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Roland Barthes Biography

Roland Gérard Barthes (/bɑːrt/; French: [ʁɔlɑ̃ baʁt]; 12 November 1915 – 26 March 1980) was a French literary theorist, philosopher, linguist, critic, and semiotician. Barthes' ideas explored a diverse range of fields and he influenced the development of schools of theory including structuralism, semiotics, social theory, design theory, anthropology and post-structuralism.

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Roland Barthes Quotes

Is not the most erotic portion of a body where the garment gapes? In perversion (which is the realm of textual pleasure) there are no "erogenous zones" (a foolish expression, besides); it is intermittence, as psychoanalysis has so rightly stated, which is erotic: the intermittence of skin flashing between two articles of clothing (trousers and sweater), between two edges (the open-necked shirt, the glove and the sleeve); it is this flash itself which seduces, or rather: the staging of an appearance-as-disappearance.

Body, Edges, Expression, Sweaters, Two

We know that the war against intelligence is always waged in the name of common sense.

Common Sense, Intelligence, Names, Waged, War

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.

Judgment, Names, Political, Profound, Side, Two

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.

Hysteria, Language, Love, Region, Writing

Le langage est une peau: je frotte mon langage contre l'autre. Language is a skin; I rub my language against another language.

Contre, Est, Language, Mon, Peau, Skins

He who reads a story only once is condemned to read the same story his whole life.

Stories, Whole Life, Whole, Read, Story

The Text is not a definitive object.

Definitive, Object, Objects, Text

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.

Understanding, Literature, Trouble, Understood, Proofs

I passed beyond the unreality of the thing represented, I entered crazily into the spectacle, into the image, taking into my arms what is dead, what is going to die.

Arms, Dead, Dies, Represented, Unreality

Tout ce qui est anachronique est obsce' ne. Everything anachronistic is obscene.

Anachronique, Anachronistic, Obscene, Qui, Tout

Literature can no longer be either Mimesis or Mathesis but merely Semiosis, the adventure of what is impossible to language, in a word: Text (it is wrong to say that the notion of 'text' repeats the notion of 'literature': literature represents a finite world, the text figures the infinite of language).

Adventure, Figures, Literature, Notion, Say, World

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!

Ending, Imagine, Interviewed, Interviews, Trouble, Would Be

A paradox: the same century invented history and photography. But history is a memory fabricated according to positive formulas, a pure intellectual discourse which abolishes mythic time; and the photograph is a certain but fugitive testimony.

Intellectual, Invented, Memories, Paradox, Photography, Same

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.

Blinds, Denies, Faces, Imagine, Men, Unable

Writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin.

Destruction, Origin, Point, Voice, Writing

It must always be considered as though spoken by a character in a novel

Character, Considered, Novel, Spoken

. . . language is never innocent.

Innocent, Language

Whereas the work is understood to be traceable to a source (through a process of derivation or "filiation"), the Text is without a source - the "author" a mere "guest" at the reading of the Text.

Reading, Guests, Source, Derivation, Author

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.

Agents, World, Determined, Photographers

The realists do not take the photograph for a 'copy' of reality, but for an emanation of past reality, a magic, not an art.

Photography, Art, Past, Magic, Realists, Copy

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