338 Quotes by Roland Barthes

Mass culture is a machine for showing desire; here is what must interest you, it says, as if it guessed that men are incapable of finding what to desire themselves.

But isn't desire always the same, whether the object is present or absent? Isn't the object always absent?

(I was looking at everything in the other's face, the other'sbody, coldly : lashes, toenail, thin eyebrows, thin lips, theluster of the eyes, a mole, a way of holding a cigarette; Iwas fascinated-fascination being, after all, only the extremeof detachment-by a kind of colored ceramicized,vitrified figurine in which I could read, without understandinganything about it, the cause of my desire. )

Language is a skin : I rub my language against theother. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers atthe tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.

Boredom is not far from bliss: it is bliss seen from the shores of pleasure.

Absence is the figure of privation; simultaneously, I desire and I need. Desire is squashed against need: that is the obsessive phenomenon of all amorous sentiment.

We are all potential Dominicis, not as murderers but as accused, deprived of language, or worse, rigged out in that of our accusers, humiliated and condemned by it. To rob a man of his language in the very name of language: this is the first step in all legal murder.

I have a disease; I see language.

There are nightmares in which the Mother appears, her face hardened into a cold and severe expression. The fade-out of the loved object is the terrifying return of the Wicked Mother, the inexplicable retreat of love, the well-known abandonment of which the Mystics complain : God exists, the Mother is present, but they no longer love.