- “The Text is not to be thought of as an object that can be computed”
“the work is a fragment of substance . . . the Text is a methodological field”
“the work can be seen . . . the text is a process of demonstration”
“the work can be held in the hand, the text is held in language”
“the Text is experienced only in an activity of production” (116).
- “the Text is that which goes to the limit of the rules of enunciation” (116).
“the Text tries to place itself very exactly behind the limit of the doxa [(from ancient Greek δόξα from δοκεῖν dokein, “to expect”, “to seem” ) is a Greek word meaning common belief or popular opinion].”
“the Text is always paradoxical” (117).
- “The Text . . . practices the infinite deferment of the signified, is dilatory”
“The Text is radically symbolic: a work conceived, perceived and received in its integrally symbolic nature is a text” (117).
- “The Text is plural.”
“The Text is not a co-existence of meanings but a passage, an over crossing; thus it answers not to an interpretation, even a liberal one, but to an explosion, a dissemination” (117).
“the Text: it can be it only in its difference” (118).
- “The work is caught up in a process of filiation . . . determination of the work by the world . . . consecution of works amongst themselves . . . conformity of the work to the author”
“The work . . . refers to the image of the organism which grows by vital expansion, by “development””
“the metaphor of the Text is that of the network; if the Text extends itself it is as a result of a combinatory systematic”
“the Author . . . in the Text, in his text . . . [is] a paper-author: his life is no longer the origin of his fictions but a fiction contributing to his work” (118).
- “The work is normally the object of a consumption”
“The Text . . . decants the work . . . from its consumption and gathers it up as play, activity, production, practice” (119).
- “But this pleasure [in reading], no matter how keen and even when free from all prejudice, remains in part . . . a pleasure of consumption”
“As for the Text, it is bound to jouissance, that is to a pleasure without separation”
“the Text achieves, if not the transparence of social relations, that at least of language relations: the Text is that space where no language has a hold over any other, where languages circulate” (120).
“The theory of the Text can coincide only with a practice of writing” (120).