#roland barthe

[austentatious]

I have known the body of my mother, sick and then dying.

Mourning Diary | Roland Barthe

[ixdatalk]

in the Photograph, the power of authentication exceeds the power of representation

Roland Barthes, "Camera Lucida," Excerpts - Literature Supernova - So-Rim Lee

[amonpress]

Response to Barthe's Essay

Barthe begins his essay, with comparing wrestling to theater in a circus (in which it is). He also asserts that wresting is NOT a sport, but a spectacle. Boxing ( in which he considers a sport) is predictable, focused and the contestants do not show much emotion. Wrestlers, on the other hand, exaggerate pain and emotion and put on a show for the audience. Barthe suggest that the costumes, props and roles in wrestling can be compared to ancient theater. I liked barthe's essay and how he explained the "sport" to be more entertaining, because many critics just call it 'fake", but it is a show-case (all broadway shows are fake...). 

Kaneko also acknowledges that wrestling is a story-line. Wrestlers would "kayfabe" (meaning to improvise or act out a character) during interviews and backstage to maintain their character--which is all business. Kaneko also reflects on his childhood fascination with wrestling and how he would believe everything was real. He also takes us back to when he would attend wrestling matches and introduced us to the roles and storylines of the professional wrestlers. 

[wellbottomblues]

Roland Barthe

Roland Barthes exists primarily as a check move of intellectual one-upmanship. And to sell Kindles to those who didn't take there semester abroad from the Ivy League at the Sorbonne for the definitions look up. I still finished A Lover's Discourse with lots of dog ears.

[swarov]

“The necessary condition for an image is sight,” Janouch told Kafka; and Kafka smiled and replied: “We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes.”

Roland Barthe

[missanthropicprinciple]

That awkward moment when this guy you almost like starts talking to you out of the blue and later on you have a conversation about a book you both like. WTF.

[ztdavis]

Regarding the Crime Unseen show up at the Museum of Contemporary Photography here in Chicago right now:

"It put me in mind of all the structuralist, post-structuralist, deconstructionist and feminist criticism I’ve read, from Roland Barthe’s Camera Lucida to Susan Sontag’s On Photography — the theorizing about the camera as gaze, the gaze as never entirely innocent, the gaze as caught in some variation of guilt-laden complicity in the exploitation of the camera’s subject. I thought of all the work that purports to express these ideas, and how little of it actually does (because it’s a lot easier to quote Derrida than to illustrate him). And I thought: wow, this is the real thing. I’m enjoying these photographs and I feel guilty about it. Sontag was right!"

-- Philip A Hartigan writing over at Hyperallergic