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.
Meaning of the quote
In this quote, the author is comparing language to a skin that we use to touch and interact with others. Just like how our fingers can feel and explore the world, our words and language allow us to connect with people and express our thoughts and feelings. The author says that language is like a sensitive surface that "trembles with desire," meaning it can be used to show our emotions and desires. Overall, the quote suggests that language is a powerful tool that allows us to experience and engage with the world around us in a very personal and intimate way.
About Roland Barthes
Roland Barthes was a renowned French literary theorist, essayist, philosopher, critic, and semiotician. His work analyzed a variety of sign systems, particularly from Western popular culture, and his ideas influenced the development of several schools of thought, including structuralism and post-structuralism.
More quotes from Roland Barthes
To eat steak rare… represents both a nature and a morality.
French philosopher and essayist
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.
French philosopher and essayist
I call the discourse of power any discourse that engenders blame, hence guilt, in its recipient.
French philosopher and essayist
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.
French philosopher and essayist
What I claim is to live to the full the contradiction of my time, which may well make sarcasm the condition of truth.
French philosopher and essayist
What the public wants is the image of passion, not passion itself.
French philosopher and essayist
For the theatre one needs long arms; it is better to have them too long than too short. An artiste with short arms can never, never make a fine gesture.
French philosopher and essayist
A photograph is always invisible, it is not it that we see.
French philosopher and essayist
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!
French philosopher and essayist
Through the mythology of Einstein, the world blissfully regained the image of knowledge reduced to a formula.
French philosopher and essayist
The bastard form of mass culture is humiliated repetition… always new books, new programs, new films, news items, but always the same meaning.
French philosopher and essayist
The New is not a fashion, it is a value.
French philosopher and essayist
The skyscraper establishes the block, the block creates the street, the street offers itself to man.
French philosopher and essayist
Myth is neither a lie nor a confession: it is an inflexion.
French philosopher and essayist
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.
French philosopher and essayist
Literature is the question minus the answer.
French philosopher and essayist
I have tried to be as eclectic as I possibly can with my professional life, and so far it’s been pretty fun.
French philosopher and essayist
The photographic image… is a message without a code.
French philosopher and essayist
There is only one way left to escape the alienation of present day society: to retreat ahead of it.
French philosopher and essayist
Literature is without proofs. By which it must be understood that it cannot prove, not only what it says, but even that it is worth the trouble of saying it.
French philosopher and essayist