French philosopher & literary theorist (1915-1980)
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
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
I am interested in language because it wounds or seduces me.
ROLAND BARTHES
The Pleasure of the Text
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
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
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
The text you write must prove to me that it desires me.
ROLAND BARTHES
The Pleasures of the 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
Is not the most erotic portion of a body where the garment gapes?
ROLAND BARTHES
The Pleasure of the Text
A work has two levels of meaning: literal and concealed.
ROLAND BARTHES
From Work to Text
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
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
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 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
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