On the Primacy of Intertextuality

“The frontiers of a book are never clear-cut: beyond the title, the first lines and the last full stop, beyond its internal configuration and its autonomous form, it is caught up in a system of references to other books, other texts, other sentences; it is a node within a network… The book is not simply the object that one holds in one’s hands. Its unity is variable and relative...” (Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 1974: 23).