It is said that mourning, by its gradual labour, slowly erases pain; I could not, I cannot believe this; because for me, Time eliminates the emotion of loss (I do note weep), that is all. For the rest, everything has remained motionless. For what I have lost is not a Figure (the Mother), but a being; and not a being, but a quality (a soul): not the indispensable, but the irreplaceable.
Roland BarthesThus every writer's motto reads: mad I cannot be, sane I do not deign to be, neurotic I am.
Roland BarthesLanguage 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.
Roland BarthesCameras, in short, were clocks for seeing, and perhaps in me someone very old still hears in the photographic mechanism the living sound of the wood.
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 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.
Roland Barthes