Myth is neither a lie nor a confession: it is an inflexion. Roland Barthes More Quotes by Roland Barthes More Quotes From Roland Barthes What the Photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once: the Photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially. Roland Barthes infinity photograph photography Every new Fashion is a refusal to inherit, a subversion against the oppression of the preceding Fashion; Fashion experiences itself as a Right, the natural right of the present over the past. Roland Barthes oppression fashion past How does meaning get into the image? Where does it end? And if it ends, what is there beyond? Roland Barthes ends ifs doe If 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 understanding kind people To try to write love is to confront the muck of language: that region of hysteria where language is both too much and too little, excessive and impoverished. Roland Barthes hysteria writing love Isn’t desire always the same, whether the object is present or absent? Isn’t the object always absent? —This isn’t the same languor: there are two words: Pothos, desire for the absent being, and Himéros, the more burning desire for the present being. Roland Barthes burning desire two As a jealous man, I suffer four times over: because I am jealous, because I blame myself for being so, because I fear that my jealousy will wound the other, because I allow myself to be subject to a banality: I suffer from being excluded, from being aggressive, from being crazy, and from being common. Roland Barthes jealous crazy men Someone tells me: this kind of love is not viable. But how can you evaluate viability? Why is the viable a Good Thing? Why is it better to last than to burn? Roland Barthes lasts kind love-is I want to be both pathetic and admirable, I want to be at the same time a child and an adult. Thereby I gamble, I take a risk: for it is always possible that the other will simply ask no question whatever about these unaccustomed glasses; that the other will see, in the fact, no sign. Roland Barthes risk glasses children Every photograph is a certificate of presence. Roland Barthes certificates photograph ...what I enjoy in a narrative is not directly its content or even its structure, but rather the abrasions I impose upon the fine surface: I read on, I skip, I look up, I dip in again. Which has nothing to do with the deep laceration the text of bliss inflicts upon language itself, and not upon the simple temporality of its reading. Roland Barthes reading simple looks We don't forget, but something vacant settles in us. Roland Barthes vacant settling forget There is only one way left to escape the alienation of present day society: to retreat ahead of it. Roland Barthes retreat society way The author enters into his own death, writing begins. Roland Barthes writing The best principals are not heroes; they are hero makers. Roland Barthes vision makers hero 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. Roland Barthes names profound two The photographer, like an acrobat, must defy the laws of probability or even of possibility; at the limit, he must defy those of the interesting: the photograph becomes surprising when we do not know why it has been taken. Roland Barthes taken law interesting I am simultaneously and contradictorily both happy and unhappy: 'to succeed' or 'to fail' have for me only ephemeral, contingent meanings (this does not stop my desires and sorrows from being violent ones); what impels me, secretly and obstinately, is not tactical: I accept and I affirm, irrespective of the true and the false, of success and failure; I am withdrawn from all finality, I live according to chance. Roland Barthes sorrow unhappy desire The new is not a fashion, it is a value. Roland Barthes values novelty fashion One of the marks of our world is perhaps this reversal: we live according to a generalized image-repertoire. Consider the United Sates, where everything is transformed into images: only images exist and are produced and are consumes ... Such a reversal necessarily raises the ethical question: not that the image is immoral, irreligious, or diabolic (as some have declared it, upon the advent of the Photograph), but because, when generalized, it completely de-realizes the human world of conflicts and desires, under cover of illustrating it. Roland Barthes ethical-questions our-world desire
