[b]Roland Barthes
Language is never innocent.[/b]
Not even counting the times it is guilty as sin.
…that ambiguous area of culture where something unfailingly political, though separate from the political choices of the day, infiltrates judgment and language.
Or, for some, unambiguous.
In 1850, August Salzmann photographed, near Jerusalem, the road to Beith-Lehem (as it was spelled at the time): nothing but stony ground, olive trees; but three tenses dizzy my consciousness: my present, the time of Jesus, and that of the photographer, all this under the instance of ‘reality’ — and no longer through the elaborations of the text, whether fictional or poetic, which itself is never credible down to the root.
If he means what I think he means, he may well mean what I think I mean.
Freud to his fiancée: “The only thing that makes me suffer is being in a situation where it is impossible for me to prove my love to you”
Gide: "Everything in her behaviour seemed to say: Since he no longer loves me, nothing matters to me. Now, I still loved her, and in fact I had never loved her so much; but it was no longer possible for me to prove it to her. That was much the worst thing of all”
Don’t be surprised however if you fall somewhere in the middle.
Now take all the delights of the earth, melt them into one single delight, and cast it entire into a single man – all this will be as nothing to the delight of which I speak.
As you may well guess, I’ve never even come close.
The other’s body was divided: on one side, the body proper–skin, eyes–tender, warm; and on the other side, the voice–abrupt, reserved, subject to fits of remoteness, a voice which did not give what the body gave. Or further: on one side, the soft, warm, downy, adorable body. and on the other, the ringing, well-formed, worldly voice–always the voice.
Not unlike that [at times] inexplicable [even confounding] distinction between words and worlds.