Barbara Johnson

“The differences between entities (prose and poetry, man and woman, literature and theory, guilt and innocence) are a function of the differences within entities.”

“Translation is not a matter of substituting words in one language for words in another, but of making the text work in a new context.”

“Deconstruction is not a dismantling of the structure of a text, but a demonstration that it has already dismantled itself.”

“Difference is not a concept but a reading effect.”

“The 'unconscious' is the discourse of the Other.”

“The surprise of the chiasmus is that the second half of the phrase is not a repetition of the first but its reversal.”

“The story of a life is not a life; it is a story.”

“What if the 'what' is not a 'what' and the 'who' is not a 'who'?”

“The reader is not a consumer but a producer of the text.”

“Ignorance, in other words, is not a passive state of absence, a simple lack of information: it is an active production.”

“If feminism is a political position, it cannot be a theory.”