Roland Barthes Quotes

Given Loughner's obsession with meaninglessness and language, maybe Foucault & Derrida deserve some fault here, too.

Deconstruction: peering suspiciously at the text, I wait for it to make a slip and betray itself.

A text is not a text unless it hides from the first comer, from the first glance, the law of its composition and the rules of its game. A text remains, moreover, forever imperceptible. Its laws and rules are not, however, harbored in the inaccessibility of a secret; it is simply that they can never be booked, in the present, into anything that could rigorously be called a perception.

Jacques Derrida is a very important thinker and philosopher who has made serious contributions to both philosophy and literary criticism. Roland Barthes is the one I feel most affinity for, and Michel Foucault, well, his writing influenced my novel, 'Middlesex.'

The critical method which denies literary modernity would appear - and even, in certain respects, would be - the most modern of critical movements.

I was really grateful to have a chance to have some really in-depth study about the power of language using a philosopher who taught at the University of Chicago by the name of Paul Ricoeur. I'm really happy to be in Chicago because a lot of what I do is rooted in his approach to language.

There is nothing outside the text

I question: do we really understand the differences between modernist and postmodernist?

Literary theory has become a parody of science, generating its own arcane jargon. In the process, tragically, it discourages love of literature for its own sake.

I used to teach at Yale, which was at one time a center of postmodernist literary theory. Derrida was there. Paul de Man was there.

One of the reasons I like Barthes more than other writers of that ilk is because he had a literary quality.

I like Jacques Derrida; I think he's funny. I like my philosophy with a few jokes and puns. I know that that offends other philosophers; they think he's not taking things seriously, but he comes up with some marvellous puns. Why shouldn't you have a bit of fun while dealing with the deepest issues of the mind?

I always wanted to put a sign up on the road to Yale saying, 'Beware: Deconstruction Ahead.'

The book is not simply the object that one holds in one's hands, and it cannot remain within the little parallelpiped that contains it: its unity is variable and relative. As soon as one questions that unity, it loses its self-evidence; it indicates itself, constructs itself, only on the basis of a complex field of discourse.

I was reading a lot of Jacques Derrida at the time, writing 'Beth.' He actually talked about zombies.

When one emphasizes, as Jacques Derrida once remarked, one always overemphasizes.

Poststructuralism. . . . is a form of literary criticism that uses elaborate wordplay to prove its central premise, that all language is internally contradictory and has no fixed meaning.

As soon as we cease to believe in such an engineer and in a discourse which breaks with the received historical discourse, and as soon as we admit that every finite discourse is bound by a certain bricolage and that the engineer and the scientist are also species of bricoleurs , then the very idea of bricolage is menaced and the difference in which it took on its meaning breaks down.

Deconstruction glorifies the critic, humiliates the author, and makes the reader wonder why he bothered.

Deconstruction never had meaning or interest, at least in my eyes, than as a radicalization, that is to say, also within the tradition of a certain Marxism, in a certain spirit of Marxism.

1) Différance is the systematic play of differences, of the traces of differences, of the spacing by means of which elements are related to each other. This spacing is the simultaneously active and passive (the a of différance indicates this indecision as concerns activity and passivity, that which cannot be governed by or distributed between the terms of this opposition) production of the intervals without which the "full" terms would not signify, would not function.

I hate intellectual discussion. When I hear the words 'phenomenology' or 'structuralism', I reach for my buck knife.

What I think I have in common with the school of deconstruction is the mode of negative thinking or negative awareness, in the technical, philosophical sense of the negative, but which comes to me through negative theology.

I'm interested in philosophical psychology, people like Nietzsche, Freud, Alcan, Foucault, Derrida.