Excerpt
For literature itself is a science≥—no longer of the “human heart,” but of human discourse; its investigation, however, is no longer addressed to the secondary forms and figures which constituted the object of rhetoric, but to the fundamental categories of language: just as, in Western culture, grammar was born only long after rhetoric, so it is only after having made its way for centuries through le beau littéraire
that literature can raise the fundamental problems of language without which it would not exist. Man does not exist prior to language, either as a species or as an individual. We never encounter a state where man is separated from language, which he then elaborates in order to 'express' what is happening to him: it is language which teaches the definition of man, not the contrary.
