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Roland Barthes

Roland Barthes Quotes

Philosopher

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Famous Roland Barthes Quotes

“(I was looking at everything in the other's face, the other's body, coldly : lashes, toenail, thin eyebrows, thin lips, the luster of the eyes, a mole, a way of holding a cigarette; I was fascinated-fascination being, after all, only the extreme of detachment-by a kind of colored ceramicized, vitrified figurine in which I could read, without understanding anything about it, the cause of my desire. )”

LoveDesire
Book:A lover's discourse: fragments
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“You see the first thing we love is a scene. For love at first sight requires the very sign of its suddenness; and of all things, it is the scene which seems to be seen best for the first time: a curtain parts and what had not yet ever been seen is devoured by the eyes: the scene consecrates the object I am going to love. The context is the constellation of elements, harmoniously arranged that encompass the experience of the amorous subject... Love at first sight is always spoken in the past tense. The scene is perfectly adapted to this temporal phenomenon: distinct, abrupt, framed, it is already a memory (the nature of a photograph is not to represent but to memorialize)... this scene has all the magnificence of an accident: I cannot get over having had this good fortune: to meet what matches my desire. The gesture of the amorous embrace seems to fulfill, for a time, the subject's dream of total union with the loved being: The longing for consummation with the other... In this moment, everything is suspended: time, law, prohibition: nothing is exhausted, nothing is wanted: all desires are abolished, for they seem definitively fulfilled... A moment of affirmation; for a certain time, though a finite one, a deranged interval, something has been successful: I have been fulfilled (all my desires abolished by the plenitude of their satisfaction).”

LoveSuccessDesireTimeChanceExperienceEmbraceLongingFortuneMemorySatisfactionLove At First SightAffirmationMomentUnionAmorousContextGestureConsummation
Book:A lover's discourse: fragments
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“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.”

DoeDesireChanceAcceptingFailingSorrowSucceedViolentUnhappySuccess And FailureEphemeralFinalityTactical
Author:Roland Barthes
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“The Photograph belongs to that class of laminated objects whose two leaves cannot be separated without destroying them both: the windowpane and the landscape, and why not: Good and Evil, desire and its object: dualities we can conceive but not perceive... Whatever it grants to vision and whatever its manner, a photograph is always invisible: it is not it that we see.”

TwoDesireEvilVisionClassObjectsPhotographyPhotographInvisibleLandscapePerceiveGood And EvilGrantsWhy NotDestroyingDualityWindowpane
Author:Roland Barthes
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“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.”

WorldHumansDesireRealizingUnitedConflictMarkRaisesPhotographOur WorldEthicalTransformedImmoralAdventReversalIllustratingEthical Questions
Author:Roland Barthes
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