Roland Barthes

Who was Roland Barthes?

Roland Gérard Barthes was a French literary theorist, philosopher, linguist, critic, and semiotician. Barthes' ideas explored a diverse range of fields and he influenced the development of schools of theory including structuralism, semiotics, social theory, anthropology and post-structuralism.

Famous Quotes:

• I think that cars today are almost the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals: I mean the supreme creation of an era, conceived with passion by unknown artists, and consumed in image if not in usage by a whole population which appropriates them as a purely magical object.
• I call the discourse of power any discourse that engenders blame, hence guilt, in its recipient.
• To try to write love is to confront the muck of language: that region of hysteria where language is both too much and too little, excessive and impoverished.
• Myth is neither a lie nor a confession: it is an inflexion.
• All official institutions of language are repeating machines: school, sports, advertising, popular songs, news, all continually repeat the same structure, the same meaning, often the same words: the stereotype is a political fact, the major figure of ideology.
• What I claim is to live to the full the contradiction of my time, which may well make sarcasm the condition of truth.
• Language 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.
• Literature is without proofs. By which it must be understood that it cannot prove, not only what it says, but even that it is worth the trouble of saying it.
• 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.
• The photographic image... is a message without a code.