Daily Inspiration Quote by Roland Barthes

Power, for Barthes, doesn’t have to bark orders. It can simply make you feel wrong. By defining “the discourse of power” as speech that “engenders blame, hence guilt,” he sidesteps the cartoon version of domination (the tyrant with a whip) and nails the subtler mechanism: control that recruits the target’s own conscience as an unpaid enforcer. If you can be made to internalize fault, you’ll police yourself, anticipate punishment, and even thank the system for “setting you straight.”

The phrasing matters. “I call” is an act of capture: Barthes isn’t discovering a natural category; he’s building a tool to read culture. And “any discourse” widens the net beyond government and bosses to parents, teachers, therapists, advertisers, editors, lovers - anyone who can frame a situation so that your discomfort becomes your moral failure. “Hence guilt” is the pivot: blame can be argued with; guilt is stickier, more private, harder to litigate because it feels like truth.

Contextually, this sits inside Barthes’s larger project: unmasking how everyday language smuggles ideology in as common sense. In postwar France, with institutions rebuilding authority and mass media standardizing norms, he’s alert to how “neutral” talk about taste, respectability, productivity, or decency turns into a quiet tribunal. The subtext is almost accusatory: if you’re busy feeling guilty, you’re less likely to ask who wrote the rules, who benefits from them, and why the rules feel like your own voice.