I am interested in language because it wounds or seduces me.
Each of us has his own rhythm of suffering.
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.
I encounter millions of bodies in my life; of these millions, I may desire some hundreds; but of these hundreds, I love only one.
? Does being able to live without someone you loved mean you loved her less than you thought...? ){kind=small}
To whom could I put this question (with any hope of an answer)? Does being able to live without someone you loved mean you loved her less than you thought...?
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?
...language is never innocent.
What the Photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once: the Photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially.
The bastard form of mass culture is humiliated repetition... always new books, new programs, new films, news items, but always the same meaning.
The lover's fatal identity is precisely this: I am the one who waits.
…the book creates meaning, the meaning creates life.
This endured absence is nothing more or less than forgetfulness. I am, intermittently, unfaithful. This is the condition of my survival.
Don't say mourning. It's too psychoanalytic. I'm not mourning. I'm suffering.
I make the other’s absence responsible for my worldliness.
Isn’t the most sensitive point of this mourning the fact that I must lose a language — the amorous language? No more ‘I love you’s.
To make someone wait: the constant prerogative of all power, "age-old pastime of humanity".
We know that the war against intelligence is always waged in the name of common sense.
Writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin.
All of a sudden it didn't bother me not being modern.
The incapacity to name is a good symptom of disturbance.
I have not a desire but a need for solitude.
What love lays bare in me is energy.
Literature is that which he can not read without pain, without choking on truth.
Every exploration is an appropriation.
As a language, Garbo's singularity was of the order of the concept, that of Audrey Hepburn is of the order of the substance; the face of Garbo is an Idea, that of Hepburn, an Event.
All those young photographers who are at work in the world, determined upon the capture of actuality, do not know that they are agents of Death.
Literature is without proofs. By which it must be understood that it cannot prove, not only what it says, but even that it is worth the trouble of saying it.
What I claim is to live to the full the contradiction of my time, which may well make sarcasm the condition of truth.
Suicide How would I know I don’t suffer any more, if I’m dead?
We don’t forget, but something vacant settles in us.
? Does being able to live without someone you loved mean you loved her less than you thought... ? ){kind=small}
To whom can I put this question (with any hopes of an answer)? Does being able to live without someone you loved mean you loved her less than you thought... ?
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.
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.
The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.
A light without shadow generates an emotion without reserve.
Absence is the figure of privation; simultaneously, I desire and I need. Desire is squashed against need: that is the obsessive phenomenon of all amorous sentiment.
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.
Are not couturiers the poets who, from year to year, from strophe to strophe, write the anthem of the feminine body?
I live in my suffering and that makes me happy. Anything that keeps me from living in my suffering is unbearable to me.
Don’t bleach language, savour it instead. Stroke it gently or even groom it, but don’t “purify” it.
I am either lacerated or ill at ease and occasionally subject to gusts of life.
There is nothing in discourse that is not to be found in a sentence.
It must always be considered as though spoken by a character in a novel
. ){kind=small}
Everyone is “extremely nice”—and yet I feel entirely alone. (“Abandonitis”).
: futuromania. ){kind=small}
As soon as someone dies, frenzied construction of the future (shifting furniture, etc.): futuromania.
I can't get to know you" means "I shall never know what you really think of me." I cannot decipher you because I do not know how you decipher me.
Frontiers are physical as well as symbolic constructions
I ask for nothing but to live in my suffering.
The text you write must prove to me that it desires me.
Painting can feign reality without having seen it. Discourse combines signs which have referents, of course, but these referents can be and are most often 'chimeras.
The pleasure of the text is that moment when my body pursues its own ideas—for my body does not have the same ideas as I do.
Incoherence seems to me preferable to a distorting order.
A creative writer is one for whom writing is a problem.
What I hide by my language, my body utters.
Literature is like phosphorus: it shines with its maximum brilliance and the moment when it attempts to die.
In the sentence “She’s no longer suffering,” to what, to whom does “she” refer? What does that present tense mean?
We know that to give writing its future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.
Isolation and competition are inhospitable to learning.
The cultural work done in the past by gods and epic sagas is now done by laundry-detergent commercials and comic-strip character
A photograph is always invisible, it is not it that we see.
...that ambiguous area of culture where something unfailingly political, though separate from the political choices of the day, infiltrates judgment and language.
It is my desire I desire, and the loved being is no more than its tool.
I pass lightly through the reactionary darkness.
I have a disease; I see language.
Above all, do not attempt to be exhaustive.
To see someone who does not see is the best way to be intensely aware of what he does not see.
of mourning
of suffering ){kind=small}
The grim egoism (egotism) of mourning of suffering
Ciò che reclamo è vivere la piena contraddizione del mio tempo, che mai così bene ha reso al sarcasmo la condizione della verità.
, the more it provides the means of masking the constructed meaning under the appearance of the given meaning. ){kind=small}
![[T]he more technology develops the diffusion of information (and notably of images), the more it provides the means of masking the constructed meaning under the appearance of the given meaning.](https://quotes.thefamouspeople.com/images/quotes/roland-barthes-46595.jpg)
[T]he more technology develops the diffusion of information (and notably of images), the more it provides the means of masking the constructed meaning under the appearance of the given meaning.
Language is neither reactionary nor progressive; it is quite simply fascist; for fascism does not prevent speech, it compels speech.
![What affects me most powerfully: mourning in layers—a kind of sclerosis.
[Which means: no depth. Layers of surface—or rather, each layer: a totality. Units]](https://quotes.thefamouspeople.com/images/quotes/roland-barthes-46593.jpg)
What affects me most powerfully: mourning in layers—a kind of sclerosis. [Which means: no depth. Layers of surface—or rather, each layer: a totality. Units]
Engulfment is a moment of hypnosis.
Literature is that neuter, that composite, that oblique into which every subject escapes, the trap where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body that writes.
![[T]he most repugnant bastard there is: the bastard-octopus.](https://quotes.thefamouspeople.com/images/quotes/roland-barthes-46589.jpg)
[T]he most repugnant bastard there is: the bastard-octopus.
Now take all the delights of the earth, melt them into one single delight, and cast it entire into a single man - all this will be as nothing to the delight of which I speak.
The author enters into his own death, writing begins.
![Like man himself, who is the only one not to know his own glance, the [Eiffel] Tower is the only blind point f the total optical system of which it is the center and Paris the circumference.](https://quotes.thefamouspeople.com/images/quotes/roland-barthes-46586.jpg)
Like man himself, who is the only one not to know his own glance, the [Eiffel] Tower is the only blind point f the total optical system of which it is the center and Paris the circumference.
To instil into the Established Order the complacent portrayal of its drawbacks has nowadays become a paradoxical but incontrovertible means of exalting it.
studium(i) is ultimately always coded, the (i)punctum is not)... ){kind=small}
The (i)studium(i) is ultimately always coded, the (i)punctum is not)...
.
To begin again without resting. Sisyphus. ){kind=small}
Afternoon with Michel, sorting maman’s belongings. Began the day by looking at her photographs. A cruel mourning begins again (but had never ended). To begin again without resting. Sisyphus.
: henceforth and forever I am my own mother. ){kind=small}
Around 6 p.m.: the apartment is warm, clean, well-lit, pleasant. I make it that way, energetically, devotedly (enjoying it bitterly): henceforth and forever I am my own mother.
Today there is no symbolic compensation for old age, no recognition of a specific value: wisdom, perceptiveness, experience, vision.
—You have never known a Woman’s body! —I have known the body of my mother, sick and then dying.
My claim is to live to the full contradiction of my time
