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“Justice is always ready to lend you a spare brain in order to condemn you without a second thought”
― Roland Barthes, Mythologies

“The ‘healthyâ€� sign, for Barthes, is one which draws attention to its own arbitrariness—which does not try to palm itself off as ‘naturalâ€� but which, in the very moment of conveying a meaning, communicates something of its own relative, artificial status as well. …Signs which pass themselves off as natural, which offer themselves as the only conceivable way of viewing the world, are by that token authoritarian and ideological. It is one of the functions of ideology to ‘naturalizeâ€� social reality, to make it seem as innocent and unchangeable as Nature itself. Ideology seeks to convert culture into Nature, and the ‘naturalâ€� sign is one of its weapons. Saluting a flag, or agreeing that Western democracy represents the true meaning of the word ‘freedomâ€�, become the most obvious, spontaneous responses in the world. Ideology, in this sense, is a kind of contemporary mythology, a realm which has purged itself of ambiguity and alternative possibility.”
― Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction

“So who is cruel? You, cruel reader, you are.”
― Johnny Rich, The Human Script

“Like the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School, postmodernism seeks to institutionalize dishonesty as a legitimate school of thought. The idea of truth as the ultimate goal of the intellectual is discarded. In its place, scholars are asked to pursue political objectives--so long as those political objectives are the 'correct' ones. Postmodernism is not fringe within the community of scholars. It is central. This tells us a great deal about the life of the mind today. Peruse any university course catalogue, and you find names like Foucault, Derrida, and Barthes. Scour the footnotes of scholarly books and journals and a similar story unfolds. With the primacy of philosophies--postmodernism, Critical Theory, and even the right-leaning Straussianism--that exalt dishonesty in the service of supposedly noble causes, is it at all surprising that liars like Alfred Kinsey, Rigoberta Menchu, Alger Hiss, and Margaret Sanger have achieved a venerated status among the intellectuals?”
― Daniel J. Flynn, Intellectual Morons: How Ideology Makes Smart People Fall for Stupid Ideas

“Atque metum tantum concepit tunc mea mater. Ut pareret geminos, meque metumque simul.”
― Thomas Hobbes

“As thoroughly as mankind has killed God, the reader has despatched the author.”
― Johnny Rich, The Human Script

“Those who perpetrate stories must act cruelly.”
― Johnny Rich, The Human Script

“If Barthes, along with Bachelard, is one of those who have done most to enrich criticism during the last thirty years, it is not as a theoretician of a still hazy semiology, but as the champion of a new pleasure in reading.”
― Laurent Binet, The Seventh Function of Language

“mieux valent les leurres de la subjectivité que les impostures de l’objectivité.”
― Roland Barthes, The Preparation of the Novel: Lecture Courses and Seminars at the Collège de France, 1978-1979 and 1979-1980

“I think if Barthes again. A writer is someone who plays with the body of his mother, he says after the death of his own mother, in order to glorify it, to embellish it.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“Open text is one of a pair of terms popularized by Eco to refer to kinds of interpretative interactions between text and reader. An open text, unlike a closed one such as a work of popular fiction, is not aimed at a specific reader in a specific social context. It is also open in that its theme, structure and language are more complex, less explicit, more "open-ended": what other critics as Barthes in reception theory would call "Indeterminate". The open text constructs the model of its own reader as part of its structural strategy.”
― Katie Wales

“Perhaps I had just ruined it by reading Barthes at the wrong time. (A Lover’s Discourse, Chandra said, was relationship poison.)”
― Catherine Lacey, The Answers

“The heart is the organ of desire (the heart swells, weakens, etc., like the sexual organs), as it is held, enchanted, within the domain of the Image-repertoire. What will the world, what will the other do with my desire? That is the anxiety in which are gathered all the heart's movements, all the heart's 'problems.”
― Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse: Fragments

“I am waiting for an arrival, a return, a promised sign... Everything is solemn: I have no sense of proportions.”
― Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse: Fragments

“Barthes referred to semiology, the science of signs, in pursuing this task. He followed Ferdinand de Saussure’s claim that a sign is merely the outcome of an arbitrary relationship between a signifier (a word, picture, utterance) and a signified (a concept or mental image to which the signifier gives rise) â€� implying that the words we use have no fixed meanings in themselves. De Saussure called this ability of the sign to represent or convey meaning signification.”
― Francesco Proto, Baudrillard for Architects

“One way of dying is to make your death alter the state of things in such a way that you no longer have any reason to be a part of it. Thus death can have the effect of a prophetic disappearance. Such were the deaths of Barthes and Lacan, I believe: the world has taken another direction since, in which these subtle figures would no longer have had any meaning. The death of Sartre, by contrast, left the world unchanged and seems an ineluctable, but insignifi cant event. Before dying, he was already to live in a world that was no longer his own.

So far as existence is concerned, as Ajar [Romain Gary] would say, it needs to be taken in charge by someone. No one can be expected to bear the responsibility for their own life. This Christian and modern idea is a vain and arrogant proposition. Moreover, it is a groundless utopian notion. The individual would have to be able to transform himself into the vestal, or the slave, of his identity, control all his circuits and all the circuits of the world which meet in his genes, nerves and thoughts. An unprecedented state of servitude. Who would wish to have salvation at such a price? It is so much more human to put one's fate, one's desire, one's will into the hands of another. Circulation of responsibilities, declension of wills, perpetual transfer of forms . Apart from this subtle path, which is attested to by a great many cultures, there is only the totalitarian path of a collective assumption.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories

“Si consideramos el sentido de esta manera, es decir, teniendo en cuenta sus relaciones con la institución o las instituciones, advertimos que en realidad se trata de un problema muy candente; desde hace siglos, casi todos los combates ideológicos de la humanidad, en cualquier caso de la humanidad occidental, son combates del sentido; en teología, en sociología o precisamente en filología, las polémicas, incluso combates muy violentos, siempre tienen lugar en torno a una interpretación.”
― Roland Barthes, Variaciones sobre la escritura

“True wrestling, wrong called amateur wrestling, is performed in second-rate halls, where the public spontaneously attunes itself to the spectacular nature of the contest, like the audience at a suburban cinema.”
― Roland Barthes, Mythologies

“Indeed, it was perhaps the most iconic scene from any novel of its day, immortalised in engravings and artworks from the period and later. Werther, as Geothe’s narrator, describes the moment of desire in the first person: "I walked across the court to a well-built house, and, ascending the flight of steps in front, opened the door, and saw before me the most charming spectacle I had ever witnessed. Six children, from eleven to two years old, were running about the hall, and surrounding a lady of middle height, with a lovely figure, dressed in a robe of simple white, trimmed with pink ribbons. She was holding a rye loaf in her hand and was cutting slices for the little ones all around, in proportion to their age and appetite. She performed her task in a graceful and affec-tionate manner; each claimant awaiting his turn with outstretched hands, and boisterously shouting his thanks. Some of them ran away at once, to enjoy their evening meal; whilst others, of a gentler disposition, retired to the courtyard to see the strangers, and to survey the carriage in which their Charlotte was to drive away." The focus here is not on Lotte herself, of whom we learn only that she is ‘a lady of middle height, with a lovely figure, dressed in a robe of simple whiteâ€�. Instead, for Werther what is important is what Barthes would call ‘the arrangements of objectsâ€�: Lotte’s relation to the children, the rye loaf, and the knife, all appear as scene-setting props which make desire possible. Lotte emerges from amidst these objects and Werther is ‘initiatedâ€� as ‘the sceneâ€� (described by Werther as the ‘most charming spectacleâ€�) ‘consecrates the object [he is] going to love.â€� It is that scene, that arrangement of objects, which makes desire â€� even love â€� possible. The technologies of our space, place and time set the scene for love to appear â€� make the emergence of desire possible. We don’t fall in love with an object in isolation but with how it appears in a curate scene determined by a variety of technologies. The Tinder profile card could hardly be a more perfect example from today.”
― Alfie Bown, Dream Lovers: The Gamification of Relationships

“What the photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once: The photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially. In the photograph, the event is never transcended for the sake of something else: The photograph always leads the corpus I need back to the body I see.”
― Barthes Roland, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography

“Barthes announced, “I am not lovingly gazing toward an Oriental essence—to me the Orient is a matter of indifference, merely providing a reserve of features whose manipulation—whose invented interplayâ€� allows me to ‘entertainâ€� the idea of an unheard-of symbolic system, one altogether detached from our own.â€� The lesson of Japan for Barthes was “the possibility of difference, of a mutation, of a revolution in the propriety of symbolic systems.â€� Like Wilde, Barthes does not locate Japaneseness in a place called Japan. But if for Wilde Japaneseness offered a new way of seeing, for Barthes, more complexly, Japan offered a new way of seeing himself being seen, which resulted in a new relationship to language. About himself, Barthes wrote, “The author has never, in any sense, photographed Japan. Rather, he has done the opposite: Japan has starred him with any number of ‘flashesâ€�; or better still, Japan has afforded him a situation of writing.â€� Japan allowed Barthes to “descend into the untranslatable . . . until everything Occidental in us totters and the rights of the ‘father tongueâ€� vacillate—that tongue which comes to us from our fathers and which makes us, in our turn, fathers and proprietors of a culture which, precisely, history transforms into ‘nature.’â€�3 Barthes’s growing sense of the “repressive valueâ€� of text as the “levelâ€� at which “the morality and ideology of a society are above all investedâ€� animated his delight in a Japanese “situationâ€� that allowed freedoms he associated with images to trump the authority of text in the West.4 Reflecting later on this book about the “system of signs I call Japan,â€� Barthes emphasized that it “occupied a moment in my life when I felt the necessity of entering completely into the signifier, i.e., of disconnecting myself from the ideological instance as signified, as the risk of the return of the signified, of theology, monologism, of law.”
― Christopher Reed