A picture is never anything but its own plural description.
Fashion postulates an achrony, a time which does not exist; here the past is shameful and the present is constantly “eaten up” by the Fashion being heralded.
Tout refus du langage est une mort. Any refusal of language is a death.
Rarely do outside of school remedies work their way into the fabric of the schools or into the teachers lives, and more rarely into the classrooms. Therefore they only offer a modest hope of influencing the basic culture of the school.
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.
Flaubert had infinite correction to perform.
Painting can feign reality without having seen it.
Every new Fashion is a refusal to inherit, a subversion against the oppression of the preceding Fashion; Fashion experiences itself as a Right, the natural right of the present over the past.
When we look at a photograph of ourselves or of others, we are really looking at the return of the dead.
How does meaning get into the image? Where does it end? And if it ends, what is there beyond?
To make someone wait: the constant prerogative of all power.
Le langage est une peau: je frotte mon langage contre l’autre. Language is a skin; I rub my language against another language.
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!
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.
The realists do not take the photograph for a ‘copy’ of reality, but for an emanation of past reality, a magic, not an art.
Myth is neither a lie nor a confession: it is an inflexion.
All those young photographers who are at work in the world, determined upon the capture of actuality, do not know that they are agents of Death.
Even hidden in the most squalid Parisian halls, wrestling partakes of the nature of the great solar spectacles, Greek drama and bullfights: in both, a light without shadow generates an emotion without reserve.
Frontiers are physical as well as symbolic constructions.
Cameras, in short, were clocks for seeing, and perhaps in me someone very old still hears in the photographic mechanism the living sound of the wood.