Jacques Derrida quotes

Jacques Derrida was a French philosopher, best known as the founder of deconstruction. His work deeply influenced literary theory, philosophy, and the humanities worldwide. He challenged conventional ideas about meaning, language, and interpretation. Here are 78 of his quotes:

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

Jacques Derrida

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

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

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 law and its 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jacques Derrida

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

Jacques Derrida

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

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

Jacques Derrida

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

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

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

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

Cinema plus Psychoanalysis equals the Science of Ghosts.

Jacques Derrida

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

Jacques Derrida

I rightly pass for an atheist.

Jacques Derrida

By virtue of its innermost intention, and like all questions about language, structuralism escapes the classical history of ideas which already supposes structuralism's possibility, for the latter naively belongs to the province of language and propounds itself within it. Nevertheless, by virtue of an irreducible region of irreflection and spontaneity within it, by virtue of the essential shadow of the undeclared, the structuralist phenomenon will deserve examination by the historian of ideas. For better or for worse. Everything within this phenomenon that does not in itself transparently belong to the question of the sign will merit this scrutiny; as will everything within it that is methodologically effective, thereby possessing the kind of infallibil-ity now ascribed to sleepwalkers and formerly attributed to instinct, which was said to be as certain as it was blind.

Jacques Derrida