Ensnared in his starvation, Chaplin-man is always just below political awareness. A strike is a catastrophe for him because it threatens a man truly blinded by his hunger; this man achieves an awareness of the working-class condition only when the poor man and the proletarian coincide under the gaze (and the blows) of the police.
Roland BarthesIsnโt desire always the same, whether the object is present or absent? Isnโt the object always absent? โThis isnโt the same languor: there are two words: Pothos, desire for the absent being, and Himรฉros, the more burning desire for the present being.
Roland BarthesI am simultaneously and contradictorily both happy and unhappy: 'to succeed' or 'to fail' have for me only ephemeral, contingent meanings (this does not stop my desires and sorrows from being violent ones); what impels me, secretly and obstinately, is not tactical: I accept and I affirm, irrespective of the true and the false, of success and failure; I am withdrawn from all finality, I live according to chance.
Roland Barthes