Empire of Signs Quotes

“The dream: to know a foreign (alien) language and yet not to understand it: to perceive the difference in it without that difference ever being recuperated by the superficial sociality of discourse, communication or vulgarity; to know, positively refracted in a new language, the impossibilities of our own; to learn the systematics of the inconceivable; to undo our own “reality” under the effect of other formulations, other syntaxes; to discover certain unsuspected positions of the subject in utterance, to displace the subject’s topology; in a word, to descend into the untranslatable, to experience its shock without ever muffling it, until everything Occidental in us totters and the rights of the “father tongue” vacillate – the tongue which comes to us from our fathers and which makes us, in our turn, fathers and proprietors of a culture which, precisely, history transforms into “nature”.”
― Roland Barthes, Empire of Signs

“The text does not gloss the images,
which do not illustrate the text.”
― Roland Barthes, Empire of Signs

“In this manner , we are told, the system of the imaginary is spread circularly, by detours and returns the length of an empty subject.”
― Roland Barthes, Empire of Signs