Jacques Derrida citations

“Je parle ici, comme Algérien devenu français un moment donné, ayant perdu sa citoyenneté française, et l'ayant retrouvée. Parmi toutes les richesses culturelles que j'ai reçues, que j'ai héritées, ma culture algérienne est parmi celles qui m'ont le plus fortement soutenu. L'héritage que j'ai reçu de l'Algérie est quelque chose qui a probablement inspiré mon travail philosophique. Tout le travail que j'ai poursuivi, à l'égard de la pensée philosophique européenne, occidentale, comme on dit, gréco-européenne, les questions que j'ai été amené à lui poser depuis une certaine marge, une certaine extériorité, n'auraient certainement pas été possibles si, dans mon histoire personnelle, je n'avais pas été une sorte d'enfant de la marge de l'Europe, un enfant de la Méditerranée, qui n'était ni simplement français ni simplement africain, et qui a passé son temps à voyager d'une culture à l'autre et à nourrir les questions qu'il se posait à partir de cette instabilité. Tout ce qui m'a intéressé depuis longtemps, au titre de l'écriture, de la trace, de la déconstruction de la métaphysique occidentale — que je n'ai jamais, quoi qu'on en ait répété, identifiée comme une chose homogène ou définie au singulier —, tout cela n'a pas pu ne pas procéder de cette référence à un ailleurs dont le lieu et la langue m'étaient pourtant inconnus ou interdits.”

“il n'y a pas de hors-texte”

“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.”

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

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

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“Contrary to what phenomenology—which is always phenomenology of perception—has tried to make us believe, contrary to what our desire cannot fail to be tempted into believing, the thing itself always escapes.”

“If,­ there is a tendency in all Western democracies no longer to respect the professional politician or even the party member as such, it is no longer only because of some personal insufficiency, some fault, or some incompetence, or because of some scandal that can now be more widely known, amplified, and in fact often produced, if not premeditated by the power of the media. Rather, it is because politicians become more and more, or even solely characters in the media's representation at the very moment when the transformation of the public space, precisely by the media, causes them to lose the essential part of the power and even of the competence they were granted before by the structures of parliamentary representation, by the party apparatuses that were linked to it, and so forth. However competent they may personally be, professional politicians who conform to the old model tend today to become structurally incompetent. The same media power accuses, produces, and amplifies at the same time this incompetence of traditional politicians: on the one hand, it takes aways from them the legitimate power they held in the former political space (party, parliament, and so forth), but, on the other hand, it obliges them to become mere silhouettes, if not marionettes, on the stage of televisual rhetoric. They were thought to be actors of politics, they now often risk, as everyone knows, being no more than TV actors.”

“No differeance without alterity, no alterity without singularity, no singularity without here-now.”

“The history of metaphysics, like the history of the West, is the history of these metaphors and metonymies. It’s matrix—If you will pardon me for demonstrating so little and for being elliptical in order to come more quickly to my principle theme—is the determination of Being as presence in all sense of this word.”

“The time is out of joint. The world is going badly. It is worn but its wear no longer counts. Old age or youth-one no longer counts in that way. The world has more than one age. We lack the measure of the measure. We no longer realize the wear, we no longer take account of it as of a single age in the progress of history. Neither maturation, nor crisis, nor even agony. Something else. What is happening is happening to age itself, it strikes a blow at the teleological order of history. What is coming, in which the untimely appears, is happening to time but it does not happen in time. Contretemps. The time is out of joint.”

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

“No one gets angry at a mathematician or a physicist whom he or she doesn't understand at all, or at someone who speaks a foreign language, but rather at someone who tampers with your own language, with this 'relation,' precisely, which is yours.”

“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.”

“I believe in the value of the book, which keeps something irreplaceable, and in the necessity of fighting to secure its respect.”

“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.”

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

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

“Cinema plus Psychoanalysis equals the Science of Ghosts.”

“How can I say 'I love you', if I know the love is you.. the word 'love' either as a verb or a noun would be destroyed in front of you.”

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

“I rightly pass for an atheist.”

“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.”

“It is also the becoming-space of the spoken chain - which has been called temporal or linear; a becoming-space which makes possible both writing and every correspondence between speech and writing, every passage from one to the other.
The activity or productivity connoted by the a of différance refers to the generative movement in the play of differences. The latter are neither fallen from the sky nor inscribed once and for all in a closed system, a static structure that a synchronic and taxonomic operation could exhaust. Differences are the effects of transformations, and from this vantage the theme of différance is incompatible with the static, synchronic, taxonomic, ahistoric motifs in the concept of structure.”

“"There is no outside-text." It is usually mistranslated as "There is nothing outside the text" by his opponents to make it appear that Derrida is claiming nothing exists beyond language (see Searle–Derrida debate). In French, that mistranslated phrase would actually read "Il n'y a rien en dehors du texte."”

“There is no Animal in the general singular, separated from man by a single, indivisible limit. We have to envisage the existence of “living creatures,” whose plurality cannot be assembled within the single figure of an animality that is simply opposed to humanity. … The confusion of all nonhuman living creatures within the general and common category of the animal is not simply a sin against rigorous thinking, vigilance, lucidity, or empirical authority, it is also a crime. Not a crime against animality, precisely, but a crime of the first order against the animals, against animals.”

“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.”

“When I say that this phase is necessary, the word phase is perhaps not the most rigorous one. It is not a question of a chronological phase, a given moment, or a page that one day simply will be turned, in order to go on to other things. The necessity of this phase is structural; it is the necessity of an interminable analysis: the hierarchy of dual oppositions always reestablishes itself. Unlike those authors whose death does not await their demise, the time for overturning is never a dead letter.”