Roland Barthes Quotes

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.

"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.

The incapacity to name is a good symptom of disturbance.

[Emilio’s dinner with FM Banier]

Gradually I abandon the conversation (suffering because the others might suppose I am doing so for reasons of contempt.) FMB (supported by Youssef) embodies a strong (and ingenious) system of values, codes, seductions, styles; but even as the system gains in consistency, I feel excluded from it. And little by little I cease struggling, I withdraw, without concern for how I appear to the others. Thus it begins by an initially slight disaffection for sociability which becomes quite radical. As it develops, it gradually combines with a hostalgia for what remains living for me: maman. And ultimately I fall into an abyss of suffering.

What love lays bare in me is energy.

[T]he most repugnant bastard there is: the bastard-octopus.

Grim evening at Gabès (windy, black clouds, hideous bungalows, “folklore” performance in the Hotel Chems bar): I can no longer take refuge in my thoughts: neither in Paris nor traveling. No escape.

Any demand is frigid until desire, until neurosis forms in it.

"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. The emotion derives from a double contact: on the one hand, a whole activity of discourse discreetly, indirectly focuses upon a single signified, which is "I desire you," and releases, nourishes, ramifies it to the point of explosion (language experiences orgasm upon touching itself); on the other hand, I enwrap the other in my words, I caress, brush against, talk up this contact, I extend myself to make the commentary to which I submit the relation endure. "

[Photography] allows me to accede to an infra-knowledge; it supplies me with a collection of partial objects and can flatter a certain fetishism of mine: for this 'me' which like knowledge, which nourishes a kind of amorous preference for it. In the same way, I like certain biographical features which, in a writer's life, delight me as much as certain photographs; I have called these features 'biographemes'; Photography has the same relation to History that the biographeme has to biography.

Le langage est une peau: je frotte mon langage contre l'autre.

The Photograph is violent: not because it shows violent tings, but because on each occasion (i)it fills the sight by force(i), and because in it nothing can be refused or transformed (that we can sometimes call it mild does not contradict its violence: many say that sugar is mild, but to me sugar is violent, and I call it so).

"A cold winter night. I'm warm enough, yet I'm alone. And I realize that I'll 'have' to get used to existing quite 'naturally' within the solitude, functioning there, working there, accompanied by, 'fastened to' the "presence of absence.

There is nothing in discourse that is not to be found in a sentence.

...that ambiguous area of culture where something unfailingly political, though separate from the political choices of the day, infiltrates judgment and language.