Quotes About Interpretation

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

The portrait-photograph is a closed field of forces. Four image-repertoires intersect here, oppose and distort each other. In front of the lens, I am at the same time: the one I think I am, the one I want others to think I am, the one the photographer thinks I am, and the one he makes use of to exhibit his art.

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.

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

The photographic image is a message without a code.

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.

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

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.

la vérité est impossible avec le langage

But if one fears or despises so much the philosophical foundations of a book, and if one demands so insistently the right to understand nothing about them and to say nothing on the subject, why become a critic?

There are thus very engaging myths which are however not innocent.

Au Japon - dans ce pays que j'appelle le Japon - la sexualité est dans le sexe et non ailleurs ; aux États-Unis, c'est le contraire : le sexe est partout, sauf dans la sexualité. L'Empire des signes.

This is why myth is experienced as innocent speech: not because its intentions are hidden—if they were hidden, they could not be efficacious—but because they are naturalised.

El placer del texto es ese momento en que mi cuerpo comienza a seguir sus propias ideas, pues mi cuerpo no tiene las mismas ideas que yo

The text does not gloss the images, which do not illustrate the text.

But when a myth reaches the entire community, it is from the latter than the mythologist must become estranged if he wants to liberate the myth.

Le mythe est une parole choisie par l'histoire : il ne saurait surgir de la « nature » des choses.

History is hysterical: it is constituted only if we consider it, only if we look at it—and in order to look at it, we must be excluded from it.

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

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

Roland Barthes

Roland Barthes

è sterile ricondurre l'opera a qualcosa di puramente esplicito, perché allora non c'è, immediatamente, più nulla da dirne e perché la funzione dell'opera non può consistere nel chiudere le labbra di coloro che la leggono

Roland Barthes