Quotes from Roland Barthes

A photograph is always invisible, it is not it that we see.

T]he most repugnant bastard there is: the bastard-octopus.

Everything pains me. The merest trifle rouses a sense of abandonment. I'm impatient with other people, their will to live, their universe. Attracted by a decision to withdraw from everyone [no longer bearing the world of Y].

However paradoxical it may seem, myth hides nothing: its function is to distort, not to make disappear.

In 1850, August Salzmann photographed, near Jerusalem, the road to Beith-Lehem (as it was spelled at the time): nothing but stony ground, olive trees; but three tenses dizzy my consciousness: my present, the time of Jesus, and that of the photographer, all this under the instance of 'reality' — and no longer through the elaborations of the text, whether fictional or poetic, which itself is never credible down to the root.

To visit the Tower, then, is to enter into contact not with a historical Sacred, as is the case for the majority of monuments, but rather with a new nature, that of human space: the Tower is not a trace, a souvenir, in short culture; but an immediate consumption of a humanity made natural by that glance which transforms it into space.

Now take all the delights of the earth, melt them into one single delight, and cast it entire into a single man - all this will be as nothing to the delight of which I speak.

We know that to give writing its future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.

Around 6 p.m.: the apartment is warm, clean, well-lit, pleasant. I make it that way, energetically, devotedly (enjoying it bitterly): henceforth and forever I am my own mother.

Valéry used to speak of those people who die in an accident because they are unwilling to let go of their umbrellas; how many subjects repressed, refracted, blinded as to their true sexuality, because they are unwilling to let go of a stereotype.

I waver—in the dark—between the observation (but is it entirely accurate?) that I'm unhappy only by moments, by jerks and surges, sporadically, even if such spasms are close together—and the conviction that deep down, in actual fact, I am continually, all the time, unhappy since maman's death.

T]he more technology develops the diffusion of information (and notably of images), the more it provides the means of masking the constructed meaning under the appearance of the given meaning.

Afternoon with Michel, sorting maman's belongings. Began the day by looking at her photographs. A cruel mourning begins again (but had never ended). To begin again without resting. Sisyphus.

The unary Photograph has every reason to be banal, 'unity' of composition being the first rule of vulgar (and notably, of academic) rhetoric: 'The subject,' says one handbook for amateur photographers, 'must be simple, free of useless accessories; this is called the Search for Unity.

Only I know what my road has been for the last year and a half: the economy of this motionless and anything but spectacular mourning that has kept me unceasingly separate by its demands; a separation that I have ultimately always projected to bring to a close by a book--Stubbornness, secrecy.

The Winter Photograph was my Ariadne, not because it would help me discover a secret thing (monster or treasure), but because it would tell me what constituted that thread which drew me toward Photography. I had understood that henceforth I must interrogate the evidence of Photography, not from the viewpoint of pleasure, but in relation to what we romantically call love and death.

Painting can feign reality without having seen it. Discourse combines signs which have referents, of course, but these referents can be and are most often 'chimeras.

Any demand is frigid until desire, until neurosis forms in it.

In terms of image-repertoire, the Photographer (the one I intend) represents that very subtle moment when, to tell the truth, I am neither subject nor object but a subject who feels he is becoming an object: I then experience a micro-version of death.

Despite the difficulties of my story, despite discomforts, doubts, despairs, despite impulses to be done with it, I unceasingly affirm love, within myself, as a value.

Il me vient alors cette exaltation d'aimer à fond quelqu'un d'inconnu, et qui le reste à jamais: mouvement mystique: j'accède à la connaissance de l'inconnaissance.

Je t'aime est sans nuances. Il supprime les explications, les aménagements, les degrés, les scrupules.

Le langage est une peau: je frotte mon langage contre l'autre.

Grim evening at Gabès (windy, black clouds, hideous bungalows, "folklore" performance in the Hotel Chems bar): I can no longer take refuge in my thoughts: neither in Paris nor traveling. No escape.