Persons [ ] Language is never innocent | Roland Barthes, 1915-80
“Language is never innocent.”
“I am interested in language because it wounds or seduces me.” *
“The book creates meaning, the meaning creates life.” *
“Writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin.”
“Literature is that which he can not read without pain, without choking on truth.”
“The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.”
“Don’t bleach language, savour it instead. Stroke it gently or even groom it, but don’t “purify” it.” ~
“Are not couturiers the poets who, from year to year, from
strophe to strophe, write the anthem of the feminine body?” –
“What I hide by my language, my body utters.”
“I pass lightly through the reactionary darkness.” *
Roland Barthes, Sanatorium de Saint-Hilaire, 1942
“There is nothing in discourse that is not to be found in a sentence.” ^
“Incoherence seems to me preferable to a distorting order.”
“A creative writer is one for whom writing is a problem.” +
“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.”
“It must always be considered as though spoken by a character in a novel”
“The author enters into his own death, writing begins.” ^
“mad I cannot be, sane I do not deign to be, neurotic I am.”
“Any demand is frigid until desire, until neurosis forms in it.” *
“I have a disease; I see language.”
“The bastard form of mass culture is humiliated repetition… always new books,
new programs, new films, news items, but always the same meaning.”
Roland Barthes, 1915-80
* The Pleasure of the Text, ^ Image, Music, Text, – The Language of Fashion, + Writing Degree Zero and Elements of Semiology, ~ The Neutral: Lecture Course at the College de France