Curiously enough, it seems to be only in describing a mode of language which does not mean what it says that one can actually say what one means.

Literature exists at the same time in the modes of error and truth; it both betrays and obeys its own mode of being.

The writer's language is to some degree the product of his own action; he is both the historian and the agent of his own language.

The critical method which denies literary modernity would appear -- and even, in certain respects, would be -- the most modern of critical movements.

What we call ideology is precisely the confusion of linguistic with natural reality, of reference with phenomenalism

Literature... is condemned (or privileged) to be forever the most rigorous and, consequently, the most reliable of terms in which man names and transforms himself.

Modernity exists in the form of a desire to wipe out whatever came earlier, in the hope of reaching at least a point that could be called a true present, a point of origin that marks a new departure.