“Don’t bleach language, savour it instead. Stroke it gently or even groom it, but don’t “purify” it.” — Roland Barthes Copy Share Image
Man does not exist prior to language, either as a species or as an individual. — Roland Barthes Copy Share Image
Tout refus du langage est une mort. Any refusal of language is a death. — Roland Barthes Copy Share Image
Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or… — Roland Barthes Copy Share Image
To try to write love is to confront the muck of language: that region of hysteria where language is both too much… — Roland Barthes Copy Share Image
Language is neither reactionary nor progressive; it is quite simply fascist; for fascism does not prevent speech, it compels speech. — Roland Barthes Copy Share Image
As a language, Garbo's singularity was of the order of the concept, that of Audrey Hepburn is of the order of the… — Roland Barthes Copy Share Image
The text you write must prove to me that it desires me. This proof exists: it is writing. Writing is: the science… — Roland Barthes Copy Share Image
“As a general rule, desire is always marketable: we don’t do anything but sell, buy, exchange desires. . . . And I… — Roland Barthes Copy Share Image
“...that ambiguous area of culture where something unfailingly political, though separate from the political choices of the day, infiltrates judgment and language.” — Roland Barthes Copy Share Image
Le langage est une peau: je frotte mon langage contre l'autre. Language is a skin; I rub my language against another language. — Roland Barthes Copy Share Image
Literature can no longer be either Mimesis or Mathesis but merely Semiosis, the adventure of what is impossible to language, in a… — Roland Barthes Copy Share Image
“This book has two determinants: on the one hand, an ideological critique of the language of so-called mass culture; on the other,… — Roland Barthes Copy Share Image
“Man does not exist prior to language, either as a species or as an individual. We never encounter a state where man… — Roland Barthes Copy Share Image
“I can do everything with my language but not with my body. What I hide by my language, my body utters. I… — Roland Barthes Copy Share Image
Contemporary poetry ... tries to transform the sign back into meaning: its ideal, ultimately, would be to reach not the meaning of… — Roland Barthes Copy Share Image
The discourse on the Text should itself be nothing other than text, research, textual activity, since the Text is that social space… — Roland Barthes Copy Share Image
“Where there is meaning, there is paradigm, and where there is paradigm (opposition), there is meaning . . . elliptically put: meaning… — Roland Barthes Copy Share Image
All official institutions of language are repeating machines: school, sports, advertising, popular songs, news, all continually repeat the same structure, the same… — Roland Barthes Copy Share Image
“Today, information: pulverized, nonhierarchized, dealing with everything: nothing is protected from information and at the same time nothing is open to reflection… — Roland Barthes Copy Share Image
“Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or… — Roland Barthes Copy Share Image
“Due allowance being made for the sounds of the language, writing aloud is not phonological but phonetic; its aim is not the… — Roland Barthes Copy Share Image
Isn’t the most sensitive point of this mourning the fact that I must lose a language — the amorous language? No more… — Roland Barthes Copy Share Image
Language is legislation, speech is its code. We do not see the power which is in speech because we forget that all… — Roland Barthes Copy Share Image
“Text of bliss: the text that imposes a state of loss, the text that discomforts (perhaps to the point of a certain… — Roland Barthes Copy Share Image
...what I enjoy in a narrative is not directly its content or even its structure, but rather the abrasions I impose upon… — Roland Barthes Copy Share Image
“Werther identifies himself with the madman, with the footman. As a reader, I can identify myself with Werther. Historically, thousands of subjects have done… — Roland Barthes Copy Share
“Valéry used to speak of those people who die in an accident because they are unwilling to let go of their umbrellas; how many… — Roland Barthes Copy Share
Today there is no symbolic compensation for old age, no recognition of a specific value: wisdom, perceptiveness, experience, vision. — Roland Barthes Copy Share
The unary Photograph has every reason to be banal, 'unity' of composition being the first rule of vulgar (and notably, of academic) rhetoric: 'The… — Roland Barthes Copy Share
“Man does not exist prior to language, either as a species or as an individual. We never encounter a state where man is separated… — Roland Barthes Copy Share
“It is said that Time soothes mourning – No, Time makes nothing happen; it merely makes the emotivity of mourning pass.” — Roland Barthes Copy Share
“So long as I perceive the world as hostile, I remain linked to it: *I am not crazy*. But sometimes, once my bad temper… — Roland Barthes Copy Share
I think that cars today are almost the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals: I mean the supreme creation of an era, conceived… — Roland Barthes Copy Share
“(Sartre) (The world is full without me, as in Nausea; the world plays at living behind a glass partition; the world is in an… — Roland Barthes Copy Share
“Like love, mourning affects the world—and the worldly—with unreality, with importunity. I resist the world, I suffer from what it demands of me, from… — Roland Barthes Copy Share
“There is an age at which we teach what we know. Then comes another age at which we teach what we do not know;… — Roland Barthes Copy Share
As a jealous man, I suffer four times over: because I am jealous, because I blame myself for being so, because I fear that… — Roland Barthes Copy Share
