Jacques Derrida
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.Collection: Poetry
I do everything I think possible or acceptable to escape from this trap.
To pretend, I actually do the thing: I have therefore only pretended to pretend.
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.
As soon as there is language, generality has entered the scene.
Who ever said that one was born just once?
We are all mediators, translators.
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.
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.
The circle of the return to birth can only remain open, but this is a chance, a sign of life, and a wound.
If this work seems so threatening, this is because it isn't simply eccentric or strange, but competent, rigorously argued, and carrying conviction.
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.
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.
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.
Certain readers resented me when they could no longer recognize their territory, their institution.
Everything is arranged so that it be this way, this is what is called culture.
The first problem of the media is posed by what does not get translated, or even published in the dominant political languages.
I became the stage for the great argument between Nietzsche and Rousseau. I was the extra ready to take on all the roles.
Why is it the philosopher who is expected to be easier and not some scientist who is even more inaccessible?
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.
I never give in to the temptation to be difficult just for the sake of being difficult. That would be too ridiculous.
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.
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.
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.
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 years of the Ecole Normale were an ordeal. Nothing was handed to me on the first try.
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.
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.Collection: Memories
If I only did what I can do, I wouldn't do anythingCollection: Can Do
If things were simple, word would have gotten around.Collection: Simple
One often speaks without seeing, without knowing, without meaning what one says.Collection: Knowing
There is nothing outside the textCollection: Deconstruction
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.Collection: Trying
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.Collection: Plato
The blindness that opens the eye is not the one that darkens vision. Tears and not sight are the essence of the eye.Collection: Eye
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.Collection: Powerful
Monsters cannot be announced. One cannot say: 'Here are our monsters,' without immediately turning the monsters into pets.Collection: Creativity
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.Collection: Real
I always dream of a pen that would be a syringe.Collection: Dream
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.Collection: Mean
I speak only one language, and it is not my own.Collection: Language
The end approaches, but the apocalypse is long lived.Collection: Long
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.Collection: Education
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).Collection: Together Again
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.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Opening Up
Beauty only happens once.Collection: Beauty
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.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Differences