Roland Barthes Quotes

"Text of pleasure: the text that contents, fills, grants euphoria; the text that comes from culture and does not break with it, is linked to a comfortable practice of reading.
Text of bliss: the text that imposes a state of loss, the text that discomforts (perhaps to the point of a certain
boredom), unsettles the reader's historical, cultural, psychological assumptions, the consistency of his tastes, values, memories, brings to a crisis his relation with language.

Now the subject who keeps the two texts in his field and in his hands the reins of pleasure and bliss is an anachronic subject, for he simultaneously and contradictorily participates in the profound hedonism of all culture (which permeates him quietly under the cover of an "art de vivre" shared by the old books) and in the destruction of that culture: he enjoys the consistency of his selfhood (that is his pleasure) and seeks its loss (that is his bliss). He is a subject split twice over, doubly perverse."

To be engulfed: outburst of annihilation which affects the amorous subject in despair or fulfillment. At its best, when it’s fulfillment, it’s a kind of disappearance at will. An easeful death. Death liberated from dying.

What affects me most powerfully: mourning in layers — a kind of sclerosis.

[Which means: no depth. Layers of surface — or rather, each layer: a totality. Units]

As a general rule, desire is always marketable: we don’t do anything but sell, buy, exchange desires. . . . And I think of Bloy’s words: “there is nothing perfectly beautiful except what is invisible and above all unbuyable.

Everything began all over again immediately: arrival of manuscripts, requests, people’s stories, each person mercilessly pushing ahead his own little demand (for love, for gratitude): No sooner has she departed than the world deafens me with its continuance.

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

I imagine that the essential gesture of the Operator is to surprise something or someone (through the little hole in the camera), and that this gesture is therefore perfect when it is performed unbeknownst to the subject being photographed. From this gesture derive all photographs whose principle (or better whose alibi) is “shock”; for the photographic “shock” consists less in traumatizing than in revealing what was so well hidden that the actor himself was unaware or unconscious of it.

Man does not exist prior to language, either as a species or as an individual. We never encounter a state where man is separated from language, which he then elaborates in order to 'express' what is happening to him: it is language which teaches the definition of man, not the contrary.

A photograph is always invisible, it is not it that we see.

Afternoon with Michel, sorting maman’s belongings.

Began the day by looking at her photographs.

A cruel mourning begins again (but had never ended).

To begin again without resting. Sisyphus.

Everything pains me. The merest trifle rouses a sense of abandonment.

I'm impatient with other people, their will to live, their universe. Attracted by a decision to withdraw from everyone [no longer bearing the world of Y].

Language is never innocent.

Now take all the delights of the earth, melt them into one single delight, and cast it entire into a single man - all this will be as nothing to the delight of which I speak.

In 1850, August Salzmann photographed, near Jerusalem, the road to Beith-Lehem (as it was spelled at the time): nothing but stony ground, olive trees; but three tenses dizzy my consciousness: my present, the time of Jesus, and that of the photographer, all this under the instance of 'reality' — and no longer through the elaborations of the text, whether fictional or poetic, which itself is never credible down to the root.

We often hear it said that it is the task of art to express the inexpressible: it is contrary which must be said (with no intention of paradox): the whole task of art is to unexpress the expressible, to kidnap from the world's language, which is the poor and powerful language of the passion, another speech, an exact speech.