The Seventh Function of Language

What would you do if you ruled the world?” The gigolo replied that he would abolish all laws. Barthes said: “Even grammar?

Glory to the logos, my friends! Long live dialectics! Let the party begin! May the verb be with you!

There are some who went off in search of unicorns, but found only rhinoceros.

The homosexuals are the new Jesuits.

Spinoza fucks Hegel up the arse! Spinoza fucks Hegel up the arse! Down with dialectics!

The old man rubbed his hands: ‘Ah! A meta-subject! Using language to discuss language, there’s nothing better. I adore that’.

Eco listens with interest to the story of a lost manuscript for which people are being killed. He sees a man walk past holding a bouquet of roses. His mind wanders for a second, and a vision of a poisoned monk flashes through it.

As Umberto Eco might say: for communicating, language is perfect; there could be nothing better. And yet, language doesn’t say everything. The body speaks, objects speak, history speaks, individual or collective destinies speak, life and death speak to us constantly in a thousand different ways. Man is an interpreting machine and, with a little imagination, he sees signs everywhere

Don’t forget that one interpretation never exhausts the sign, that polysemy is a bottomless well where we can hear an infinite number of echoes: a word’s meaning never runs dry.

Conversation is essentially a game of tennis played with a ball of playdough that changes shape each time it crosses the net.

If Barthes, along with Bachelard, is one of those who have done most to enrich criticism during the last thirty years, it is not as a theoretician of a still hazy semiology, but as the champion of a new pleasure in reading.

We always fail to talk about love’. He quickly scans the text – it’s about Stendhal. Simon is moved by the thought of Barthes sitting at his desk, thinking about Stendhal, about love, about Italy, completely unaware that every hour spent typing this article was bringing him closer to the moment when he would be knocked over by a laundry van.

He liked cock, this intellectual!

Kristoff knows exactly how a good lie works: it must be drowned in an ocean of truth.

With Barthes, signs no longer need to be signals: they have become clues. A seismic shift. They’re everywhere. From now on, semiology is ready to conquer the world.

Intuition is a convenient concept for dispensing with explanations, like God.

The slalom race of syntax!

L’emploi du mot „système” confirme au policier ce qu’il redoutait: il est tombé chez les gauchistes. Il sait d’expérience qu’ils n’ont que ça à la bouche: la société pourrie, la lutte des classes, le „système”...

In the provinces, being queer is worse than being Arab.

He downs the contents of his glass in a single gulp and, looking at Simon, adds: “This is as amusing as a novel.

And it was you who created us. The notion of male homosexuality didn’t exist in ancient Greece. Socrates could bugger Alcibiades without being seen as a pederast. The Greeks had a more elevated notion of the corruption of youth …