Quotes from Roland Barthes

Sometimes roused by desires (say, the trip to Tunisia), but they're desires of before --somehow anachronistic; they come from another shore , another country, the country of before.--Today it is a flat, dreary country--virtually without water--and paltry.

Ciò che reclamo è vivere la piena contraddizione del mio tempo, che mai così bene ha reso al sarcasmo la condizione della verità.

Dreamed of maman again. She was telling me—O cruelty!—that I didn't really love her. But I took it calmly, because I was so sure it wasn't true. The idea that death would be a kind of sleep. But it would be horrible if we had to dream eternally. (And this morning, her birthday. I always gave her a rose. Bought two at the little market of Mers Sultan and put them on my desk)

Like a kind of melancholy mirage, the other withdraws into infinity and I wear myself out trying to get there.

Where you are tender, you speak your plural.

But isn't desire always the same, whether the object is present or absent? Isn't the object always absent?

I was looking at everything in the other's face, the other's body, coldly : lashes, toenail, thin eyebrows, thin lips, the luster of the eyes, a mole, a way of holding a cigarette; I was fascinated-fascination being, after all, only the extreme of detachment-by a kind of colored ceramicized, vitrified figurine in which I could read, without understanding anything about it, the cause of my desire. )

mad I cannot be, sane I do not deign to be, neurotic I am.

The photograph touches me if I withdraw it from its usual blah-blah: "Technique," "Reality," "Reportage," "Art," etc.: to say nothing, to shut my eyes, to allow the detail to rise of its own accord into affective consciousness.

Endlessly I sustain the discourse of the beloved's absence; actually a preposterous situation; the other is absent as referent, present as allocutory. The singular distortion generates a kind of insupportable present; I am wedged between two tenses, that of the reference and that of the allocution: you have gone (which I lament), you are here (since I am addressing you). Whereupon I know what the present, that difficult tense is: a pure portion of anxiety.

Aussi, le style est-il toujours un secret[...]

Forma bastard? a culturii de mas? este repetarea ruÅŸinoas?:se repet? conÅ£inuturile,schemele ideologice,ÅŸtergerea contradicÅ£iilor,dar se varieaz? formele superficiale:mereu alte c?rÅ£i,emisiuni,filme noi,fapte diverse,dar întodeauna acelaÅŸi sens

the love which is over and done with passes into another world like a ship into space, lights no longer winking

The true act of mourning is not to suffer from the loss of the loved object; it is to discern one day, on the skin of the relationship, a certain tiny stain, appearing there as the symptom of a certain death : for the first time I am doing harm to the one I love, involuntarily, of course, but without panic.

Am I in love? -Yes, since I'm waiting. The other never waits. Sometimes I want to play the part of the one who doesn't wail; I try to busy myself elsewhere, to arrive late; but I always lose at this game: whatever I do, I find myself there, with nothing to do, punctual. even ahead of time. The lover's fatal identity is precisely: I am the one who waits.

Duelo) No Continuo, sino Inmóvil

Mais à nous, qui ne sommes ni des chevaliers de la foi ni des surhommes, il ne reste, si je puis dire, qu'à tricher avec la langue, qu'à tricher la langue. Cette tricherie salutaire, cette esquive, ce leurre magnifique, qui permet d'entendre la langue hors-pouvoir, dans la splendeur d'une révolution permanente du langage, je l'appelle pour ma part : littérature.

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

Nela vejo apenas o objeto de um desejo esteticamente retido.

The crisis of engulfment can come from a wound

Where there is a wound, there is a subject.

The crisis of engulfment can come from a wound but also from a fusion: we die together from loving each other: an open death, by dilution into the ether, a closed death of the shared grave.

Un mandarín estaba enamorado de una cortesana. «Seré tuya», dijo ella, «cuando hayas pasado cien noches esperándome sentado sobre un banco, en mi jardín, bajo mi ventana». Pero, en la nonagesimonovena noche, el mandarín se levanta, toma su banco bajo el brazo y se va.

All this means in fact that one believes oneself to have such sureness of intelligence that acknowledging an inability to understand calls in question the clarity of the author and not that of one's own mind.