01UndatedI transform "Work" in its analytic meaning (the Work of Mourning, the Dream-Work) into the real "Work" - of writing.Roland Barthes / quote ↗
02UndatedIn this manner , we are told, the system of the imaginary is spread circularly, by detours and returns the length of an empty subject.Roland Barthes / quote ↗
03UndatedWhat right does my present have to speak of my past? Has my present some advantage over my past? What "grace" might have enlightened me? except that of passing time, or of a good cause, encountered on my way?Roland Barthes / quote ↗
04UndatedAm 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.Roland Barthes / quote ↗
05Undated...The editors of (i)Life(i) rejected Kerész'a photographs when he arrived in the United States in 1937 because, they said, his images 'spoke too much'; they made us reflect, suggested a meaning — a different meaning from the literal one. Ultimately, Photography is subversive not when it frightens, repels, or even stigmatizes, but when it is (i)pensive(i), when it thinks.Roland Barthes / quote ↗
06UndatedAbsence is the figure of privation; simultaneously, I desire and I need. Desire is squashed against need: that is the obsessive phenomenon of all amorous sentiment.Roland Barthes / quote ↗
07UndatedAs 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.Roland Barthes / quote ↗
09UndatedThe Winter Photograph was my Ariadne, not because it would help me discover a secret thing (monster or treasure), but because it would tell me what constituted that thread which drew me toward Photography. I had understood that henceforth I must interrogate the evidence of Photography, not from the viewpoint of pleasure, but in relation to what we romantically call love and death.Roland Barthes / quote ↗
10UndatedIf I had to create a god, I would lend him a “slow understanding”: a kind of drip-by-drip understanding of problems. People who understand quickly frighten me.Roland Barthes / quote ↗
11UndatedI can do everything with my language but not with my body. What I hide by my language, my body utters. I can deliberately mold my message, not my voice. By my voice, whatever it says, the other will recognize "that something is wrong with me". I am a liar (by preterition), not an actor. My body is a stubborn child, my language is a very civilized adult...Roland Barthes / quote ↗
12UndatedLanguage is neither reactionary nor progressive; it is quite simply fascist; for fascism does not prevent speech, it compels speech.Roland Barthes / quote ↗
13UndatedDon’t bleach language, savour it instead. Stroke it gently or even groom it, but don’t “purify” it.Roland Barthes / quote ↗
14UndatedWhere there is meaning, there is paradigm, and where there is paradigm (opposition), there is meaning . . . elliptically put: meaning rests on conflict (the choice of one term against another), and all conflict is generative of meaning: to choose one and refuse the other is always a sacrifice made to meaning, to produce meaning, to offer it to be consumed.Roland Barthes / quote ↗
15UndatedBut 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 / quote ↗
17UndatedThe 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).Roland Barthes / quote ↗
18UndatedI think that cars today are almost the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals; I mean the supreme creation of an era, conceived with passion by unknown artists, and consumed in image if not in usage by a whole population which appropriates them as a purely magical object.Roland Barthes / quote ↗
20UndatedToday there is no symbolic compensation for old age, no recognition of a specific value: wisdom, perceptiveness, experience, vision.Roland Barthes / quote ↗
21UndatedAre not couturiers the poets who, from year to year, from strophe to strophe, write the anthem of the feminine body?Roland Barthes / quote ↗
22UndatedUltimately — 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 / quote ↗
23UndatedWhen we define the Photograph as a motionless image, this does not mean only that the figures it represents do not move; it means that they do not (i)emerge(i), do not (i)leave(i): they are anesthetized and fastened down, like butterflies.Roland Barthes / quote ↗
24UndatedThe 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.Roland Barthes / quote ↗
