100 definitions
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Roland Barthes: top 100 quotes
100 definitions on 41 concepts
Japan (n.) is a place of decentered geography, non-subjectivity and elaborate surfaces without depth.
Structuralism (n.) is a way of analysing cultural artifacts as a product of codes, or underlying systems of rules and distinctions.
Structuralism (n.) is an activity of taking the real, decomposing it, and then recomposing it to make something appear which was previously unintelligible. What appears is nothing but a kind of intelligible which is not the object, but man himself, his history, his situation, his freedom, and the very resistance which nature offers to his mind.
Structuralism (n.) does not discover but rather reconstructs an object to make it intelligible.
The Spiral (n.) is dialectical as compared to the circle which is theological. like a circle, it is distended to infinity, but on it, things recur, but at another level: there is a return in difference, not repetition in identity.
A Biographeme (n.) is a partial biographical feature in a writer's life which delights one much like that partial object, the photograph.
The Biographeme (n.) is the minimal unit of biographical discourse just as the morpheme is to linguistic analysis and the mytheme to mythical analysis.
The Biographeme (n.) is a fragment that points to the essence of a life.
The Biographeme (n.) is that in a biography which reaches out of the text and touches, just as the photo reaches out of the photograph and pricks.
Truth (n.) is, in these fully contradiction-ridden times, embodied in sarcasm.
A Photograph (n.) is always invisible, it is not it that we see.
The Photograph (n.) is always a certificate of presence.
The Photograph (n.) is a mad image, a temporal hallucination that caricatures not figure, but time itself. It is a hallucination on the one hand in that 'it is not there,' on the other 'but it has indeed been'.
The Photograph (n.) is a motionless image... this does not mean only that the figures it represents do not move... it means that they do not emerge and they do not leave: They are anesthetized and fastened down, like butterflies.
A Photograph (n.) is a partial object, a collection of little features which delight and which are able to flatter certain fetishes in us.
A Photograph (n.) is always invisible: It is not it that we see. It is like the windowpane and the landscape.
Common sense (n.) is always the name in which the war against intelligence is waged.
Cinema (n.) is a festival of affects.
Alienation (n.) is only able to be escaped in present day society by retreating ahead of it.
Chopsticks (n.) are a utensil which tirelessly performs the gesture that creates the mouthful.
Chopsticks (n.) are a utensil whose function is to divide, to divide not by violating the foodstuff through cutting and piercing, but by separating, parting, pecking, unraveling, prodding in a manner that rediscovers the natural fisures of the substance.