Jacques Derrida Quotes

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.

The blindness that opens the eye is not the one that darkens vision. Tears and not sight are the essence of the eye.

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

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.

If things were simple, word would have gotten around.

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

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

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

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

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

There is nothing outside the text

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

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

I say things that contradict each other, that are in real tension with each other, that compose me, that make me live, and that will make me die.

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).

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

The end approaches, but the apocalypse is long lived.

Who ever said that one was born just once?

Beyond the touchline there is nothing.

We are all mediators, translators.

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

Each time this identity announces itself, someone or something cries: Look out for the trap, youre caught. Take off, get free, disengage yourself.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Beauty only happens once.

The circle of the return to birth can only remain open, but this is a chance, a sign of life, and a wound.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

Cinema plus Psychoanalysis equals the Science of Ghosts.

Why is it apparently the philosopher who is expected to be "easier" and not some scientist or other who is even more inaccessible to the same readers?

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.

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

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.

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.

I became the stage for the great argument between Nietzsche and Rousseau. I was the extra ready to take on all the roles.

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.

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.

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.

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.