Quotes About Language

There is nothing in discourse that is not to be found in a sentence.

Man does not exist prior to language, either as a species or as an individual. We never encounter a state where man is separated from language, which he then elaborates in order to 'express' what is happening to him: it is language which teaches the definition of man, not the contrary.

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.

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

The modern writer (scriptor) is born simultaneously with his text; he is in no way supplied with a being which precedes or transcends his writing, he is in no way the subject of which his book is the predicate; there is no other time than that of the utterance, and every text is eternally written here and now.

that ambiguous area of culture where something unfailingly political, though separate from the political choices of the day, infiltrates judgment and language.

This book has two determinants: on the one hand, an ideological critique of the language of so-called mass culture; on the other, an initial semiological dismantling of that language: I had just read Saussure and emerged with the conviction that by treating "collective representations" as sign systems one might hope to transcend pious denunciation and instead account in detail for the mystification which transforms petit bourgeois culture into a universal nature.

The (i)studium(i) is ultimately always coded, the (i)punctum is not)...

The pleasure of the sentence is to a high degree cultural. The artifact created by rhetors, grammarians, linguists, teachers, writers, parents -- this artifact is mimicked in a more or less ludic manner; we are playing with an exceptional object, whose paradox has been articulated by linguistics: immutably structured and yet infinitely renewable: something like chess.

Is the scene always visual? It can be aural, the frame can be linguistic: I can fall in love with a sentence spoken to me: and not only because it says something which manages to touch my desire, but because of its syntactical turn (framing), which will inhabit me like a memory.

We are all potential Dominicis, not as murderers but as accused, deprived of language, or worse, rigged out in that of our accusers, humiliated and condemned by it. To rob a man of his language in the very name of language: this is the first step in all legal murder.

M? interesez de limbaj pentru c? m? r?ne?te sau m? seduce.

photography is an ellipse of language and a condensation of an 'ineffable' society...

La tautologie. Oui, je sais, le mot n'est pas beau. Mais la chose est fort laide aussi.

ETYMOLOGY: "Panic" relates to the god Pan; but we can play on etymologies as on words (as has always been done) and pretend to believe that "panic" comes from the Greek adjective that means "everything.

Ce que cache mon langage, mon corps le dit» Roland Barthes (Fragments d'un discours amoureux)

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

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.

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

la vérité est impossible avec le langage

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.

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

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.

I-love-you is active. It affirms itself as force--against other forces. Which ones? The thousand forces of the world, which are, all of them, disparaging forces (science, doxa, reality, reason, etc) Or again: against language.