23 quotes
What the public wants is the image of passion, not passion itself.
Mythologies (1957)
A work has two levels of meaning: literal and concealed.
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.
Mythologies (1957)
Literature is the question minus the answer.
By reducing any quality to quantity, myth economizes intelligence: it understands reality more cheaply.
Mythologies (1957)
The bourgeoisie is defined as the social class which does not want to be named.
Mythologies (1957)
The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author.
The bourgeoisie hides the fact that it is the bourgeoisie and thereby produces myth; revolution announces itself openly as revolution and thereby abolishes myth.
Mythologies (1957)
Bourgeois norms are experienced as the evident laws of a natural order—the further the bourgeois class propagates its representations, the more naturalized they become.
Mythologies (1957)
The theory of the Text can coincide only with a practice of writing.
Myth deprives the object of which it speaks of all history. In it, history evaporates.
Mythologies (1957)
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.
There is only one way left to escape the alienation of present day society: to retreat ahead of it; every old language is immediately compromised, and every language becomes old once it is repeated.
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!
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.
The Text is not a definitive object.
The bastard form of mass culture is humiliated repetition: content, ideological schema, the blurring of contradictions—these are repeated, but the superficial forms are varied: always new books, new programs, new films, news items, but always the same meaning.
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.
I think 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.
The New Citroën (1957)
Statistically, myth is on the right. There, it is essential, well-fed, sleek, expensive, garrulous, it invents itself ceaselessly. It takes hold of everything, all aspects of the law, of morality, of aesthetics, of diplomacy, of household equipment, of Literature, of entertainment.
Mythologies (1957)