The Quoting Mind: Homo Citans Against Originality

This article develops the concept of Homo citans "The Quating Man" as a critical figure for understanding authorship, originality, and knowledge production in late modernity. Rather than treating quotation as a secondary scholarly technique, the text argues that citation is the primary mode of human thought and expression, revealing the fundamentally circulatory nature of language and ideas. The quoting subject is never a neutral transmitter; repetition inevitably transforms meaning, turning citation into appropriation and, eventually, invention. Over time, borrowed sentences become internalised, rearticulated, and detached from identifiable origins, dissolving stable notions of authorship and ownership. Situating Homo citans within contemporary media systems, attention economies, and abstract forms of power, the article demonstrates how quotation functions simultaneously as ethical practice, cognitive necessity, and political mechanism. Against the modern myth of originality, Homo citans exposes thought itself as an iterative process in which humans endlessly quote, modify, and reproduce themselves through language.