Fashion is like the ashes left behind by the uniquely shaped flames of the fire, the trace alone revealing that a fire actually took place.

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.

Death is a displaced name for a linguistic predicament.

Fashion is like the ashes left behind by the uniquely shaped flames of the fire, the trace alone revealing that a fire actually took place.

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.

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

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.