The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.
Myth is neither a lie nor a confession: it is an inflexion.
Every exploration is an appropriation.
To make someone wait: the constant prerogative of all power.
Literature is the question minus the answer.
How does meaning get into the image? Where does it end? And if it ends, what is there beyond?
Each of us has his own rhythm of suffering.
The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.
The Text is plural. Which is not simply to say that it has several meanings, but that it accomplishes the very plural of meaning: an irreducible (and not merely an acceptable) plural. The Text is not a co-existence of meanings but a passage, an overcrossing; thus it answers not to an interpretation, even a liberal one, but to an explosion, a dissemination.
The author enters into his own death, writing begins.
Every photograph is a certificate of presence.
Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.
...language is never innocent.
Language is legislation, speech is its code. We do not see the power which is in speech because we forget that all speech is a classification, and that all classifications are oppressive.
We know that the war against intelligence is always waged in the name of common sense.
Where you are tender, you speak your plural.
We don't forget, but something vacant settles in us.
Am I in love? --yes, since I am waiting. The other one 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 this: I am the one who waits.
Who speaks is not who writes, and who writes is not who is.
A light without shadow generates an emotion without reserve.
The photographic image... is a message without a code.
Man does not exist prior to language, either as a species or as an individual.
The photograph is literally an emanation of the referent. From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here; the duration of the transmission is insignificant; the photograph of the missing being, as Sontag says, will touch me like the delayed rays of a star.
The best principals are not heroes; they are hero makers.
I am interested in language because it wounds or seduces me.
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