la marche du Vivant supérieur (l'espèce). Ma particularité ne pourrait jamais plus s'universaliser (sinon, utopiquement, par l'écriture, dont le projet, dès lors, devait devenir l'unique but de ma vie).

To select only monuments supresses at one stroke the reality of the land and that of its people, it accounts for nothing of the present, that is, nothing historical, and as a consequence, the monuments themselves become undecipherable, therefore senseless. What is to be seen is thus constantly in the process of vanishing, and the Guide becomes, through an operation common to all mystifications, the very opposite of what it advertises, an agent of blindness.

Were I a writer, and dead, how I would love it if my life, through the pains of some friendly and detached biographer, were to reduce itself to a few details, a few preferences, a few inflections, let us say: to biographemes whose distinction and mobility might go beyond any fate and come to touch, like Epicurean atoms, some future body, destined to the same dispersion.

I counter whatever doesn't work in love with the affirmation of what is worthwhile

Lorsque aucune langue connue n'est à votre disposition, il faut bien se résoudre à voler un langage - comme on volait autrefois un pain. Tous ceux - légion - qui sont hors du Pouvoir, sont contraints au vol de langage.

The text does not gloss the images, which do not illustrate the text.

To be jealous is to conform...To reject jealousy is to transgress a law.

La neurosis es un mal menor: no en relación con la salud sino en relación con ese imposible del que hablaba Bataille (La neurosis es la miedosa aprehensión de un fondo imposible, etc.); pero ese mal menor es el único que permite escribir (y leer).

Ultimately, Photography is subversive not when it frightens, repels, or even stigmatizes, but when it is pensive , when it thinks.

Comme jaloux, je souffre quatre fois : parce que je suis jaloux, parce que je me reproche de l'être, parce que je crains que ma jalousie ne blesse l'autre, parce que je me laisse assujettir à une banalité : je souffre d'être exclu, d'être agressif, d'être fou et d'être commun.