For the photograph's immobility is somehow the result of a perverse confusion between two concepts: the Real and the Live: by attesting that the object has been real, the photograph surreptitiously induces belief that it is alive, because of that delusion which makes us attribute to Reality an absolute superior, somehow eternal value; but by shifting this reality to the past ("this-has-been"), the photograph suggests that it is already dead.
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).
The haiku reproduces the designating gesture of the child pointing at whatever it is (the haiku shows no partiality for the subject), merely saying: that!
When we look at a photograph of ourselves or of others, we are really looking at the return of the dead.
He who reads a story only once is condemned to read the same story his whole life.
Wine is a part of society because it provides a basis not only for a morality but also for an environment; it is an ornament in the slightest ceremonials of French daily life, from the snack to the feast, from the conversation at the local cafT to the speech at a formal dinner.
We can never know, for the good reason that writing is the destruction of every voice, every origin. Writing is that neuter, that composite, that obliquity into which our subject flees, the black-and-white where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body that writes.
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.
Great portrait photographers are great mythologists.
The lover's fatal identity is precisely this: I am the one who waits.
As Spectator I wanted to explore photography not as a question (a theme) but as a wound.
Those who fail to reread are obliged to read the same story everywhere.
Tout ce qui est anachronique est obsce' ne. Everything anachronistic is obscene.
To whom could I put this question (with any hope of an answer)? Does being able to live without someone you loved mean you loved her less than you thought...?
New York... is a city of geometric heights, a petrified desert of grids and lattices, an inferno of greenish abstraction under a flat sky, a real Metropolis from which man is absent by his very accumulation.
Why is it better to last than to burn?
The incapacity to name is a good symptom of disturbance.
Literature is that which he can not read without pain, without choking on truth.
This endured absence is nothing more or less than forgetfulness. I am, intermittently, unfaithful. This is the condition of my survival.
Frontiers are physical as well as symbolic constructions
Through the mythology of Einstein, the world blissfully regained the image of knowledge reduced to a formula.
One must turn the tongue seven times in the mouth before speaking.
There are two kinds of liberalism. A liberalism which is always, subterraneously authoritative and paternalistic, on the side of one's good conscience. And then there is a liberalism which is more ethical than political; one would have to find another name for this. Something like a profound suspension of judgment.
Thus every writer's motto reads: mad I cannot be, sane I do not deign to be, neurotic I am.
I call the discourse of power any discourse that engenders blame, hence guilt, in its recipient.
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