Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text (Le Plaisir du texte), 17.
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Quote reblogged from A la recherche du temps perdu with 277 notes
Am I in love?—yes, since I am waiting. The other one never waits.
—
Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, trans. Richard Howard
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Quote reblogged from To a dusty shelf we aspire. with 197 notes
To know that one does not write for the other, to know that these things I am going to write will never cause me to be loved by the one I love (the other), to know that writing compensates for nothing, sublimates nothing, that it is precisely there where you are not—this is the beginning of writing.
—
Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse
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Quote with 21 notes
In the other’s perfect and “embalmed” figure (for that is the degree to which it fascinates me) I perceive suddenly a speck of corruption. This speck is a tiny one: a gesture, a word, an object, a garment, something unexpected which appears (which dawns) from a region I had never even suspected, and suddenly attaches the loved object to a commonplace world. Could the other be vulgar, whose elegance and originality I had so religiously hymned? Here is a gesture by which is revealed a being of another race. I am flabbergasted: I hear a counter-rhythm: something like a syncope in the lovely phrase of the loved being, the noise of a rip in the smooth envelope of the
Image.
— Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments (translated by Richard Howard)
Photo reblogged from the fascination of the absence of time with 323 notes
“The truth of the matter is that—by an exorbitant paradox—I never stop believing that I am loved. I hallucinate what I desire. Each wound proceeds less from a doubt than from a betrayal: for only the one who loves can betray, only the one who believes himself loved can be jealous: that the other, episodically, should fail in his being, which is to love me—that is the origin of all my woes. A delirium, however, does not exist unless one wakens from it(there are only retrospective deliriums): one day, I realize what has happened to me: I thought I was suffering from not being loved, and yet it is because I thought I was loved that I was suffering; I lived in the complication of supposing myself simultaneously loved and abandoned. Anyone hearing my intimate language would have had to exclaim, as of a difficult child: But after all, what does he want?”
— Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments
Source: pornwithoutporn
Quote with 39 notes
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
Quote reblogged from defamiliar. with 181 notes
As a child, I was often and intensely bored. This evidently began very early, it has continued my whole life, in gusts (increasingly rare, it is true, thanks to work and to friends), and it has always been noticeable to others. A panic boredom, to the point of distress: like the kind I feel in panel discussions, lectures, parties among strangers, group amusements: wherever boredom can be seen. Might boredom be my form of hysteria? roland barthes by roland barthes
—
Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes By Roland Barthes
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Quote reblogged from defamiliar. with 205 notes
Apparently Arab scholars, when speaking of the text, use this admirable expression: the certain body. What body? We have several of them; the body of anatomists and physiologists, the one science sees or discusses: this is the text of grammarians, critics, commentators, philologists (the pheno-text). But we also have a body of bliss consisting solely of erotic relations, utterly distinct from the first body: it is another contour, another nomination; thus with the text: it is no more than the fires of language. …Does the text have human form, is it a figure, an anagram of the body? Yes, but of our erotic body. The pleasure of the text is irreducible to physiological need. The pleasure of the text is that moment when my body pursues its own ideas — for my body does not have the same ideas I do.
—
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Quote reblogged from LEDA with 122 notes
Dreaming makes everything in me which is not strange, foreign, speak.
—
Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text
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Source: mythologyofblue
Quote reblogged from Poe's Mistress with 162 notes
Language reconstructs itself elsewhere under the teeming flux of every kind of linguistic pleasure. Where is this elsewhere? In the paradise of words.
—
Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, translation by Richard Miller
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Quote reblogged from Poe's Mistress with 98 notes
From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here; the duration of the transmission is insignificant; the photograph of the missing being, as Sontag says, will touch me like the delayed rays of a star. A sort of umbilical cord links the body of the photographed thing to my gaze: light, though impalpable, is here a carnal medium, a skin I share with anyone who has been photographed.
—
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, translation by Richard Howard
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