Jacques Derrida quotes

Psychoanalysis has taught that the dead – a dead parent, for example – can be more alive for us, more powerful, more scary, than the living. It is the question of ghosts.
-- Jacques Derrida

#Powerful #Scary #Parent

I always dream of a pen that would be a syringe.
-- Jacques Derrida

#Dream #Communication #Would Be

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

#Men #Names #Play

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

There is a future which is predictable, programmed, scheduled, foreseeable. But there is a future, l'avenir (to come) which refers to someone who comes whose arrival is totally unexpected. For me, that is the real future. That which is totally unpredictable. The Other who comes without my being able to anticipate their arrival. So if there is a real future, beyond the other known future, it is l'avenir in that it is the coming of the Other when I am completely unable to foresee their arrival.
-- Jacques Derrida

#Real #Able #Unexpected

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

#Believe #Perception #Desire

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

#Trying #Answers #Firsts

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

#Attitude #Cutting #Medical

The traditional statement about language is that it is in itself living, and that writing is the dead part of language.
-- Jacques Derrida

#Writing #Language

If things were simple, word would have gotten around.
-- Jacques Derrida

#Simple

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

#Writing #Eye #Self

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

#Language #Speak #Mathematician

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

#Media #Political #Doe

The trace I leave to me means at once my death, to come or already come, and the hope that it will survive me. It is not an ambition of immortality; it is fundamental. I leave here a bit of paper, I leave, I die; it is impossible to exit this structure; it is the unchanging form of my life. Every time I let something go, I live my death in writing.
-- Jacques Derrida

#Ambition #Mean #Writing

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

#Ironic #Irony #Said

Who ever said that one was born just once?
-- Jacques Derrida

#Born #Said

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

#Culture #Way

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

#Circles #Return #Chance

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

#Opening Up #Risk #Firsts

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

#Language #Scene

Beauty only happens once.
-- Jacques Derrida

#Beauty

There is nothing outside of the text. [Fr., Il n'y a pas de hors-texte.]
-- Jacques Derrida

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.
-- Jacques Derrida

#Doubt #Secret #What If

There is nothing outside the text
-- Jacques Derrida

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

#Believe #Objectivity #Conventions

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

#Self #Drawing #Portraits

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

The end approaches, but the apocalypse is long lived.
-- Jacques Derrida

#Long #Apocalypse #Ends

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

#Eye #Spirit #Tradition

No one will ever know from what secret I am writing and the fact that I say so changes nothing.
-- Jacques Derrida

#Writing #Secret #Facts

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

#Law #Games #Forever

Cinema plus Psychoanalysis equals the Science of Ghosts.
-- Jacques Derrida

#Cinema #Ghost #Plus

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

#Creativity #Imagination #Pet

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

#Winning #Looks #Surprise

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

#Insecurity #Eccentric #Strange

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

#Poetic #Methodology #Discourse

I believe in the value of the book, which keeps something irreplaceable, and in the necessity of fighting to secure its respect.
-- Jacques Derrida

#Believe #Book #Fighting

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

#Dream #Philosophy #Writing

Certain readers resented me when they could no longer recognize their territory, their institution.
-- Jacques Derrida

#Territory #Institutions #Certain

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

#Political #Intellectual #Roles

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

#Believe #Names #Echoes

I rightly pass for an atheist.
-- Jacques Derrida

#Atheist

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

#School #Long #Sickness

I speak only one language, and it is not my own.
-- Jacques Derrida

#Language #Speak

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

#Caring #Names #Looks

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

#Philosophy #Responsibility #Numbers

1) Différance is the systematic play of differences, of the traces of differences, of the spacing by means of which elements are related to each other. This spacing is the simultaneously active and passive (the a of différance indicates this indecision as concerns activity and passivity, that which cannot be governed by or distributed between the terms of this opposition) production of the intervals without which the "full" terms would not signify, would not function.
-- Jacques Derrida

#Mean #Play #Differences

Circumcision , that's all I've ever talked about.
-- Jacques Derrida

#Circumcision

I am one of those marranes who no longer say they are Jews even in the secret of their own hearts.
-- Jacques Derrida

#Heart #Secret #Jew

Within the university... you can study without waiting for any efficient or immediate result. You may search, just for the sake of searching, and try for the sake of trying. So there is a possibility of what I would call playing. It's perhaps the only place within society where play is possible to such an extent.
-- Jacques Derrida

#Education #Play #Waiting

I would say that deconstruction is affirmation rather than questioning, in a sense which is not positive: I would distinguish between the positive, or positions, and affirmations. I think that deconstruction is affirmative rather than questioning: this affirmation goes through some radical questioning, but it is not questioning in the field of analysis.
-- Jacques Derrida

#Thinking #Analysis #Fields

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

#Children #Events #Unveiling

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

#School #Paris #Sick

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

#Names #Mourning #Possibility

Beyond the touchline there is nothing.
-- Jacques Derrida

#Football

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

#Eye #Sight #Essence

Why is it the philosopher who is expected to be easier and not some scientist who is even more inaccessible?
-- Jacques Derrida

#Philosopher #Scientist #Easier

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

#Men #Limits #Infinity

I do everything I think possible or acceptable to escape from this trap.
-- Jacques Derrida

#Thinking #Traps

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

#Teaching #School #Anxiety

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

#Solitude #Speak #Given

As soon as we cease to believe in such an engineer and in a discourse which breaks with the received historical discourse, and as soon as we admit that every finite discourse is bound by a certain bricolage and that the engineer and the scientist are also species of bricoleurs , then the very idea of bricolage is menaced and the difference in which it took on its meaning breaks down.
-- Jacques Derrida

#Believe #Ideas #Differences

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

#Roles #Argument #Stage

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

#Desire #Return #Archives

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

#Giving #Temptation #Sake

One often speaks without seeing, without knowing, without meaning what one says.
-- Jacques Derrida

#Knowing #Speak

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

#Believe #Writing #Thinking

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

#Writing #Feelings #Stronger

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

#Reading #Kind #Young

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

#Plato #Philosophical #Mean

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

#Memories #Mixtures #Break

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

#Practice #Personality #Philosopher

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.
-- Jacques Derrida

#Determination #Etc #Causes

Survival in the conventional sense of the term means to continue to live, but also to live after death.
-- Jacques Derrida

#Mean #Survival #Term