This imperfection, if that is the word for it, comes from the nature of the "Left": whatever the imprecision of the term, the Left always defines itself in relation to the oppressed, whether proletarian or colonized. Now the speech of the oppressed can only be poor, monotonous, immediate: his destitution is the very yardstick of his language: he has only one, always the same, that of his actions; metalanguage is a luxury, he cannot yet have access to it. The speech of the oppressed is real, like that of the woodcutter; it is a transitive type of speech: it is quasi-unable to lie; lying is a richness, a lie presupposes property, truths, and forms to spare. This essential barrenness produces rare, threadbare myths: either transient or clumsily indiscreet; by their very being, they label themselves as myths, and point to their masks. [...]

The petit bourgeois is a man unable to imagine the Other. [...] This is because the Other is a scandal who threatens the petit bourgeois's essence.

For the very end of myths is to immobilize the world: they must suggest and mimic a universal order which has fixated once and for all the hierarchy of possessions. Thus, every day and everywhere, man is stopped by myths, referred by them to this motionless prototype which lives in his place, stifles him in the manner of a huge internal parasite, and assigns to his activity the narrow limits within which he is allowed to suffer without upsetting the world: bourgeois pseudophysis is in the fullest sense a prohibition for man against inventing himself. Myths are nothing but this ceaseless, untiring solicitation, this insidious and inflexible demand that all men recognize themselves in this image, eternal yet bearing a date, which was built of them one day as if for all time. For Nature, in which they are locked up under the pretext of being eternalized, is nothing but a Usage. And it is this Usage, however, lofty, that they must take in hand and transform.