Quotes from Roland Barthes

Sweat is a sign. Of what? Of moral feeling.

One writes with one's desire, and I am not through desiring.

one can conceive of very ancient myths, but there are no eternal ones; for it is human history which converts reality into speech, and it alone rules the life and the death of mythical language. Ancient or not, mythology can only have an historical foundation, for myth is a type of speech chosen by history…

Like the Roman fringe or the nocturnal plait, sweat is a sign. Of what? Of moral feeling. Everyone is sweating because everyone is debating something within himself.

What is a hero? The one who has the last word.

La sanción del crítico no es el sentido de la obra, sino el sentido de lo que dice sobre ella.

El texto que usted escribe debe demostrarme que me desea. Esa prueba existe: es la escritura. La escritura es esto: la ciencia de los gozos del lenguaje, su kamasutra (de esta ciencia no hay más que un tratado: la escritura misma).

In wrestling, as on the stage in antiquity, one is not ashamed of one's suffering, one knows how to cry, one has a liking for tears.

The writer is the prey of an inner god who speaks at all times, without bothering, tyrant that he is, with the holidays of his medium. Writers are on holiday, but their Muse is awake, and gives birth non-stop.

The mythology of Einstein shows him as a genius so lacking in magic that one speaks about his thought as of a functional labour analogous to the mechanical making of sausages, the grinding of corn or the crushing of ore: he used to produce thought, continuously, as a mill makes flour, and death was above all, for him, the cessation of a localized function: 'the most powerful brain of all has stopped thinking'.

Myth and utopia: the origins have belonged, the future will belong to the subjects in whom there is something feminine.

Another day, in the rain, we're waiting for the boat at the lake; from happiness, this time, the same outburst of annihilation sweeps through me. This is how it happens sometimes, misery or joy engulfs me, without any particular tumult ensuing: nor any pathos: I am dissolved, not dismembered; I fall, I flow, I melt. Such thoughts grazed, touched, tested (the way you test the water with your foot)-can recur. Nothing solemn about them. This is exactly what gentleness is.

And yet, nothing can escape being put into question by History; not even good writing.

Love's atopia, characteristic which causes it to escape all dissertations, would be that *ultimately* it is possible to talk about love only *according to a strict allocutive determination*; whether philosophical, gnomic, lyric, or novelistic, there is always, in the discourse upon love, a person whom one addresses, though this person may have shifted to the condition of a phantom or a creature still to come. No one wants to speak of love unless it is *for* someone.).

I myself cannot (as an enamored subject) construct my love story to the end: I am its poet (its bard) only for the beginning; the end, like my own death, belongs to others; it is up to them to write the fiction, the external, mythic narrative.

In this manner , we are told, the system of the imaginary is spread circularly, by detours and returns the length of an empty subject.

A man who wants the truth is never answered save in strong, highly colored images, which nonetheless turn ambiguous, indecisive, once he tries to transform them into signs, as in any manticism, the consulting lover must make his own truth

What wounds me are the forms of the relations, its images; or rather, what others call form I experience as force. The image--as the example for the excessive--*is the thing itself*. The lover is thus an artist; and his world is in fact a world reversed, since in it each image is its own end (nothing beyond the image).

el miedo es a la vez lo que está "en el origen de todo", una parodia del cogito cartesiano: "Tengo miedo, luego vivo"– y

Amour au bandeau: Ce proverbe est faux. L'amour ouvre grand les yeux, il rend clairvoyant:J'ai, de toi, sur toi, le savoir absolu. Rapport du clerc au maître; tu a tout pouvoir sur moi, mais j'ai tout savoir sur toi.

Truth to tell, what is invested in the concept is less reality than a certain knowledge of reality; in passing from the meaning to the form, the image loses some knowledge: the better to receive the knowledge in the concept. In actual fact, the knowledge contained in a mythical concept is confused, made of yielding, shapeless associations.

Obliger a penser tout seul, voila une definition possible de la culture classique. Une civilisation n'est belle que dans la mesure ou il y a une circulation naturelle entre les oeuvres de ses grands hommes et la vie intime de ses individus et de ses foyers.

Historiquement, le discours de l'absence est tenu par la Femme : la Femme est sédentaire, l'Homme est chasseur, voyageur; la Femme est fidèle (elle attend), l'homme est coureur (il navigue, il drague). C'est la Femme qui donne forme à l'absence, en élabore la fiction, car elle en a le temps ; (…)

Language is a skin : I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.