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But I Never Looked Like That!’ - How Do You Know? What Is The ‘you’ You Might Or Might Not Look Like? Where Do You Find It - By Which Morphological Or Expressive Calibration? Where Is Your Authentic Body? You Are The Only One Who Can Never See Yourself Except As An Image; You Never See Your Eyes Unless They Are Dulled By The Gaze They Rest Upon The Mirror Or The Lens (i Am Interested In Seeing My Eyes Only When They Look At You): Even And Especially For Your Own Body, You Are Condemned To The Repertoire Of Its Images.

-Roland Barthes

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But I Never Looked

Roland Barthes

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But I Never Looked Like That!’ - How Do You Know? What Is The ‘you’ You Might Or Might Not Look Like? Where Do You Find It - By Which Morphological Or Expressive Calibration? Where Is Your Authentic Body? You Are The Only One Who Can Never See Yourself Except As An Image; You Never See Your Eyes Unless They Are Dulled By The Gaze They Rest Upon The Mirror Or The Lens (i Am Interested In Seeing My Eyes Only When They Look At You): Even And Especially For Your Own Body, You Are Condemned To The Repertoire Of Its Images.

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The Unary Photograph Has Every Reason To Be Banal, 'unity' Of Composition Being The First Rule Of Vulgar (and Notably, Of Academic) Rhetoric: 'the Subject,' Says One Handbook For Amateur Photographers, 'must Be Simple, Free Of Useless Accessories; This Is Called The Search For Unity.

Where You Are Tender, You Speak Your Plural.

We Can Never Know, For The Good Reason That Writing Is The Destruction Of Every Voice, Every Origin. Writing Is That Neuter, That Composite, That Obliquity Into Which Our Subject Flees, The Black-and-white Where All Identity Is Lost, Beginning With The Very Identity Of The Body That Writes.

I Try To Busy Myself Elsewhere, To Arrive Late; But I Always Lose At This Game. Whatever I Do, I Find Myself There, With Nothing To Do, Punctual, Even Ahead Of Time.

I Encounter Millions Of Bodies In My Life; Of These Millions, I May Desire Some Hundreds; But Of These Hundreds, I Love Only One.

I Have Not A Desire But A Need For Solitude.

The Politician Being Interviewed Clearly Takes A Great Deal Of Trouble To Imagine An Ending To His Sentence: And If He Stopped Short? His Entire Policy Would Be Jeopardized!

The Realists Do Not Take The Photograph For A 'copy' Of Reality, But For An Emanation Of Past Reality, A Magic, Not An Art.

All Of A Sudden It Didn't Bother Me Not Being Modern.

The Necessary Condition For An Image Is Sight.

All Those Young Photographers Who Are At Work In The World, Determined Upon The Capture Of Actuality, Do Not Know That They Are Agents Of Death.

We Know That The War Against Intelligence Is Always Waged In The Name Of Common Sense.

Is Not The Most Erotic Part Of The Body Wherever The Clothing Affords A Glimpse?

The Discourse On The Text Should Itself Be Nothing Other Than Text, Research, Textual Activity, Since The Text Is That Social Space Which Leaves No Language Safe, Outside, Nor Any Subject Of The Enunciation In Position As Judge, Master, Analyst, Confessor, Decoder. The Theory Of The Text Can Coincide Only With A Practice Of Writing.

Every New Fashion Is A Refusal To Inherit, A Subversion Against The Oppression Of The Preceding Fashion; Fashion Experiences Itself As A Right, The Natural Right Of The Present Over The Past.

We Don't Forget, But Something Vacant Settles In Us.

Architecture Is Always Dream And Function, Expression Of A Utopia And Instrument Of A Convenience.

Literature Is Like Phosphorus: It Shines With Its Maximum Brilliance And The Moment When It Attempts To Die.

How Does Meaning Get Into The Image? Where Does It End? And If It Ends, What Is There Beyond?

Are Not Couturiers The Poets Who, From Year To Year, From Strophe To Strophe, Write The Anthem Of The Feminine Body?

Wine Is A Part Of Society Because It Provides A Basis Not Only For A Morality But Also For An Environment; It Is An Ornament In The Slightest Ceremonials Of French Daily Life, From The Snack To The Feast, From The Conversation At The Local Caft To The Speech At A Formal Dinner.

Each Of Us Has His Own Rhythm Of Suffering.

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.

Cameras, In Short, Were Clocks For Seeing, And Perhaps In Me Someone Very Old Still Hears In The Photographic Mechanism The Living Sound Of The Wood.

The Author Enters Into His Own Death, Writing Begins.

To Know That One Does Not Write For The Other, To Know That These Things I Am Going To Write Will Never Cause Me To Be Loved By The One I Love (the Other), To Know That Writing Compensates For Nothing, Sublimates Nothing, That It Is Precisely There Where You Are Not--this Is The Beginning Of Writing.

A Photograph Is Always Invisible, It Is Not It That We See.

This Endured Absence Is Nothing More Or Less Than Forgetfulness. I Am, Intermittently, Unfaithful. This Is The Condition Of My Survival.

...what I Enjoy In A Narrative Is Not Directly Its Content Or Even Its Structure, But Rather The Abrasions I Impose Upon The Fine Surface: I Read On, I Skip, I Look Up, I Dip In Again. Which Has Nothing To Do With The Deep Laceration The Text Of Bliss Inflicts Upon Language Itself, And Not Upon The Simple Temporality Of Its Reading.

As A Language, Garbo's Singularity Was Of The Order Of The Concept, That Of Audrey Hepburn Is Of The Order Of The Substance; The Face Of Garbo Is An Idea, That Of Hepburn, An Event.

Literature Can No Longer Be Either Mimesis Or Mathesis But Merely Semiosis, The Adventure Of What Is Impossible To Language, In A Word: Text (it Is Wrong To Say That The Notion Of 'text' Repeats The Notion Of 'literature': Literature Represents A Finite World, The Text Figures The Infinite Of Language).

It Is As If The Photograph Always Carries Its Referent With Itself, Both Affected By The Same Amorous Or Funereal Immobility, At The Very Heart Of The Moving World: They Are Glued Together, Limb By Limb, Like The Condemned Man And The Corpse In Certain Tortures; Or Even Like Those Pairs Of Fish (sharks, I Think, According To Michelet) Which Navigate In Convoy, As Though United By An Eternal Coitus.

...language Is Never Innocent.

New York... Is A City Of Geometric Heights, A Petrified Desert Of Grids And Lattices, An Inferno Of Greenish Abstraction Under A Flat Sky, A Real Metropolis From Which Man Is Absent By His Very Accumulation.

In An Initial Period, Photography, In Order To Surprise, Photographs The Notable; But Soon, By A Familiar Reversal, It Decrees Notable Whatever It Photographs. The 'anything Whatever' Then Becomes The Sophisticated Acme Of Value.

The Photograph Belongs To That Class Of Laminated Objects Whose Two Leaves Cannot Be Separated Without Destroying Them Both: The Windowpane And The Landscape, And Why Not: Good And Evil, Desire And Its Object: Dualities We Can Conceive But Not Perceive... Whatever It Grants To Vision And Whatever Its Manner, A Photograph Is Always Invisible: It Is Not It That We See.

Ultimately — Or At The Limit — In Order To See A Photograph Well, It Is Best To Look Away Or Close Your Eyes. 'the Necessary Condition For An Image Is Sight,'janouch Told Kafka; And Kafka Smiled And Replied: 'we Photograph Things In Order To Drive Them Out Of Our Minds. My Stories Are A Way Of Shutting My Eyes.

Don't Say Mourning. It's Too Psychoanalytic. I'm Not Mourning. I'm Suffering.

The Photographer, Like An Acrobat, Must Defy The Laws Of Probability Or Even Of Possibility; At The Limit, He Must Defy Those Of The Interesting: The Photograph Becomes Surprising When We Do Not Know Why It Has Been Taken.

Great Portrait Photographers Are Great Mythologists.

I Passed Beyond The Unreality Of The Thing Represented, I Entered Crazily Into The Spectacle, Into The Image, Taking Into My Arms What Is Dead, What Is Going To Die.

To Eat, To Speak, To Sing (need We Add: To Kiss?) Are Operations Which Have The Same Site Of The Body For Origin.

Le Toucher Est Le Plus De Mystificateur De Tous Les Sens, A' La Diffe Rence De La Vue, Qui Est Le Plus Magique. Touch Is The Most Demystifying Of All Senses, Different From Sight Which Is The Most Magical.

I Am Interested In Language Because It Wounds Or Seduces Me.

For Death Must Be Somewhere In A Society; If It Is No Longer (or Less Intensely) In Religion, It Must Be Elsewhere; Perhaps In This Image Which Produces Death While Trying To Preserve Life. Contemporary With The Withdrawal Of Rites, Photography May Correspond To The Intrusion, In Our Modern Society, Of An Asymbolic Death, Outside Of Religion, Outside Of Ritual, A Kind Of Abrupt Dive Into Literal Death.

I Make The Other’s Absence Responsible For My Worldliness.

But I Never Looked Like That!’ - How Do You Know? What Is The ‘you’ You Might Or Might Not Look Like? Where Do You Find It - By Which Morphological Or Expressive Calibration? Where Is Your Authentic Body? You Are The Only One Who Can Never See Yourself Except As An Image; You Never See Your Eyes Unless They Are Dulled By The Gaze They Rest Upon The Mirror Or The Lens (i Am Interested In Seeing My Eyes Only When They Look At You): Even And Especially For Your Own Body, You Are Condemned To The Repertoire Of Its Images.

Who Speaks Is Not Who Writes, And Who Writes Is Not Who Is.

The Text Is Not A Definitive Object.

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.

Falling In Love

One Day, Quite Some Time Ago, I Happened On A Photograph Of Napoleon’s Youngest Brother, Jerome, Taken In 1852. And I Realized Then, With An Amazement I Have Not Been Able To Lessen Since: ‘i Am Looking At Eyes That Looked At The Emperor.’ Sometimes I Would Mention This Amazement, But Since No One Seemed To Share It, Nor Even To Understand It (life Consists Of These Little Touches Of Solitude), I Forgot About It.

[photography] Allows Me To Accede To An Infra-knowledge; It Supplies Me With A Collection Of Partial Objects And Can Flatter A Certain Fetishism Of Mine: For This 'me' Which Like Knowledge, Which Nourishes A Kind Of Amorous Preference For It. In The Same Way, I Like Certain Biographical Features Which, In A Writer's Life, Delight Me As Much As Certain Photographs; I Have Called These Features 'biographemes'; Photography Has The Same Relation To History That The Biographeme Has To Biography.

The Winter Photograph Was My Ariadne, Not Because It Would Help Me Discover A Secret Thing (monster Or Treasure), But Because It Would Tell Me What Constituted That Thread Which Drew Me Toward Photography. I Had Understood That Henceforth I Must Interrogate The Evidence Of Photography, Not From The Viewpoint Of Pleasure, But In Relation To What We Romantically Call Love And Death.

The Art Of Living Has No History: It Does Not Evolve: The Pleasure Which Vanishes Vanishes For Good, There Is No Substitute For It. Other Pleasures Come, Which Replace Nothing. No Progress In Pleasures, Nothing But Mutations.

It Must Always Be Considered As Though Spoken By A Character In A Novel

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).

I Want A History Of Looking. For The Photograph Is The Advent Of Myself As Other: A Cunning Dissociation Of Consciousness From Identity. Even Odder: It Was Before Photography That Men Had The Most To Say About The Vision Of The Double. Heautoscopy Was Compared With An Hallucinosis; For Centuries This Was A Great Mythic Theme.

A Picture Is Never Anything But Its Own Plural Description.

Usually The Amateur Is Defined As An Immature State Of The Artist: Someone Who Cannot — Or Will Not — Achieve The Mastery Of A Profession. But In The Field Of Photographic Practice, It Is The Amateur, On The Contrary, Who Is The Assumption Of The Professional: For It Is He Who Stands Closer To The (i)noeme(i) Of Photography.

Thus Every Writer's Motto Reads: Mad I Cannot Be, Sane I Do Not Deign To Be, Neurotic I Am.

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.

To Whom Could I Put This Question (with Any Hope Of An Answer)? Does Being Able To Live Without Someone You Loved Mean You Loved Her Less Than You Thought...?

Isn’t The Most Sensitive Point Of This Mourning The Fact That I Must Lose A Language — The Amorous Language? No More ‘i Love You’s.

Henceforth I Would Have To Cosent To Combine Two Voices: The Voice Of Banality (to Say What Everyone Sees And Knows) And The Voice Of Singularity (to Replenish Such Banality With All The élan Of An Emotion Which Belonged Only To Myself).

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.

Painting Can Feign Reality Without Having Seen It.

There Is Only One Way Left To Escape The Alienation Of Present Day Society: To Retreat Ahead Of It.

As A Jealous Man, I Suffer Four Times Over: Because I Am Jealous, Because I Blame Myself For Being So, Because I Fear That My Jealousy Will Wound The Other, Because I Allow Myself To Be Subject To A Banality: I Suffer From Being Excluded, From Being Aggressive, From Being Crazy, And From Being Common.

The Lover's Fatal Identity Is Precisely This: I Am The One Who Waits.

The Incapacity To Name Is A Good Symptom Of Disturbance.

For The Photograph's Immobility Is Somehow The Result Of A Perverse Confusion Between Two Concepts: The Real And The Live: By Attesting That The Object Has Been Real, The Photograph Surreptitiously Induces Belief That It Is Alive, Because Of That Delusion Which Makes Us Attribute To Reality An Absolute Superior, Somehow Eternal Value; But By Shifting This Reality To The Past ("this-has-been"), The Photograph Suggests That It Is Already Dead.

There Are People Who Think That Wrestling Is An Ignoble Sport. Wrestling Is Not Sport, It Is A Spectacle, And It Is No More Ignoble To Attend A Wrestled Performance Of Suffering Than A Performance Of The Sorrows Of Arnolphe Or Andromaque.

Fashion Postulates An Achrony, A Time Which Does Not Exist; Here The Past Is Shameful And The Present Is Constantly "eaten Up" By The Fashion Being Heralded.

For The Theatre One Needs Long Arms; It Is Better To Have Them Too Long Than Too Short. An Artiste With Short Arms Can Never, Never Make A Fine Gesture.

The Text Is Plural. Which Is Not Simply To Say That It Has Several Meanings, But That It Accomplishes The Very Plural Of Meaning: An Irreducible (and Not Merely An Acceptable) Plural. The Text Is Not A Co-existence Of Meanings But A Passage, An Overcrossing; Thus It Answers Not To An Interpretation, Even A Liberal One, But To An Explosion, A Dissemination.

It Is No Longer The Sexual Which Is Indecent, It Is The Sentimental.

Whereas The Work Is Understood To Be Traceable To A Source (through A Process Of Derivation Or "filiation"), The Text Is Without A Source - The "author" A Mere "guest" At The Reading Of The Text.

The Photograph Is Literally An Emanation Of The Referent. From A Real Body, Which Was There, Proceed Radiations Which Ultimately Touch Me, Who Am Here; The Duration Of The Transmission Is Insignificant; The Photograph Of The Missing Being, As Sontag Says, Will Touch Me Like The Delayed Rays Of A Star.

The Skyscraper Establishes The Block, The Block Creates The Street, The Street Offers Itself To Man.

Every Photograph Is A Certificate Of Presence.

The Birth Of The Reader Must Be At The Cost Of The Death Of The Author.

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.

Ethical Questions

Through The Mythology Of Einstein, The World Blissfully Regained The Image Of Knowledge Reduced To A Formula.

The Photographic Image... Is A Message Without A Code.

Rarely Do Outside Of School Remedies Work Their Way Into The Fabric Of The Schools Or Into The Teachers Lives, And More Rarely Into The Classrooms. Therefore They Only Offer A Modest Hope Of Influencing The Basic Culture Of The School

What Love Lays Bare In Me Is Energy.

Every Object In The World Can Pass From A Closed, Silent Existence To An Oral State, Open To Appropriation By Society, For There Is No Law, Whether Natural Or Not, Which Forbids Talking About Things

Someone Tells Me: This Kind Of Love Is Not Viable. But How Can You Evaluate Viability? Why Is The Viable A Good Thing? Why Is It Better To Last Than To Burn?

A Light Without Shadow Generates An Emotion Without Reserve.

Am I In Love? --yes, Since I Am Waiting. The Other One Never Waits. Sometimes I Want To Play The Part Of The One Who Doesn't Wait; I Try To Busy Myself Elsewhere, To Arrive Late; But I Always Lose At This Game. Whatever I Do, I Find Myself There, With Nothing To Do, Punctual, Even Ahead Of Time. The Lover's Fatal Identity Is Precisely This: I Am The One Who Waits.

Every Exploration Is An Appropriation.

Language Is Neither Reactionary Nor Progressive; It Is Quite Simply Fascist; For Fascism Does Not Prevent Speech, It Compels Speech.

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 And Power

Le Langage Est Une Peau: Je Frotte Mon Langage Contre L'autre. Language Is A Skin; I Rub My Language Against Another Language.

In 1850, August Salzmann Photographed, Near Jerusalem, The Road To Beith-lehem (as It Was Spelled At The Time): Nothing But Stony Ground, Olive Trees; But Three Tenses Dizzy My Consciousness: My Present, The Time Of Jesus, And That Of The Photographer, All This Under The Instance Of 'reality' - And No Longer Through The Elaborations Of The Text, Whether Fictional Or Poetic, Which Itself Is Never Credible Down To The Root.

The Text Is A Tissue Of Quotations Drawn From The Innumerable Centres Of Culture.

Pleasure Is Continually Disappointed, Reduced, Deflated, In Favor Of Strong, Noble Values: Truth, Death, Progress, Struggle, Joy, Etc. Its Victorious Rival Is Desire: We Are Always Being Told About Desire, Never About Pleasure.

I Want To Be Both Pathetic And Admirable, I Want To Be At The Same Time A Child And An Adult. Thereby I Gamble, I Take A Risk: For It Is Always Possible That The Other Will Simply Ask No Question Whatever About These Unaccustomed Glasses; That The Other Will See, In The Fact, No Sign.

Ultimately, Photography Is Subversive, Not When It Frightens, Repels, Or Even Stigmatizes, But When It Is Pensive, When It Thinks.

If I Acknowledge My Dependency, I Do So Because For Me It Is A Means Of Signifying My Demand: In The Realm Of Love, Futility Is Not A "weakness" Or An "absurdity": It Is A Strong Sign: The More Futile, The More It Signifies And The More It Asserts Itself As Strength.)

Frontiers Are Physical As Well As Symbolic Constructions

When We Define The Photograph As A Motionless Image, This Does Not Mean Only That The Figures It Represents Do Not Move; It Means That They Do Not (i)emerge(i), Do Not (i)leave(i): They Are Anesthetized And Fastened Down, Like Butterflies.

Historically And Politically, The Petit-bourgeois Is The Key To The Century. The Bourgeois And Proletariat Classes Have Become Abstractions: The Petite-bourgeoisie, In Contrast, Is Everywhere, You Can See It Everywhere, Even In The Areas Of The Bourgeois And The Proletariat, What's Left Of Them.

Those Who Fail To Reread Are Obliged To Read The Same Story Everywhere.

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.

To Dope The Racer Is As Criminal, As Sacrilegious, As Trying To Imitate God; It Is Stealing From God The Privilege Of The Spark.

Death Of The Father Would Deprive Literature Of Many Of Its Pleasures. If There Is No Longer A Father, Why Tell Stories? Doesn't Every Narrative Lead Back To Oedipus? Isn't Storytelling Always A Way Of Searching For One's Origin, Speaking One's Conflicts With The Law, Entering Into The Dialectic Of Tenderness And Hatred?

The Photograph Is An Extended, Loaded Evidence — As If It Caricatured Not The Figure Of What It Represents (quite The Converse) But Its Very Existence ... The Photograph Then Becomes A Bizarre (i)medium(i), A New Form Of Hallucination: False On The Level Of Perception, True On The Level Of Time: A Temporal Hallucination, So To Speak, A Modest (o)shared(i) Hallucination (on The One Hand 'it Is Not There,' On The Other 'but It Has Indeed Been'): A Mad Image, Chafed By Reality.

Flaubert Had Infinite Correction To Perform.

Literature Is That Which He Can Not Read Without Pain, Without Choking On Truth.

Tout Ce Qui Est Anachronique Est Obsce' Ne. Everything Anachronistic Is Obscene.

Myth Is Neither A Lie Nor A Confession: It Is An Inflexion.

Each Photograph Is Read As The Private Appearance Of Its Referent: The Age Of Photography Corresponds Precisely To The Explosion Of The Private Into The Public, Or Rather Into The Creation Of A New Social Value, Which Is The Publicity Of The Private: The Private Is Consumes As Such, Publicly.

To Eat Steak Rare . . . Represents Both A Nature And A Morality.

To Make Someone Wait: The Constant Prerogative Of All Power.

Man Does Not Exist Prior To Language, Either As A Species Or As An Individual.

Literature Is The Question Minus The Answer.

What The Photograph Reproduces To Infinity Has Occurred Only Once: The Photograph Mechanically Repeats What Could Never Be Repeated Existentially.

The Best Principals Are Not Heroes; They Are Hero Makers.

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).

He Who Reads A Story Only Once Is Condemned To Read The Same Story His Whole Life.

The Photograph Is Violent: Not Because It Shows Violent Tings, But Because On Each Occasion (i)it Fills The Sight By Force(i), And Because In It Nothing Can Be Refused Or Transformed (that We Can Sometimes Call It Mild Does Not Contradict Its Violence: Many Say That Sugar Is Mild, But To Me Sugar Is Violent, And I Call It So).

Eiffel Saw His Tower In The Form Of A Serious Object, Rational, Useful; Men Return It To Him In The Form Of A Great Baroque Dream Which Quite Naturally Touches On The Borders Of The Irrational ... Architecture Is Always Dream And Function, Expression Of A Utopia And Instrument Of A Convenience.

…the Book Creates Meaning, The Meaning Creates Life.

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.

Why Is It Better To Last Than To Burn?

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.

One Must Turn The Tongue Seven Times In The Mouth Before Speaking.

Today There Is No Symbolic Compensation For Old Age, No Recognition Of A Specific Value: Wisdom, Perceptiveness, Experience, Vision.

Physically, The Ventoux Is Dreadful. Bald, It's The Spirit Of Dry: Its Climate (it Is Much More An Essence Of Climate Than A Geographic Place) Makes It A Damned Terrain, A Testing Place For Heroes, Something Like A Higher Hell.

The New Is Not A Fashion, It Is A Value.

Television Doomed Us To The Family, Whose Household Instrument It Has Become-what The Hearth Used To Be, Flanked By The Communal Kettle.

For Me The Noise Of Time Is Not Sad: I Love Bells, Clocks, Watches — And I Recall That At First Photographic Implements Were Related To Techniques Of Cabinetmaking And The Machinery Of Precision: Cameras, In Short, Were Clocks For Seeing, And Perhaps In Me Someone Very Old Still Hears In The Photographic Mechanism The Living Sound Of The Wood.

Tout Refus Du Langage Est Une Mort. Any Refusal Of Language Is A Death.

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.

Take The Gesture, The Action Of Writing. I Have An Almost Obsessive Relation To Writing Instruments. I Often Switch From One Pen To Another Just For The Pleasure Of It. I Try Out New Ones. I Have Far Too Many Pens - I Don't Know What To Do With All Of Them! And Yet, As Soon As I See A New One, I Start Craving It. I Cannot Keep Myself From Buying Them.

When We Look At A Photograph Of Ourselves Or Of Others, We Are Really Looking At The Return Of The Dead.

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.

In Front Of The Photograph Of My Mother As A Child, I Tell Myself: She Is Going To Die: I Shudder, Like Winnicott's Psychotic Patient, Over A Catastrophe Which Has Already Occurred. Whether Or Not The Subject Is Already Dead, Every Photograph Is This Catastrophe.

Even Hidden In The Most Squalid Parisian Halls, Wrestling Partakes Of The Nature Of The Great Solar Spectacles, Greek Drama And Bullfights: In Both, A Light Without Shadow Generates An Emotion Without Reserve.

Other Countries Drink To Get Drunk, And This Is Accepted By Everyone; In France, Drunkenness Is A Consequence, Never An Intention. A Drink Is Felt As The Spinning Out Of A Pleasure, Not As The Necessary Cause Of An Effect Which Is Sought: Wine Is Not Only A Philtre, It Is Also The Leisurely Act Of Drinking.

The Petit-bourgeois Is A Man Unable To Imagine The Other. If He Comes Face To Face With Him, He Blinds Himself, Ignores And Denies Him, Or Else Transforms Him Into Himself.

The Ventoux Is A God Of Evil, To Which Sacrifices Must Be Made. It Never Forgives Weakness And Extracts An Unfair Tribute Of Suffering.

A Paradox: The Same Century Invented History And Photography. But History Is A Memory Fabricated According To Positive Formulas, A Pure Intellectual Discourse Which Abolishes Mythic Time; And The Photograph Is A Certain But Fugitive Testimony.

It Is Said That Mourning, By Its Gradual Labour, Slowly Erases Pain; I Could Not, I Cannot Believe This; Because For Me, Time Eliminates The Emotion Of Loss (i Do Note Weep), That Is All. For The Rest, Everything Has Remained Motionless. For What I Have Lost Is Not A Figure (the Mother), But A Being; And Not A Being, But A Quality (a Soul): Not The Indispensable, But The Irreplaceable.

The Gesture Of The Amorous Embrace Seems To Fulfill, For A Time, The Subject's Dream Of Total Union With The Loved Being: The Longing For Consummation With The Other.

What I Claim Is To Live To The Full The Contradiction Of My Time, Which May Well Make Sarcasm The Condition Of Truth.

I Call The Discourse Of Power Any Discourse That Engenders Blame, Hence Guilt, In Its Recipient.

Contemporary Poetry ... Tries To Transform The Sign Back Into Meaning: Its Ideal, Ultimately, Would Be To Reach Not The Meaning Of Words, But The Meaning Of Things Themselves. This Is Why It Clouds The Language, Increases As Much As It Can The Abstractness Of The Concept And The Arbitrariness Of The Sign And Stretches To The Limit The Link Between Signifier And Signified.

There Are Two Kinds Of Liberalism. A Liberalism Which Is Always, Subterraneously Authoritative And Paternalistic, On The Side Of One's Good Conscience. And Then There Is A Liberalism Which Is More Ethical Than Political; One Would Have To Find Another Name For This. Something Like A Profound Suspension Of Judgment.

As Spectator I Wanted To Explore Photography Not As A Question (a Theme) But As A Wound.

The Haiku Reproduces The Designating Gesture Of The Child Pointing At Whatever It Is (the Haiku Shows No Partiality For The Subject), Merely Saying: That!

Ensnared In His Starvation, Chaplin-man Is Always Just Below Political Awareness. A Strike Is A Catastrophe For Him Because It Threatens A Man Truly Blinded By His Hunger; This Man Achieves An Awareness Of The Working-class Condition Only When The Poor Man And The Proletarian Coincide Under The Gaze (and The Blows) Of The Police.

L'amoureux Qui N'oublie Pas Quelquefois Meurt Par Exce' S, Fatigue Et Tension De Me Moire (tel Werther). The Lover Who Does Not Forget Sometimes Dies From Excess, Fatigue, And The Strain Of Memory (like Werther).

To Hide A Passion Totally (or Even To Hide, More Simply, Its Excess) Is Inconceivable: Not Because The Human Subject Is Too Weak, But Because Passion Is In Essence Made To Be Seen: The Hiding Must Be Seen: I Want You To Know That I Am Hiding Something From You, That Is The Active Paradox I Must Resolve: At One And The Same Time It Must Be Known And Not Known: I Want You To Know That I Don't Want To Show My Feelings: That Is The Message I Address To The Other.

Hiding Something

I Love You Is Unsubtle. It Removes Explanations, Facilities, Degrees, Scruples.

Is Not The Most Erotic Portion Of A Body Where The Garment Gapes? In Perversion (which Is The Realm Of Textual Pleasure) There Are No "erogenous Zones" (a Foolish Expression, Besides); It Is Intermittence, As Psychoanalysis Has So Rightly Stated, Which Is Erotic: The Intermittence Of Skin Flashing Between Two Articles Of Clothing (trousers And Sweater), Between Two Edges (the Open-necked Shirt, The Glove And The Sleeve); It Is This Flash Itself Which Seduces, Or Rather: The Staging Of An Appearance-as-disappearance.

I Have Tried To Be As Eclectic As I Possibly Can With My Professional Life, And So Far It's Been Pretty Fun.

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Kenneth Rexroth

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