From Camera Lucida:
... with regard to the heterogeneity of "good" photographs, all we can say is that the object speaks, it induces us, vaguely, to think. And further: even this risks being perceived as dangerous. At the limit, no meaning at all is safer: the editors of Life rejected Kertész's photographs when he arrived in the United States in 1937 because, they said, his images "spoke too much"; they made us reflect, suggested a meaning—a different meaning from the literal one. Ultimately, Photography is subversive not when it frightens, repels or even stigmatizes, but when it is pensive, when it thinks.
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From A Lover's Discourse: Fragments:
... the first thing we love is a scene. For love at first sight requires the very sign of its suddenness (what makes me irresponsible, subject to fatality, swept away, ravished): and of all the arrangements of objects, it is the scene which seems to be seen best for the first time: a curtain parts: what had not yet ever been seen is discovered in its entirety, and then devoured by the eyes: what is immediate stands for what is fulfilled: I am initiated: the scene consecrates the object I am going to love.
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From The Pleasure of the Text:
So we arrive at this paradox: the texts, like those by Bataille—or by others—which are written against neurosis, from the center of madness, contain within themselves, if they want to be read, that bit of neurosis necessary to the seduction of their readers: these terrible texts are all the same flirtatious texts.
Thus every writer's motto reads: mad I cannot be, sane I do not deign to be, neurotic I am.
The text you write must prove to me that it desires me. This proof exists: it is writing. Writing is: the science of the various blisses of language, its Kama Sutra (this science has but one treatise: writing itself).
Books by Barthes at Powell's Books
