Quotes About Barthes

What is new about Barthes's posthumous reputation is the view of him as a writer whose books of criticism and personal musings must be admired as serious and beautiful works of the imagination.

The text you write must prove to me that it desires me. This proof exists: it is writing. Writing is: the science of the various blisses of language, its Kama Sutra (this science has but one treatise: writing itself).

As a language, Garbo's singularity was of the order of the concept, that of Audrey Hepburn is of the order of the substance; the face of Garbo is an Idea, that of Hepburn, an Event.

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

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

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?

Is not any other desire but mine insane?

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).

I am through with *not enough* Henceforth I live in the definitive assumption of the Image-repertoire, its triumph.

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

Literature is like phosphorus: it shines with its maximum brilliance at the moment when it attempts to die. — Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero . (Hill and Wang; Reissue edition April 1, 1977) Originally published 1953

Po mome ukusu, ništa nije indiskretnije od posmatranja nekog dok piše: još je indiskretnije videti nekog da ?ita jedva primetno mi?u?i usnama. Markizu de Sadu je nedostajao taj prizor (za njega isuviše blag): uhvatiti eksplozije na usnama onog koji poluglasno ?ita neki tekst u procesu artikulisanja. Ništa od te minule erotike više nije mogu?e: danas su pisanje i ?itanje skrovite prakse.

There are people who think that wrestling is an ignoble sport. Wrestling is not sport, it is a spectacle, and it is no more ignoble to attend a wrestled performance of suffering than a performance of the sorrows of Arnolphe or Andromaque.

If I acknowledge my dependency, I do so because for me it is a means of signifying my demand.

Jacques Derrida is a very important thinker and philosopher who has made serious contributions to both philosophy and literary criticism. Roland Barthes is the one I feel most affinity for, and Michel Foucault, well, his writing influenced my novel, 'Middlesex.'

For Barthes, this would be a classic example of the operations of ideology, the attempt to make universal and legitimate what is in fact partial and particular; an attempt to pass off that which is cultural (i.e. humanly made) as something which is natural (i.e. just existing).

Don't say mourning. It's too psychoanalytic. I'm not mourning. I'm suffering.

One of the reasons I like Barthes more than other writers of that ilk is because he had a literary quality.

I saw Roland Barthes's 'Mourning Diary' at a bookshop, and I felt it was like I was destined to see the book. I read it all in one go while I was in the shop. The book was mind-blowing.

the given language is power because it compels me to use already formulated stereotypes, including words themselves, and that it is structured so fatally that, slaves inside it, we cannot free ourselves outside it, because outside the given language there is nothing. How can we escape what Barthes calls, Sartre-like, this huis clos ? By cheating. You can cheat the given language. This dishonest and healthy and liberating trick is called literature.

A line from Barthes she remembered: Every lover is mad, we are told. But can we imagine a madman in love?

Barthes me lisait, donc on s'est rencontrés.

Barthes found the exit to this merry-go-round by reminding himself that "it is language which is assertive, not he." It is absurd, Barthes says, to try to flee from language's assertive nature by "add[ing] to each sentence some little phrase of uncertainty

It is absurd, Barthes says, to try to flee from language's assertive nature by "add[ing] to each sentence some little phrase of uncertainty, as if anything that came out of language could make language tremble.