Roland Barthes
Roland Barthes
Roland Gérard Bartheswas 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...
NationalityFrench
ProfessionPhilosopher
Date of Birth12 November 1915
CountryFrance
Roland Barthes quotes about
solitude desire needs
I have not a desire but a need for solitude.
photography men vision
I want a History of Looking. For the Photograph is the advent of myself as other: a cunning dissociation of consciousness from identity. Even odder: it was before Photography that men had the most to say about the vision of the double. Heautoscopy was compared with an hallucinosis; for centuries this was a great mythic theme.
photography theme wanted
As Spectator I wanted to explore photography not as a question (a theme) but as a wound.
return looks photograph
When we look at a photograph of ourselves or of others, we are really looking at the return of the dead.
speech language forget
Language is legislation, speech is its code. We do not see the power which is in speech because we forget that all speech is a classification, and that all classifications are oppressive.
doe ends ifs
How does meaning get into the image? Where does it end? And if it ends, what is there beyond?
reading simple looks
...what I enjoy in a narrative is not directly its content or even its structure, but rather the abrasions I impose upon the fine surface: I read on, I skip, I look up, I dip in again. Which has nothing to do with the deep laceration the text of bliss inflicts upon language itself, and not upon the simple temporality of its reading.
culture tissues centre
The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.
teacher school fabric
Rarely do outside of school remedies work their way into the fabric of the schools or into the teachers lives, and more rarely into the classrooms. Therefore they only offer a modest hope of influencing the basic culture of the school
sight doe sugar
The Photograph is violent: not because it shows violent tings, but because on each occasion (i)it fills the sight by force(i), and because in it nothing can be refused or transformed (that we can sometimes call it mild does not contradict its violence: many say that sugar is mild, but to me sugar is violent, and I call it so).
photography delight biographies
[Photography] allows me to accede to an infra-knowledge; it supplies me with a collection of partial objects and can flatter a certain fetishism of mine: for this 'me' which like knowledge, which nourishes a kind of amorous preference for it. In the same way, I like certain biographical features which, in a writer's life, delight me as much as certain photographs; I have called these features 'biographemes'; Photography has the same relation to History that the biographeme has to biography.
obscene
Tout ce qui est anachronique est obsce' ne. Everything anachronistic is obscene.
mourning suffering psychoanalytic
Don't say mourning. It's too psychoanalytic. I'm not mourning. I'm suffering.
hero vision makers
The best principals are not heroes; they are hero makers.