1
As a general rule, desire is always marketable: we don’t do anything but sell, buy, exchange desires.. .. And I think of Bloy’s words: “there is nothing perfectly beautiful except what is invisible and above all unbuyable.Roland Barthes
2
If I had to create a god, I would lend him a “slow understanding”: a kind of drip-by-drip understanding of problems. People who understand quickly frighten me.Roland Barthes
3
Language is neither reactionary nor progressive; it is quite simply fascist; for fascism does not prevent speech, it compels speech.Roland Barthes
4
Don’t bleach language, savour it instead. Stroke it gently or even groom it, but don’t “purify” it.Roland Barthes
5
Where there is meaning, there is paradigm, and where there is paradigm (opposition), there is meaning .. . elliptically put: meaning rests on conflict (the choice of one term against another), and all conflict is generative of meaning: to choose one and refuse the other is always a sacrifice made to meaning, to produce meaning, to offer it to be consumed.Roland Barthes
6
Today, information: pulverized, nonhierarchized, dealing with everything: nothing is protected from information and at the same time nothing is open to reflection -> Encyclopedias are impossible -> I would say: the more information grows, the more knowledge retreats and therefore the more decision is partial (terroristic, dogmatic) -> “I don’t know, ” “I refuse to judge”: as scandalous as an agrammatical sentence: doesn’t belong to the language of the discourse. Variations on the “I don’t know.” The obligation to “be interested” in everything that is imposed on you by the world: prohibition of noninterest, even if provisional. .Roland Barthes
7
Today there is no symbolic compensation for old age, no recognition of a specific value: wisdom, perceptiveness, experience, vision.Roland Barthes