Roland Gérard Barthes (November 12th, 1915 – March 26th, 1980) was a French philosopher, essayist, literary theorist, and critic. His work explored many fields, including, literary theory, anthropology, structuralism, and post-structuralism.
He is perhaps best known for his essay collection Mythologies in 1957, which covered popular culture.
Below we list some words of wisdom from Roland Barthes.
“The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.”
“Each of us has his own rhythm of suffering.”
“I encounter millions of bodies in my life; of these millions, I may desire some hundreds; but of these hundreds, I love only one.”
“Every exploration is an appropriation.”
“To make someone wait: the constant prerogative of all power.”
“Literature is the question minus the answer.”
“We know that the war against intelligence is always waged in the name of common sense.”
“The author enters into his own death, writing begins.”
“The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.”
“How does meaning get into the image? Where does it end? And if it ends, what is there beyond?”
“Myth is neither a lie nor a confession: it is an inflexion.”
“But 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.”
“Every photograph is a certificate of presence.”
“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.”
“Man does not exist prior to language, either as a species or as an individual.”
“I am interested in language because it wounds or seduces me.”
“Painting can feign reality without having seen it.”
“A photograph is always invisible, it is not it that we see.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“What love lays bare in me is energy.”
“The best principals are not heroes; they are hero makers.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“We don’t forget, but something vacant settles in us.”
“The photographic image… is a message without a code.”
“Who speaks is not who writes, and who writes is not who is.”
“Don’t say mourning. It’s too psychoanalytic. I’m not mourning. I’m suffering.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
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