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Top Jacques Derrida Quotes

Browse top 59 most favorite famous quotes and sayings by Jacques Derrida.

Favorite Jacques Derrida Quotes

1. "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
2. "What cannot be said above all must not be silenced but written." ~ Jacques Derrida
3. "I speak only one language, and it is not my own." ~ Jacques Derrida
4. "How can another see into me, into my most secret self, without my being able to see in there myself? And without my being able to see him in me. And if my secret self, that which can be revealed only to the other, to the wholly other, to God if you wish, is a secret that I will never reflect on, that I will never know or experience or possess as my own, then what sense is there in saying that it is my secret, or in saying more generally that a secret belongs, that it is proper to or belongs to some one, or to some other who remains someone. It's perhaps there that we find the secret of secrecy. Namely, that it is not a matter of knowing and that it is there for no one. A secret doesn't belong, it can never be said to be at home or in its place. The question of the self: who am I not in the sense of who am I but rather who is this I that can say who? What is the- I and what becomes of responsibility once the identity of the I trembles in secret?" ~ Jacques Derrida
5. "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
6. "I always dream of a pen that would be a syringe." ~ Jacques Derrida
7. "The lie is the future, one may venture to say [...]. To tell the truth is, on the contrary, to say what is or what will have been and it would instead prefer the past." ~ Jacques Derrida
8. "You always return to the water..." ~ Jacques Derrida
9. "I cannot respond to the call, the request, the obligation, or even the love of another, without sacrificing the other other, the other others" ~ Jacques Derrida
10. "The Ethical can therefore end up making us irresponsible." ~ Jacques Derrida
11. "And still the text will remain, if it is really cryptic and parodying (and I tell you that it is so through and through. I might as well tell you since it won't be of any help to you. Even my admission can very well be a lie because there is dissimulation only if one tells the truth, only if one tells that one is telling the truth), still the text will remain indefinitely open, cryptic and parodying." ~ Jacques Derrida
12. "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
13. "... and in the homosexual phase which would follow Eurydice's death ... Orpheus sings no more, he writes." ~ Jacques Derrida
14. "There are things like reflecting pools, and images, an infinite reference from one to the other, but no longer a source, a spring. There is no longer any simple origin. For what is reflected it split in itself and not only as an addition to itself of its image. The reflection, the image, the double, splits what it doubles. The origin of the speculation becomes a difference. What can look at itself is not one; and the law of the addition of the origin to its representation, or the thing to its image, is that one plus one makes at least three." ~ Jacques Derrida
15. "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
16. "As soon as there is language, generality has entered the scene." ~ Jacques Derrida
17. "Who ever said that one was born just once?" ~ Jacques Derrida
18. "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
19. "I never give in to the temptation to be difficult just for the sake of being difficult. That would be too ridiculous." ~ Jacques Derrida
20. "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
21. "Certain readers resented me when they could no longer recognize their territory, their institution." ~ Jacques Derrida
22. "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
23. "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
24. "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
25. "These years of the Ecole Normale were an ordeal. Nothing was handed to me on the first try." ~ Jacques Derrida
26. "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
27. "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
28. "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
29. "In general, I try and distinguish between what one calls the Future and "l'avenir" [the ‘to come]. The future is that which – tomorrow, later, next century – will be. 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
30. "I believe in the value of the book, which keeps something irreplaceable, and in the necessity of fighting to secure its respect." ~ Jacques Derrida
31. "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
32. "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
33. "The traditional statement about language is that it is in itself living, and that writing is the dead part of language." ~ Jacques Derrida
34. "I rightly pass for an atheist." ~ Jacques Derrida
35. "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
36. "Cinema plus Psychoanalysis equals the Science of Ghosts." ~ Jacques Derrida
37. "I do not teach truth as such; I do not transform myself into a diaphanous mouthpiece of eternal pedagogy: I settle accounts , however I can, on a certain number of problems; with you and with me or me, and through you, me and me, with a certain number of authorities represented here. I understand that the place I am now occupying will not be left out of the exhibit or withdrawn form the scene. Nor do I intend to withhold even that which I shall call, to save time, an autobiographical demonstration, although I must ask you to shift its sense a little and to listen to it with another ear. I wish to take a certain pleasure in this, so that you may learn this pleasure from me." ~ Jacques Derrida
38. "Here again, the difference between the effective and the virtual, between mourning and its possibility, seems fragile and porous. The anguished apprehension of mourning (without which the act of friendship would not spring forth in its very energy) insinuates itself a priori and anticipates itself; it haunts and plunges the friend, before mourning, into mourning. This apprehension weeps before the lamentation, it weeps death before death, and this is the very respiration of friendship, the extreme of its possibility. Hence surviving is at once the essence, the origin and the possibility, the condition of possibility of friendship; it is the grieved act of loving. This time of surviving thus gives the time of friendship." ~ Jacques Derrida
39. "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
40. "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
41. "Every sign, linguistic or nonlinguistic, spoken or written (in the usual sense of this opposition), as a small or large unity, can be cited, put between quotation marks; thereby it can break with every given context, and engender infinitely new contexts in an absolutely nonsaturable fashion. This does not suppose that the mark is valid outside its context, but on the contrary that there are only contexts without any center of absolute anchoring. This citationality, duplication, or duplicity, this iterability of the mark is not an accident or anomaly, but is that (normal/abnormal) without which a mark could no longer even have a so-called "normal" functioning. What would a mark be that one could not cite? And whose origin could not be lost on the way?" ~ Jacques Derrida
42. "Let us being again. To take some examples: why should "literature" still designate that which already breaks away from literature—away from what has always been conceived and signified under that name—or that which, not merely escaping literature, implacably destroys it? (Posed in these terms, the question would already be caught in the assurance of a certain fore-knowledge: can "what has always been conceived and signified under that name" be considered fundamentally homogeneous, univocal, or nonconflictual?) To take other examples: what historical and strategic function should henceforth be assigned to the quotation marks, whether visible or invisible, which transform this into a "book," or which still make the deconstruction of philosophy into a "philosophical discourse"?" ~ Jacques Derrida
43. "Still less, despite appearances, will it have been a collection of three "essays" whose itinerary it would be time, after the fact, to recognize; whose continuity and underlying laws could now be pointed out; indeed, whose overall concept or meaning could at last, with all the insistence required on such occasions, be squarely set forth. I will not feign, according to the code, either premeditation or improvisation. These texts are assembled otherwise; it is not my intention here to present them." ~ Jacques Derrida
44. "Monsters cannot be announced. One cannot say: 'Here are our monsters,' without immediately turning the monsters into pets." ~ Jacques Derrida
45. "To pretend, I actually do the thing: I have therefore only pretended to pretend." ~ Jacques Derrida
46. "Everything is arranged so that it be this way, this is what is called culture." ~ Jacques Derrida
47. "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
48. "I do everything I think possible or acceptable to escape from this trap." ~ Jacques Derrida
49. "Why is it the philosopher who is expected to be easier and not some scientist who is even more inaccessible?" ~ Jacques Derrida
50. "The bricoleur, says Levi-Strauss, is someone who uses ‘the means at hand,' that is, the instruments he finds at his disposition around him, those which are already there, which had not been especially conceived with an eye to the operation for which they are to be used and to which one tries by trial and error to adapt them, not hesitating to change them whenever it appears necessary, or to try several of them at once, even if their form and their origin are heterogenous – and so forth. There is therefor a critique of language in the form of bricolage, and it has even been said that bricolage is critical language itself…If one calls bricolage the necessity of borrowing one's concepts from the text of a heritage which is more or less coherent or ruined, it must be said that every discourse is bricoleur." ~ Jacques Derrida
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People who ask our advice almost never take it. Yet we should never refuse to give it, upon request, for it often helps us to see our own way more clearly."
Author: Brendan Francis Brown

What Did Jacques Derrida Talk About?

Wit
Here
Lit
Con
Self
Thin
Hen
Itself
Once
Era
Ten
Thou
Call
Los
Sit
Ring
Ally
Language
Lie
Pen
Mean
Ours
Name
Per
Read
Ways
Able
End
Whose
Use
Main
Ready
Ear
Cannot
Sign
Said
Remain
Sin
Question
Open
Present
Position
Turn
Philosophy
Win
Old
Forth
Between
Another
Course

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