French philosopher & literary theorist (1915-1980)
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.
ROLAND BARTHES
A Lover's Discourse: Fragments
New York ... is a city of geometric heights, a petrified desert of grids and lattices, an inferno of greenish abstraction under a flat sky, a real Metropolis from which man is absent by his very accumulation.
ROLAND BARTHES
In the Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies
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.
ROLAND BARTHES
A Lover's Discourse: Fragments
I am interested in language because it wounds or seduces me.
ROLAND BARTHES
The Pleasure of the Text
To make someone wait: the constant prerogative of all power.
ROLAND BARTHES
A Lover's Discourse: Fragments
I can do everything with my language but not with my body. What I hide by my language, my body utters.
ROLAND BARTHES
A Lover's Discourse: Fragments
A work has two levels of meaning: literal and concealed.
ROLAND BARTHES
From Work to Text
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.
ROLAND BARTHES
A Lover's Discourse: Fragments
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.
ROLAND BARTHES
A Lover's Discourse: Fragments
I encounter millions of bodies in my life; of these millions, I may desire some hundreds; but of these hundreds, I love only one.
ROLAND BARTHES
A Lover's Discourse: Fragments
The text you write must prove to me that it desires me.
ROLAND BARTHES
The Pleasures of the Text
Is not the most erotic portion of a body where the garment gapes?
ROLAND BARTHES
The Pleasure of the Text
May cocktails. A sad, depressing sensation of a seasonal and social stereotype. What comes to my mind is that maman is no longer here and life, stupid life, continues.
ROLAND BARTHES
Mourning Diary
Desire is squashed against need: that is the obsessive phenomenon of all amorous sentiment.
ROLAND BARTHES
A Lover's Discourse: Fragments
We know that the war against intelligence is always waged in the name of common sense.
ROLAND BARTHES
Mythologies
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.
ROLAND BARTHES
The Pleasure of the Text
The bourgeoisie hides the fact that it is the bourgeoisie and thereby produces myth; revolution announces itself openly as revolution and thereby abolishes myth.
ROLAND BARTHES
Mythologies
If I acknowledge my dependency, I do so because for me it is a means of signifying my demand.
ROLAND BARTHES
A Lover's Discourse: Fragments
The Text is without a source -- the "author" a mere "guest" at the reading of the Text.
ROLAND BARTHES
From Work to Text
The Text is not a definitive object.
ROLAND BARTHES
From Work to Text