Roland Barthes: Language

Roland Barthes was French philosopher, critic and literary theorist. Explore interesting quotes on language.
Roland Barthes: 78 quotes8 likes

“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

"Talking," in A Lover's Discourse (1977)

“… language is never innocent.”

Roland Barthes

“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.”

Roland Barthes book A Lover's Discourse: Fragments

Source: A Lover's Discourse: Fragments

“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 book The Pleasure of the Text

Source: The Pleasure of the Text

“Encratic language (the language produced and spread under the protection of power) is statutorily a language of repetition; all official institutions of language are repeating machines: schools, sports, advertising, popular songs, news, all continually repeat the same structure, the same meaning, often the same words.”

Roland Barthes book The Pleasure of the Text

The Pleasure of the Text (1975)