Italo Calvino, The Literature Machine (London: Picador 1989)

‘All the parameters, categories, and antitheses we once used to define, plan and classify the world have been called into question. And not only those closely linked to historical values, but even the ones that seemed stable anthropological categories - reason and myth, work and existence, male and female - and even the polarity of the most elementary combination of words - affirmation and negation, above and below, subject and object.’ (pp.90-91.)