French philosopher & literary theorist (1915-1980)
Myth deprives the object of which it speaks of all history. In it, history evaporates.
ROLAND BARTHES
Mythologies
Don't say mourning. It's too psychoanalytic. I'm not mourning. I'm suffering.
ROLAND BARTHES
Mourning Diary
The world increases my sadness, my dryness, my confusion, my irritation.
ROLAND BARTHES
Mourning Diary
I cannot classify the other, for the other is, precisely, Unique, the singular Image which has miraculously come to correspond to the speciality of my desire. The other is the figure of my truth, and cannot be imprisoned in any stereotype (which is the truth of others).
ROLAND BARTHES
A Lover's Discourse: Fragments
Myth is depoliticized speech.
ROLAND BARTHES
Mythologies
I pass lightly through the reactionary darkness.
ROLAND BARTHES
The Pleasure of the Text
We don't forget, but something vacant settles in us.
ROLAND BARTHES
Mourning Diary
The politician being interviewed clearly takes a great deal of trouble to imagine an ending to his sentence: and if he stopped short? His entire policy would be jeopardized!
ROLAND BARTHES
"Sentence", The Pleasure of the Text
The pleasure which vanishes vanishes for good, there is no substitute for it. Other pleasures come, which replace nothing. No progress in pleasures, nothing but mutations.
ROLAND BARTHES
Roland Barthes
The petit-bourgeois is a man unable to imagine the Other. If he comes face to face with him, he blinds himself, ignores and denies him, or else transforms him into himself.
ROLAND BARTHES
Mythologies
The bastard form of mass culture is humiliated repetition: content, ideological schema, the blurring of contradictions--these are repeated, but the superficial forms are varied: always new books, new programs, new films, news items, but always the same meaning.
ROLAND BARTHES
"Modern", The Pleasure of the Text
Each of us has his own rhythm of suffering.
ROLAND BARTHES
Mourning Diary
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
From Work to Text
What the Photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once: the Photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially.
ROLAND BARTHES
Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography
I 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
Mythologies
The book creates meaning, the meaning creates life.
ROLAND BARTHES
The Pleasures of the Text
The bourgeoisie is defined as the social class which does not want to be named.
ROLAND BARTHES
Mythologies
Which is what literature is: that I cannot read without pain, without choking on truth.
ROLAND BARTHES
Mourning Diary