Jacques Derrida Quotes

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  • 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).

  • Cinema plus Psychoanalysis equals the Science of Ghosts.

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

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

    Jacques Derrida (1995). “Points . .: Interviews, 1974-1994”, p.200, Stanford University Press
  • 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.

  • 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.

    "Positions" by Jacques Derrida, University of Chicago Press, (p. 21), 1982.
  • 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.

  • 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 (1995). “Points . .: Interviews, 1974-1994”, p.410, Stanford University Press
  • 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.

  • 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 (1978). “Writing and Difference”, p.285, University of Chicago Press
  • If you read philosophical texts of the tradition, you'll notice they almost never said 'I,' and didn't speak in the first person. From Aristotle to Heidegger, they try to consider their own lives as something marginal or accidental. What was essential was their teaching and their thinking. Biography is something empirical and outside, and is considered an accident that isn't necessarily or essentially linked to the philosophical activity or system.

  • 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.

  • 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 (1998). “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression”, p.100, University of Chicago Press
  • 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, John D. Caputo (1997). “Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida”, p.6, Fordham Univ Press
  • The end approaches, but the apocalypse is long lived.

    Harold Coward, Toby Foshay, Jacques Derrida (1992). “Derrida and Negative Theology”, p.59, SUNY Press
  • We are all mediators, translators.

    Jacques Derrida (1995). “Points . .: Interviews, 1974-1994”, p.116, Stanford University Press
  • I am one of those marranes who no longer say they are Jews even in the secret of their own hearts.

    Geoffrey Bennington, Jacques Derrida (1999). “Jacques Derrida”, p.180, University of Chicago Press
  • Who ever said that one was born just once?

    Jacques Derrida (1995). “Points . .: Interviews, 1974-1994”, p.339, Stanford University Press
  • 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 (1995). “Points . .: Interviews, 1974-1994”, p.342, Stanford University Press
  • Surviving - that is the other name of a mourning whose possibility is never to be awaited.

    Jacques Derrida (2003). “The Work of Mourning”, p.1, University of Chicago Press
  • 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.

  • If this work seems so threatening, this is because it isn't simply eccentric or strange, but competent, rigorously argued, and carrying conviction.

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

  • 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 (1995). “Points . .: Interviews, 1974-1994”, p.200, Stanford University Press
  • Everything is arranged so that it be this way, this is what is called culture.

    Jacques Derrida (1995). “Points . .: Interviews, 1974-1994”, p.340, Stanford University Press
  • 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 (2008). “The Gift of Death, Second Edition & Literature in Secret”, p.17, University of Chicago Press
  • 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 (1995). “Points . .: Interviews, 1974-1994”, p.115, Stanford University Press
  • 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.

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

    Jacques Derrida (2004). “Dissemination”, p.14, A&C Black
  • I believe in the value of the book, which keeps something irreplaceable, and in the necessity of fighting to secure its respect.

    Jacques Derrida (2005). “Paper Machine”, p.28, Stanford University Press
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