Roland Barthes Quotes - Page 3

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• Ultimately — or at the limit — in order to see a photograph well, it is best to look away or close your eyes. 'The necessary condition for an image is sight,'Janouch told Kafka; and Kafka smiled and replied: 'We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes.

  Roland Barthes

  Photography, Eye, Sight

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• There is only one way left to escape the alienation of present day society: to retreat ahead of it.

  Roland Barthes

  Society, Way, Retreat

  "Political Culture and Public Opinion". Book by Roland Barthes, p.175, January 1, 1989.

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• It is said that mourning, by its gradual labour, slowly erases pain; I could not, I cannot believe this; because for me, Time eliminates the emotion of loss (I do note weep), that is all. For the rest, everything has remained motionless. For what I have lost is not a Figure (the Mother), but a being; and not a being, but a quality (a soul): not the indispensable, but the irreplaceable.

  Roland Barthes

  Mother, Pain, Believe

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• Cameras, in short, were clocks for seeing, and perhaps in me someone very old still hears in the photographic mechanism the living sound of the wood.

  Roland Barthes

  Cameras, Sound, Woods

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• The Photograph is an extended, loaded evidence — as if it caricatured not the figure of what it represents (quite the converse) but its very existence ... The Photograph then becomes a bizarre (i)medium(i), a new form of hallucination: false on the level of perception, true on the level of time: a temporal hallucination, so to speak, a modest (o)shared(i) hallucination (on the one hand 'it is not there,' on the other 'but it has indeed been'): a mad image, chafed by reality.

  Roland Barthes

  Reality, Hands, Mad

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• To eat steak rare . . . represents both a nature and a morality.

  Roland Barthes

  Pregnancy, Morality, Steak

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• Ultimately, Photography is subversive, not when it frightens, repels, or even stigmatizes, but when it is pensive, when it thinks.

  Roland Barthes

  Photography, Thinking, Pensive

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• What the Photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once: the Photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially.

  Roland Barthes

  Photography, Infinity, Photograph

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• Is not the most erotic part of the body wherever the clothing affords a glimpse?

  Roland Barthes

  Erotic, Glimpse, Body

  1973 Le Plaisir du texte.

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• ...what I enjoy in a narrative is not directly its content or even its structure, but rather the abrasions I impose upon the fine surface: I read on, I skip, I look up, I dip in again. Which has nothing to do with the deep laceration the text of bliss inflicts upon language itself, and not upon the simple temporality of its reading.

  Roland Barthes

  Reading, Simple, Looks

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• But I never looked like that!’ - How do you know? What is the ‘you’ you might or might not look like? Where do you find it - by which morphological or expressive calibration? Where is your authentic body? You are the only one who can never see yourself except as an image; you never see your eyes unless they are dulled by the gaze they rest upon the mirror or the lens (I am interested in seeing my eyes only when they look at you): even and especially for your own body, you are condemned to the repertoire of its images.

  Roland Barthes

  Eye, Mirrors, Lenses

  Roland Barthes (1994). “Roland Barthes”

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• Architecture is always dream and function, expression of a utopia and instrument of a convenience.

  Roland Barthes

  Dream, Expression, Architecture

  Roland Barthes (1997). “The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies”, p.6, Univ of California Press

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• Language is neither reactionary nor progressive; it is quite simply fascist; for fascism does not prevent speech, it compels speech.

  Roland Barthes

  Doe, Speech, Language

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• Great portrait photographers are great mythologists.

  Roland Barthes

  Portraits, Photographer

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• It is no longer the sexual which is indecent, it is the sentimental.

  Roland Barthes

  Sentimental

  Roland Barthes (1990). “A lover's discourse: fragments”, Penguin Books

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• In an initial period, Photography, in order to surprise, photographs the notable; but soon, by a familiar reversal, it decrees notable whatever it photographs. The 'anything whatever' then becomes the sophisticated acme of value.

  Roland Barthes

  Photography, Order, Notable

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• I cannot classify the other, for the other is, precisely, Unique, the singular Image which has miraculously come to correspond to the speciality of my desire. The other is the figure of my truth, and cannot be imprisoned in any stereotype (which is the truth of others).

  Roland Barthes

  Unique, Desire, Stereotype

  Roland Barthes (1990). “A lover's discourse: fragments”, Penguin Books

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• Henceforth I would have to cosent to combine two voices: the voice of banality (to say what everyone sees and knows) and the voice of singularity (to replenish such banality with all the élan of an emotion which belonged only to myself).

  Roland Barthes

  Two, Voice, Emotion

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• All those young photographers who are at work in the world, determined upon the capture of actuality, do not know that they are agents of Death.

  Roland Barthes

  Agents, World, Determined

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• A paradox: the same century invented history and photography. But history is a memory fabricated according to positive formulas, a pure intellectual discourse which abolishes mythic time; and the photograph is a certain but fugitive testimony.

  Roland Barthes

  Photography, Memories, Intellectual

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• I passed beyond the unreality of the thing represented, I entered crazily into the spectacle, into the image, taking into my arms what is dead, what is going to die.

  Roland Barthes

  Arms, Unreality, Dies

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• I make the other’s absence responsible for my worldliness.

  Roland Barthes

  Absence, Responsible, Worldliness

  Roland Barthes (1990). “A lover's discourse: fragments”, Penguin Books

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• 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).

  Roland Barthes

  Writing, Desire, Language

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• Isn’t the most sensitive point of this mourning the fact that I must lose a language — the amorous language? No more ‘I love you’s.

  Roland Barthes

  Love You, Mourning, Facts

  Roland Barthes (1990). “A lover's discourse: fragments”, Penguin Books

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• Literature is that which he can not read without pain, without choking on truth.

  Roland Barthes

  Pain, Literature, Choke

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