Quotes from Verena Andermatt Conley

Reading then is writing, in an endless movement of giving and receiving: each reading reinscribes something of a text; each reading reconstitutes the web it tries to decipher, but by adding another web. One must read in a text not only that which is visible and present but also the nontext of the text, the parentheses, the silences.

In reality, myth was that which took the place of analysis in former times. … It showed that there was the universe, but one knew that there was also something else. One knew that something stronger than the social existed.

That is to say that at the heart of existence is that double negation, "one can not, not.

The poet must rethink her writing activities in such a way as to désoublier (to unforget), détaire (to unsilence), déterrer (to unbury), se désaveugler (to unbind), se dessourdier (to undeafen), in an endeavor to displace all that has been repressed, incorporated, appropriated. This is the poet's way of fighting.

All language is metaphoric, and abstract concepts are always used by those in power to insure their supremacy. Everything is language, and the body is always a written, never a "natural" body.

for Cixous, writing from the imaginary implies the invention of "other I's," the poet is more open to otherness. She follows the post-revolutionary myth of the artist as subversive and effeminate. Poetry, like other arts, questions and transforms ideology. … This is not to say that to create, one must be homosexual, but that there is no invention without other I's, no poetry, no fiction without that of a certain homosexuality, therefore of bisexuality.