Voices

Voice

Roland Barthes

Human Flourishing Communication Literature

A personal doodle illustration selected for this voice.
Photograph by Greg Conrad Smith of artwork, 2026.

I don’t share the traditional belief that there’s a divorce in nature between the objectivity of the scientist and the subjectivity of the writer, as if the former were endowed with a “freedom” and the latter with a “vocation,” both of them likely to spirit away or sublimate the true limits of their situation: my claim is to live to the full the contradictions of my time, which can make sarcasm the condition of truth.

–Roland Barthes, preface to the 1957 edition of Mythologies

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