Roland Barthes Quotes about Desire

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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.

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.

Roland Barthes

Desire, Skins, Language And Power

"A Lover's Discourse (Talking)". Bok by Roland Barthes, 1977.

Is the scene always visual? It can be aural, the frame can be linguistic: I can fall in love with a sentence spoken to me: and not only because it says something which manages to touch my desire, but because of its syntactical turn (framing), which will inhabit me like a memory.

Roland Barthes

Falling In Love, Memories, Desire

Roland Barthes (1990). “A lover's discourse: fragments”, Penguin Books

Isn’t desire always the same, whether the object is present or absent? Isn’t the object always absent? —This isn’t the same languor: there are two words: Pothos, desire for the absent being, and Himéros, the more burning desire for the present being.

Roland Barthes

Two, Desire, Burning

I am simultaneously and contradictorily both happy and unhappy: 'to succeed' or 'to fail' have for me only ephemeral, contingent meanings (this does not stop my desires and sorrows from being violent ones); what impels me, secretly and obstinately, is not tactical: I accept and I affirm, irrespective of the true and the false, of success and failure; I am withdrawn from all finality, I live according to chance.

Roland Barthes

Sorrow, Unhappy, Desire

One of the marks of our world is perhaps this reversal: we live according to a generalized image-repertoire. Consider the United Sates, where everything is transformed into images: only images exist and are produced and are consumes ... Such a reversal necessarily raises the ethical question: not that the image is immoral, irreligious, or diabolic (as some have declared it, upon the advent of the Photograph), but because, when generalized, it completely de-realizes the human world of conflicts and desires, under cover of illustrating it.

Roland Barthes

Ethical Questions, Our World, Desire

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

Desire, Encounters, Body

Roland Barthes (1990). “A lover's discourse: fragments”, Penguin Books

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).

Roland Barthes

Writing, Desire, Language

I cannot classify the other, for the other is, precisely, Unique, the singular Image which has miraculously come to correspond to the speciality of my desire. The other is the figure of my truth, and cannot be imprisoned in any stereotype (which is the truth of others).

Roland Barthes

Unique, Desire, Stereotype

Roland Barthes (1990). “A lover's discourse: fragments”, Penguin Books