The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.
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.
To make someone wait: the constant prerogative of all power.
Each of us has his own rhythm of suffering.
How does meaning get into the image? Where does it end? And if it ends, what is there beyond?
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.
Every exploration is an appropriation.
The author enters into his own death, writing begins.
Literature is the question minus the answer.
We know that the war against intelligence is always waged in the name of common sense.
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.
...language is never innocent.
Every photograph is a certificate of presence.
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.
A light without shadow generates an emotion without reserve.
Where you are tender, you speak your plural.
The photographic image... is a message without a code.
Man does not exist prior to language, either as a species or as an individual.
Who speaks is not who writes, and who writes is not who is.
We don't forget, but something vacant settles in us.
I am interested in language because it wounds or seduces me.
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.
Isn’t desire always the same, whether the object is present or absent? Isn’t the object always absent? —This isn’t the same languor: there are two words: Pothos, desire for the absent being, and Himéros, the more burning desire for the present being.
To hide a passion totally (or even to hide, more simply, its excess) is inconceivable: not because the human subject is too weak, but because passion is in essence made to be seen: the hiding must be seen: I want you to know that I am hiding something from you, that is the active paradox I must resolve: at one and the same time it must be known and not known: I want you to know that I don't want to show my feelings: that is the message I address to the other.
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