Politics & Power Quote by Roland Barthes

Barthes skewers political speech at the level where it actually does its work: not in ideas, but in syntax. The “ending to his sentence” isn’t a stylistic detail; it’s the moment when ambiguity gets sealed into authority. A politician under interview pressure is caught performing coherence in real time, trying to steer a sentence toward a destination that will keep every constituency provisionally satisfied. Barthes’s joke is that the policy doesn’t precede the speech as a stable blueprint. It’s manufactured in the act of speaking, as though government were a kind of live improvisation where the final clause retroactively determines what the first clause “meant.”

The ironies stack. “Takes a great deal of trouble” suggests labor, even anxiety: rhetoric as risk management. Then Barthes flips the stakes with the ridiculous conditional: “and if he stopped short?” It’s funny because it’s obviously impossible in ordinary conversation to end mid-sentence and have one’s worldview collapse. Yet in media politics, especially the kind Barthes watched crystallize in postwar France, interruption is disaster. The journalist’s cut-off, the awkward pause, the unfinished thought - these aren’t mere social slips; they become evidence. A truncated sentence can be replayed, captioned, turned into a scandal or a meme before memes existed.

Subtext: policy is fragile because it’s semiotic. Power depends on closure, on the disciplined production of endings that read as inevitability. Barthes isn’t just mocking politicians; he’s diagnosing a system where governance is increasingly a struggle over the last words.