They say, unhappy one, they have driven you out of the world of signs, and yet they have given you names, they have called you slave, you unhappy slave. Like masters they have exercised their right as masters. They write of this right to give names that it goes so far that one can consider the origin of language as an act of authority emanating from those who dominate. Thus they say that they have said, this is such and such a thing, they have attached to an object and to a fact such a word and by that they have, so to speak, appropriated it. They say, in doing so they have shouted, screamed with all their might to silence you. They say, the language you speak poisons your glottis, your tongue, your palate, your lips. They say the language you speak is made of words that kill you. They say, the language you speak is made of signs that properly speaking designate what they have appropriated. What they did not lay their hands on, what they did not swoop down on like many-eyed birds of prey, does not appear in the language you speak. It only manifests itself in the interval that the masters could not fill with their words of owners and possessors, it can be sought in the gap, in everything that is not the continuity of their discourses, in the zero, the O, the perfect circle that you invent to imprison them and to defeat them. - Monique Wittig, The Guerillas