Roland Barthes Quotes

“A day or two after my love pronouncement, now feral with vulnerability, I sent you the passage from Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes in which Barthes describes how the subject who utters the phrase “I love you” is like “the Argonaut renewing his ship during its voyage without changing its name.” Just as the Argo’s parts may be replaced over time but the boat is still called the Argo, whenever the lover utters the phrase “I love you,” its meaning must be renewed by each use, as “the very task of love and of language is to give to one and the same phrase inflections which will be forever new.”
― Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts

“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 wait; 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.”
― Roland Barthes

“Another unary photograph is the pornographic photograph (I am not saying the erotic photograph: the erotic is a pornographic that has been disturbed, fissured). Nothing more homogeneous than a pornographic photograph. It is always a naive photograph, without intention and without calculation. Like a shop window which shows only one illuminated piece of jewelry, it is completely constituted by the presentation of only one thing: sex: no secondary, untimely object ever manages to half conceal, delay, or distract... A proof a contrario: Mapplethorpe shifts his close-ups of genitalia from the pornographic to the erotic by photographing the fabric of underwear at very close range: the photograph is no longer unary, since I am interested in the texture of the material.


The presence (the dynamics) of this blind field is, I believe, what distinguishes the erotic photograph from the pornographic photograph. Pornography ordinarily represents the sexual organs, making them into a motionless object (a fetish), flattered like an idol that does not leave its niche; for me, there is no punctum in the pornographic image; at most it amuses me (and even then, boredom follows quickly). The erotic photograph, on the contrary (and this is its very condition), does not make the sexual organs into a central object; it may very well not show them at all; it takes the spectator outside its frame, and it is there that I animate this photograph and that it animates me.”
― Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography

“Literature is like phosphorus: it shines with its maximum brilliance and the moment when it attempts to die.”
― Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero

“Justice is always ready to lend you a spare brain in order to condemn you without a second thought”
― Roland Barthes, Mythologies

“Cinema captures the sound of speech close up and makes us hear in their materiality, their sensuality, the breath, the gutturals, the fleshiness of the lips, a whole presence of the human muzzle (that the voice, that writing, be as fresh, supple, lubricated, delicately granular and vibrant as an animal's muzzle), to succeed in shifting the signified a great distance and in throwing, so to speak, the anonymous body of the actor into my ear: it granulates, it crackles, it caresses, it grates, it cuts, it comes: that is bliss.”
― Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text

“«Ce que cache mon langage, mon corps le dit» Roland Barthes (Fragments d’un discours amoureux)”
― Roland Barthes

“Barthes me lisait, donc on s’est rencontrés.”
― Philippe Sollers

“A day or two after my love pronouncement, now feral with vulnerability, I sent you the passage from Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes in which Barthes describes how the subject who utters the phrase “I love you” is like “the Argonaut renewing his ship during its voyage without changing its name.” Just as the Argo’s parts may be replaced over time but the boat is still called the Argo, whenever the lover utters the phrase “I love you,” its meaning must be renewed by each use, as “the very task of love and of language is to give to one and the same phrase inflections which will be forever new.”
― Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts

“I experience reality as a system of power. Coluche, the restaurant, the painter, Rome on a holiday, everything imposes on me its system of being; everyone is *badly behaved*. Isn't their impoliteness merely a *plenitude*? The world is full, plenitude is its system, and as a final offense this system is presented as a "nature" with which I must sustain good relations: in order to be "normal" (exempt from love)..."

—from_A Lover's Discourse: Fragments_”
― Roland Barthes

“So long as I perceive the world as hostile, I remain linked to it: *I am not crazy*. But sometimes, once my bad temper is exhausted, I have no language left at all: the world is not "unreal" (I could then utter it: there are arts of the unreal, among them the greatest arts of all), but disreal: reality has fled from it, is nowhere, so that I no longer have any meaning (any paradigm) available to me; *I do not manage* to define my relations with Coluche, the restaurant, the painter, the Piazza del Popolo. What relation can I have with a system of power if I am neither its slave nor its accomplice nor its witness."

—from_A Lover's Discourse: Fragments_”
― Roland Barthes

“The heart is the organ of desire (the heart swells, weakens, etc., like the sexual organs), as it is held, enchanted, within the domain of the Image-repertoire. What will the world, what will the other do with my desire? That is the anxiety in which are gathered all the heart's movements, all the heart's 'problems.”
― Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse: Fragments

“I am waiting for an arrival, a return, a promised sign... Everything is solemn: I have no sense of proportions.”
― Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse: Fragments

“Iš prigimties Fotografija (patogumo dėlei tenka priimti šią universaliją, kuri kol kas remiasi tik nesiliaujančiu atsitiktinumų kartojimu) turi kažką tautologiško — pypkė čia yra visada ir neįveikiamai pypkė. Galima sakyti, kad Fotografija visada nešiojasi savo referentą — abudu sustingę iš tos pačios meilės ar gedulo pačioje judančio pasaulio širdyje: jiedu vienas su kitu suklijuoti, galūnė prie galūnės, kaip pasmerktasis prirakintas prie lavono kai kurių kankinimų metu; ar net panašiaip kaip tos žuvų poros (regis, rykliai, anot Michelet), kurios plaukia vilkstine, tarsi sujungtos kažkokiu amžinu lytiniu aktu. Fotografija priklauso tai sluoksniuotų objektų klasei, kai negalima atskirti dviejų sluoksnių jų nesunaikinant — kaip lango stikslas ir peizažas, ir — kodėl gi ne — Gėris ir Blogis, geismas ir jo objektas — dvilypumai, kuriuos galime suvokti, bet ne patirti.”
― Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography