xntrek

5 quotes

I, like many others, post quotes that inspire or elate in the hope that it may mean something to others. Today, I thought I would try a different approach. I thought I would choose five quotes from a single source and perhaps in so doing provide both an insight into this remarkable man and by some small visceral measured extension, myself.

Roland Barthes was a literary theorist, a philosopher, a critic, and semiotician. His work influenced many and is calpable in the development of schools of theory including structuralism, semiotics, existentialism, social theory and post-structuralism.

I discovered his works in one of my many visits to the Victorian State Library where I spent hours on end devouring his words. I was shocked by the force of his ideas and awed by the beauty of his words. The thoughts entered my mind as though the slots were already there, awaiting their safe return. The creative shocks they induced I still feel to this day.

Many of my existential and aesthetic philosophical views are derived from this French man’s work. He inflamed my desire, inspired my hunger and sated my lust for further knowledge. It is due solely to this man that my explorations of comparative philology began, and had life dealt a different set of cards, I too would have entered the halls of academia following in his footsteps.

Alas, I have digressed and gone on for too long so to the point - five quotations from this man whom to me has given so much.

“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.”

“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 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.”

“Inexpressible Love: 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, to know that writing compensates for nothing..”

“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.”