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

The bases for historical knowledge are not empirical facts but written texts, even if these texts masquerade in the guise of wars or revolutions.

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

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.

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

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