Jacques Derrida Quotes

If I only did what I can do, I wouldn't do anything

These years of the Ecole Normale were an ordeal. Nothing was handed to me on the first try.

I always dream of a pen that would be a syringe.

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

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

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.

A determination or an effect within a system which is no longer that of a presence but of a diffrance, a system that no longer tolerates the opposition of activity and passivity, nor that of cause and effect, or of indetermination and determination, etc., such that in designating consciousness as an effect or a determination, one continues - for strategic reasons that can be more or less lucidly deliberated and systematically calculated - to operate according to the lexicon of that which one is de-limiting.

If things were simple, word would have gotten around.

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.

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

But because me and myself, as you no doubt are well aware, we are going to die, my relation—and yours too—to the event of this text, which otherwise never quite makes it, our relation is that of a structurally posthumous necessity. Suppose, in that case, that I am not alone in my claim to know the idiomatic code (whose notion itself is already contradictory) of this event. What if somewhere, here or there, there are shares in this non-secret’s secret? Even so the scene would not be changed. The accomplices, as you are once again well aware, are also bound to die.

Cinema plus Psychoanalysis equals the Science of Ghosts.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

There is no rigorous and effective deconstruction without the faithful memory of philosophies and literatures, without the respectful and competent reading of texts of the past, as well as singular works of our own time. Deconstruction is also a certain thinking about tradition and context. Mark Taylor evokes this with great clarity in the course of a remarkable introduction. He reconstitutes a set of premises without which no deconstruction could have seen the light of day.

I rightly pass for an atheist.

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.

To pretend, I actually do the thing: I have therefore only pretended to pretend.

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

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