Quotes from Monique Wittig

Today, together, let us repeat as our slogan that all trace of violence must disappear from this earth, then the sun will be honey-colored and music good to hear.

... I am with fire between my teeth and still nothing but my blank page.

There was a time when you were not a slave, remember that. You walked alone, full of laughter, you bathed bare-bellied. You say you have lost all recollection of it, remember . . . You say there are no words to describe this time, you say it does not exist. But remember. Make an effort to remember. Or, failing that, invent.

I am with fire between my teeth and still nothing but my blank page.

It is quite possible for a work of literature to operate as a war machine upon its epoch.

Despite all the evils they wished to crush me with/ I remain as steady as the three-legged cauldron.

The women say that they could not eat hare veal or fowl, they say that they could not eat animals, but man, yes, they may. He says to them throwing his head back with pride, poor wretches of women, if you eat him who will go to work in the fields, who will produce food consumer goods, who will make the aeroplanes, who will pilot them, who will provide the spermatozoa, who will write the books, who in fact will govern? Then the women laugh, baring their teeth to the fullest extent.

The 'I' [Je] who writes is alien to her own writing at every word because this 'I' uses a language that is alien to her; this 'I' [Je] experiences what is alien to her since this 'I' [Je] cannot be un ecrivain. J/e poses the ideological and historical question of feminine subjects.

There was a time you when you were not a slave, remember that. You walked alone, full of laughter, you bathed bare-bellied. You say you have lost all recollection of it, remember... You say there are no words to describe this time, you say it does not exist. But remember. Make an effort to remember. Or, failing that, invent.

One only has to read interviews with outstanding women to hear them apologizing

Lesbian is the only concept I know of which is beyond the categories of sex (woman and man), because the designated subject (lesbian) is not a woman, either economically, or politically, or ideologically. For what makes a woman is a specific relationship to a man, a relationship which we have previously called servitude, a relation which lesbians escape by refusing to become or stay heterosexual.

They say, hell, let the earth become a vast hell destroying killing and setting fire to the buildings of men, to theatres, national assemblies, to museums, libraries, prisons, psychiatric hospitals, old and new, from which they free the slaves.

For there is no sex. There is but sex that is oppressed and sex that oppresses. It is oppression that creates sex and not the contrary.

One is a writer, or one is not.

C'est l'oppression qui crée le sexe et non l'inverse.

On peut seulement noter que l'hétérosexualité n'est pas "naturelle", pas plus qu'elle n'est la seule sexualité, la sexualité universelle. L'hétérosexualité est une construction culturelle qui justifie le système entier de la domination sociale fondé sur la fonction de la reproduction obligatoire pour les femmes et sur l'appropriation de cette reproduction.

Dans la mesure où la femme devient réalité pour un individu uniquement en relation avec un individu de la classe opposée - les hommes - et en particulier dans le mariage, les lesbiennes, parce qu'elles n'entrent pas dans cette catégorie, ne sont pas des "femmes".

The refusal to become (or to remain) heterosexual always meant to refuse to become a man or a woman, consciously or not.

L'hétérosexualité allait tellement de soi qu'elle n'avait pas de nom [par le passé]. C'est la norme sociale. C'est le contrat social. C'est un régime politique.

L'hétérosexualité n'est pas "naturelle", pas plus qu'elle n'est la seule sexualité, la sexualité universelle.

Et vivre en société c'est vivre en hétérosexualité.

Elles disent, si je m'approprie le monde, que ce soit pour m'en déposséder aussitôt, que ce soit pour créer des rapports nouveaux entre moi et le monde.

The women say that they perceive their bodies in their entirety. They say that they do not favour any of its parts on the grounds that it was formerly a forbidden object. They say that they do not want to become prisoners of their own ideology. They say that they did not garner and develop the symbols that were necessary to them at an earlier period to demonstrate their strength.

Ni la Pensée de l'Autre, ni la Pensée de la Différence ne devraient être possibles pour nous, parce que "rien de ce qui est humain ne m'est étranger".