Jacques Derrida Quotes

39 Sourced Quotes

I wrote some bad poetry that I published in North African journals, but even as I withdrew into this reading, I also led the life of a kind of young hooligan.

Jacques Derrida
Still today, I cannot cross the threshold of a teaching institution without physical symptoms, in my chest and my stomach, of discomfort or anxiety. And yet I have never left school.

Jacques Derrida
No one gets angry at a mathematician or a physicist whom he or she doesn't understand at all, or at someone who speaks a foreign language, but rather at someone who tampers with your own language, with this 'relation,' precisely, which is yours.

Jacques Derrida
As soon as there is language, generality has entered the scene.

Jacques Derrida
A text is not a text unless it hides from the first comer, from the first glance, the law of its composition and the rules of its game. A text remains, moreover, forever imperceptible. Its laws and rules are not, however, harbored in the inaccessibility of a secret; it is simply that they can never be booked, in the present, into anything that could rigorously be called a perception.

Jacques Derrida
Writing in the common sense is the dead letter, it is the carrier of death. It exhausts life.

Jacques Derrida
We need to interpret interpretations more than to interpret things. Montaigne.

Jacques Derrida
I never give in to the temptation to be difficult just for the sake of being difficult. That would be too ridiculous.

Jacques Derrida
It is to have a compulsive, repetitive, and nostalgic desire for the archive, an irrepressible desire to return to the origin, a homesickness, a nostalgia for the return to the most archaic place of absolute commencement

Jacques Derrida
The circle of the return to birth can only remain open, but this is a chance, a sign of life, and a wound.

Jacques Derrida
I became the stage for the great argument between Nietzsche and Rousseau. I was the extra ready to take on all the roles.

Jacques Derrida
What cannot be said above all must not be silenced but written.

Jacques Derrida
Every discourse, even a poetic or oracular sentence, carries with it a system of rules for producing analogous things and thus an outline of methodology.

Jacques Derrida
Monsters cannot be announced. One cannot say: 'here are our monsters', without immediately turning the monsters into pets.

Jacques Derrida
Surviving - that is the other name of a mourning whose possibility is never to be awaited.

Jacques Derrida
In a language, in the system of language, there are only differences. Therefore, a taxonomical operation an undertake the systematic, statistical, and classificatory inventory of a language.

Jacques Derrida
I am like a child ready for the apocalypse, I am the apocalypse itself, that is to say, the ultimate and first event of the end, the unveiling and the verdict.

Jacques Derrida
These critics organize and practice in my case a sort of obsessive personality cult which philosophers should know how to question and above all, to moderate.

Jacques Derrida
But can one not conceive of a presence, and of a presence to itself of the subject before speech or signs, a presence to itself of the subject in a silent and intuitive consciousness? Such a question therefore presupposes that, prior to the sign, and outside it, excluding any trace and any diference, something like consciousness is possible.

Jacques Derrida
All sentences of the type 'deconstruction is X' or 'deconstruction is not X', a priori miss the point, which is to say that they are at least false. As you know, one of the principal things at stake in what is called in my texts 'deconstruction', is precisely the delimiting of ontology and above all of the third-person present indicative: S is P.

Jacques Derrida
That is what deconstruction is made of: not the mixture but the tension between memory, fidelity, the preservation of something that has been given to us, and, at the same time, heterogeneity, something absolutely new, and a break.

Jacques Derrida
I have always had school sickness, as others have seasickness. I cried when it was time to go back to school long after I was old enough to be ashamed of such behavior.

Jacques Derrida
Amy Kofman: Have you read all the books in here?
Derrida: No, only four of them. But I read those very, very carefully.

Jacques Derrida
Everything is arranged so that it be this way, this is what is called culture.

Jacques Derrida
Contrary to what phenomenology- which is always phenomenology of perception- has tried to make us believe, contrary to what our desire cannot fail to be tempted into believing, the thing itself always escapes.

Jacques Derrida
The first problem of the media is posed by what does not get translated, or even published in the dominant political languages.

Jacques Derrida
When I say that this phase is necessary, the word phase is perhaps not the most rigorous one. It is not a question of a chronological phase, a given moment, or a page that one day simply will be turned, in order to go on to other things. The necessity of this phase is structural; it is the necessity of an interminable analysis: the hierarchy of dual oppositions always reestablishes itself. Unlike those authors whose death does not await their demise, the time for overturning is never a dead letter.

Jacques Derrida
Such a caring for death, an awakening that keeps vigil over death, a conscience that looks death in the face, is another name for freedom.

Jacques Derrida
We are given over to absolute solitude. No one can speak with us and no one can speak for us; we must take it upon ourselves, each of us must take it upon himself.

Jacques Derrida
The end of man (as a factual anthropological limit) is announced to thought from the vantage of the end of man (as a determined opening or the infinity of a telos). Man is that which is in relation to his end, in the fundamentally equivocal sense of the word. Since always.

Jacques Derrida