Literature can no longer be either Mimesis or Mathesis but merely Semiosis, the adventure of what is impossible to language, in a word: Text (it is wrong to say that the notion of 'text' repeats the notion of 'literature': literature represents a finite world, the text figures the infinite of language).

Roland Barthes

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.

Roland Barthes

language-and-power skins desire

The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.

Roland Barthes

birth cost book

Painting can feign reality without having seen it.

Roland Barthes

painting reality

Each of us has his own rhythm of suffering.

Roland Barthes

bereavement sad grief

...language is never innocent.

Roland Barthes

innocent language

Am 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

games waiting play

Language is legislation, speech is its code. We do not see the power which is in speech because we forget that all speech is a classification, and that all classifications are oppressive.

Roland Barthes

speech language forget

Don't say mourning. It's too psychoanalytic. I'm not mourning. I'm suffering.

Roland Barthes

psychoanalytic mourning suffering

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

eye photography sight

Man does not exist prior to language, either as a species or as an individual.

Roland Barthes

language doe men

A light without shadow generates an emotion without reserve.

Roland Barthes

shadow emotion light

I am interested in language because it wounds or seduces me.

Roland Barthes

seducing wounds language

All official institutions of language are repeating machines: school, sports, advertising, popular songs, news, all continually repeat the same structure, the same meaning, often the same words: the stereotype is a political fact, the major figure of ideology.

Roland Barthes

song sports school

The Text is plural. Which is not simply to say that it has several meanings, but that it accomplishes the very plural of meaning: an irreducible (and not merely an acceptable) plural. The Text is not a co-existence of meanings but a passage, an overcrossing; thus it answers not to an interpretation, even a liberal one, but to an explosion, a dissemination.

Roland Barthes

explosions interpretation answers

Literature is the question minus the answer.

Roland Barthes

poetry healing art

In front of the photograph of my mother as a child, I tell myself: she is going to die: I shudder, like winnicott's psychotic patient, over a catastrophe which has already occurred. Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe.

Roland Barthes

patient mother children

To hide a passion totally (or even to hide, more simply, its excess) is inconceivable: not because the human subject is too weak, but because passion is in essence made to be seen: the hiding must be seen: I want you to know that I am hiding something from you, that is the active paradox I must resolve: at one and the same time it must be known and not known: I want you to know that I don't want to show my feelings: that is the message I address to the other.

Roland Barthes

hiding-something passion essence

I want a History of Looking. For the Photograph is the advent of myself as other: a cunning dissociation of consciousness from identity. Even odder: it was before Photography that men had the most to say about the vision of the double. Heautoscopy was compared with an hallucinosis; for centuries this was a great mythic theme.

Roland Barthes

vision photography men

The photographic image... is a message without a code.

Roland Barthes

code photography messages

We know that the war against intelligence is always waged in the name of common sense.

Roland Barthes

common-sense names war