Top 85 Jacques Derrida Quotes
#1. Therefore we will not listen to the source itself in order to learn what it is or what it means, but rather to the turns of speech, the allegories, figures, metaphors, as you will, into which the source has deviated, in order to lose it or rediscover it - which always amounts to the same.
Jacques Derrida
#2. 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
#4. Certain readers resented me when they could no longer recognize their territory, their institution.
Jacques Derrida
#5. I cannot respond to the call, the request, the obligation, or even the love of another, without sacrificing the other other, the other others
Jacques Derrida
#6. I never give in to the temptation to be difficult just for the sake of being difficult. That would be too ridiculous.
Jacques Derrida
#7. And in the homosexual phase which would follow Eurydice's death ... Orpheus sings no more, he writes.
Jacques Derrida
#8. 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
#9. Every text participates in one or several genres, there is no genreless text; there is always a genre and genres, yet such participation never amounts to belonging.
Jacques Derrida
#11. Deconstruction never had meaning or interest, at least in my eyes, than as a radicalization, that is to say, also within the tradition of a certain Marxism , in a certain spirit of Marxism .
Jacques Derrida
#14. Learning to live ought to mean learning to die - to acknowledge, to accept, an absolute mortality - without positive outcome,or resurrection, or redemption, for oneself or for anyone else. That has been the old philosophical injunction since Plato: to be a philosopher is to learn how to die.
Jacques Derrida
#15. My most resolute opponents believe that I am too visible, that I am a little too alive, that my name echoes too much in the texts which they nevertheless claim to be inaccessible.
Jacques Derrida
#16. What cannot be said above all must not be silenced but written.
Jacques Derrida
#17. Monsters cannot be announced. One cannot say: 'Here are our monsters,' without immediately turning the monsters into pets.
Jacques Derrida
#19. Peace is only possible when one of the warring sides takes the first step, the hazardous initiative, the risk of opening up dialogue, and decides to make the gesture that will lead not only to an armistice but to peace.
Jacques Derrida
#20. The Ethical can therefore end up making us irresponsible.
Jacques Derrida
#21. One often speaks without seeing, without knowing, without meaning what one says.
Jacques Derrida
#23. 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
#24. 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
#26. 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
#27. In philosophy, you have to reckon with the implicit level of an accumulated reserve, and thus with a very great number of relays, with the shared responsibility of these relays.
Jacques Derrida
#28. No one will ever know from what secret I am writing and the fact that I say so changes nothing.
Jacques Derrida
#29. Why is it the philosopher who is expected to be easier and not some scientist who is even more inaccessible?
Jacques Derrida
#30. These years of the Ecole Normale were an ordeal. Nothing was handed to me on the first try.
Jacques Derrida
#32. The lie is the future, one may venture to say [ ... ]. To tell the truth is, on the contrary, to say what is or what will have been and it would instead prefer the past.
Jacques Derrida
#33. The only attitude (the only politics
judicial, medical, pedagogical and so forth) I would absolutely condemn is one which, directly or indirectly, cuts off the possibility of an essentially interminable questioning, that is, an effective and thus transforming questioning.
Jacques Derrida
#34. In Algeria, I had begun to get into literature and philosophy. I dreamed of writing-and already models were instructing the dream, a certain language governed it.
Jacques Derrida
#37. 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
#38. I am one of those marranes who no longer say they are Jews even in the secret of their own hearts.
Jacques Derrida
#39. 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
#40. The boarding-school experience in Paris was very hard, I didn't put up with it very well. I was sick all the time, or in any case frail, on the edge of a nervous breakdown.
Jacques Derrida
#41. I'm no good for anything except taking the world apart and putting it together again (and I manage the latter less and less frequently).
Jacques Derrida
#42. I say things that contradict each other, that are in real tension with each other, that compose me, that make me live, and that will make me die.
Jacques Derrida
#43. Each time this identity announces itself, someone or something cries: Look out for the trap, youre caught. Take off, get free, disengage yourself.
Jacques Derrida
#44. I was wondering myself where I am going. So I would answer you by saying, first, that I am trying, precisely, to put myself at a point so that I do not know any longer where I am going.
Jacques Derrida
#45. 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
#46. There is nothing outside of the text.
[Fr., Il n'y a pas de hors-texte.]
Jacques Derrida
#47. 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
#48. Actually, when I write, there is a feeling of necessity, of something that is stronger than myself that demands that I must write as I write.
Jacques Derrida
#49. I absolutely forbade all public photographs of myself. I like photography, I don't have anything against it, but ...
Jacques Derrida
#50. 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
#51. As soon as there is language, generality has entered the scene.
Jacques Derrida
#52. 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
#53. Whatever precautions you take so the photograph will look like this or that, there comes a moment when the photograph surprises you. It is the other's gaze that wins out and decides.
Jacques Derrida
#54. The central signified, the original or transcendental signified, is never absolutely present outside a system of differences. The absence of the transcendental signified extends the domain and the interplay of signification ad infinitum.
Jacques Derrida
#55. The poet ... is the man of metaphor: while the philosopher is interested only in the truth of meaning, beyond even signs and names, and the sophist manipulates empty signs ... the poet plays on the multiplicity of signifieds.
Jacques Derrida
#56. 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
#58. How can I say 'I love you', if I know the love is you .. the word 'love' either as a verb or a noun would be destroyed in front of you
Jacques Derrida
#59. Cinema plus Psychoanalysis equals the Science of Ghosts.
Jacques Derrida
#60. The traditional statement about language is that it is in itself living, and that writing is the dead part of language.
Jacques Derrida
#61. No one gets angry at a mathematician or a physicist whom he or she doesn't understand, or at someone who speaks a foreign language, but rather at someone who tampers with your own language.
Jacques Derrida
#63. I believe in the value of the book, which keeps something irreplaceable, and in the necessity of fighting to secure its respect.
Jacques Derrida
#64. The blindness that opens the eye is not the one that darkens vision. Tears and not sight are the essence of the eye.
Jacques Derrida
#66. What is certain is that I am not a Marxist, as someone said a long time ago, let us recall, in a witticism reported by Engels. Must we still cite Marx as an authority in order to say "I am not a Marxist"?
Jacques Derrida
#67. I have always had trouble recognizing myself in the features of the intellectual playing his political role according to the screenplay that you are familiar with and whose heritage deserves to be questioned.
Jacques Derrida
#68. Surviving - that is the other name of a mourning whose possibility is never to be awaited.
Jacques Derrida
#69. To pretend, I actually do the thing: I have therefore only pretended to pretend.
Jacques Derrida
#70. An act of naming should quite rightly enable me to call any-thing a self-portrait, not only any drawing, 'portrait' or not, but everything that happens to me, that I can affect, or that affects me.
Jacques Derrida
#71. I do not believe in pure idioms. I think there is naturally a desire, for whoever speaks or writes, to sign in an idiomatic, irreplaceable manner.
Jacques Derrida
#74. I do everything I think possible or acceptable to escape from this trap.
Jacques Derrida
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. The first problem of the media is posed by what does not get translated, or even published in the dominant political languages.
Jacques Derrida
#78. I would like to write you so simply, so simply, so simply. Without having anything ever catch the eye, excepting yours alone, ... so that above all the language remains self-evidently secret, as if it were being invented at every step, and as if it were burning immediately
Jacques Derrida
#80. 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
#81. Even if we're in a state of hopelessness, a sense of expectation is an integral part of our relationship to time. Hopelessness is possible only because we do hope that some good, loving someone could come. If that's what Heidegger meant, then I agree with him.
Jacques Derrida
#82. What is called "objectivity," scientific for instance (in which I firmly believe, in a given situation) imposes itself only within a context which is extremely vast, old, firmly established, or rooted in a network of conventions ... and yet which still remains a context.
Jacques Derrida
#83. Everything is arranged so that it be this way, this is what is called culture.
Jacques Derrida
#84. Survival in the conventional sense of the term means to continue to live, but also to live after death.
Jacques Derrida
#85. If this work seems so threatening, this is because it isn't simply eccentric or strange, but competent, rigorously argued, and carrying conviction
Jacques Derrida
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