Quotes by Jacques Derrida - Page 2

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 / Philosopher
Ashamed
Behavior
Cried
Long
School
Sickness
Time Always Enough
Time Long Behavior
Back To School
Time Enough Always
Old Enough
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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 / Philosopher
Parent
Powerful
Scary
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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.
Jacques Derrida / Philosopher
Breakdown
Frail
Nervous
Nervous Breakdown
Paris
School
Sick
Edge
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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 / Philosopher
Implicit
Numbers
Philosophy
Responsibility
Accumulate
Reckon
Reserve
Shared
Thus
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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 / Philosopher
Alive
Believe
Echoes
Inaccessible
Names
Nevertheless
Opponents
Resolute
Visible
Claim
Texts
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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 / Philosopher
Looks
Photograph
Surprise
Winning
Surprises
Gaze
Wins
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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 / Philosopher
Anxiety
Discomfort
Left
School
Stomach
Symptoms
Teaching
Threshold
Chest
Cross
Institution
Physical
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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.
Jacques Derrida / Philosopher
Answers
Firsts
Trying
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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 / Philosopher
Eye
Spirit
Tradition
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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.
Jacques Derrida / Philosopher
Angry
Foreign Language
Language
Mathematician
Physicist
Speak
Foreign
Gets
He Or She
Speaks
Whom
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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.
Jacques Derrida / Philosopher
Differences
Inventory
Systematic
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An act of naming should quite rightly enable me to call any-thing a self-portrait, not only any drawing, 'portrait' or not, but everything that happens to me, that I can affect, or that affects me.
Jacques Derrida / Philosopher
Drawing
Portraits
Self
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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.
Jacques Derrida / Philosopher
Familiar
Features
Heritage
Intellectual
Political
Recognizing
Roles
According
Myself Always Political
Questioned
Screenplay
Whose
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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.
Jacques Derrida / Philosopher
Believe
Desire
Perception
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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 / Philosopher
Men
Names
Play
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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 / Philosopher
Gestures
Opening Up
Risk
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It is to have a compulsive, repetitive, and nostalgic desire for the archive, an irrepressible desire to return to the origin, a homesickness, a nostalgia for the return to the most archaic place of absolute commencement
Jacques Derrida / Philosopher
Archives
Desire
Return
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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.
Jacques Derrida / Philosopher
Break
Memories
Mixtures
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Even if we're in a state of hopelessness, a sense of expectation is an integral part of our relationship to time. Hopelessness is possible only because we do hope that some good, loving someone could come. If that's what Heidegger meant, then I agree with him.
Jacques Derrida / Philosopher
Expectations
Heidegger
Loving Someone
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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 / Philosopher
Believe
Conventions
Objectivity
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The only attitude (the only politics--judicial, medical, pedagogical and so forth) I would absolutely condemn is one which, directly or indirectly, cuts off the possibility of an essentially interminable questioning, that is, an effective and thus transforming questioning.
Jacques Derrida / Philosopher
Attitude
Medical
Cutting
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I would like to write you so simply, so simply, so simply. Without having anything ever catch the eye, excepting yours alone, ... so that above all the language remains self-evidently secret, as if it were being invented at every step, and as if it were burning immediately
Jacques Derrida / Philosopher
Eye
Self
Writing
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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 / Philosopher
Men
Infinity
Limits
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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.
Jacques Derrida / Philosopher
Mean
Philosophical
Plato
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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.
Jacques Derrida / Philosopher
Education
Play
Waiting
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But can one not conceive of a presence, and of a presence to itself of the subject before speech or signs, a presence to itself of the subject in a silent and intuitive consciousness? Such a question therefore presupposes that, prior to the sign, and outside it, excluding any trace and any différance, something like consciousness is possible.
Jacques Derrida / Philosopher
Consciousness
Silent
Speech
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All sentences of the type 'deconstruction is X' or 'deconstruction is not X', a priori miss the point, which is to say that they are at least false. As you know, one of the principal things at stake in what is called in my texts 'deconstruction', is precisely the delimiting of ontology and above all of the third-person present indicative: S is P.
Jacques Derrida / Philosopher
Science
Missing
Ontology
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The trace I leave to me means at once my death, to come or already come, and the hope that it will survive me. It is not an ambition of immortality; it is fundamental. I leave here a bit of paper, I leave, I die; it is impossible to exit this structure; it is the unchanging form of my life. Every time I let something go, I live my death in writing.
Jacques Derrida / Philosopher
Ambition
Mean
Writing
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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.
Jacques Derrida / Philosopher
Analysis
Fields
Thinking
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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 / Philosopher
Believe
Differences
Ideas
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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 / Philosopher
Forever
Games
Law
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If you read philosophical texts of the tradition, you'll notice they almost never said 'I,' and didn't speak in the first person. From Aristotle to Heidegger, they try to consider their own lives as something marginal or accidental. What was essential was their teaching and their thinking. Biography is something empirical and outside, and is considered an accident that isn't necessarily or essentially linked to the philosophical activity or system.
Jacques Derrida / Philosopher
Philosophical
Teaching
Thinking
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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 / Philosopher
Differences
Mean
Play
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There is no rigorous and effective deconstruction without the faithful memory of philosophies and literatures, without the respectful and competent reading of texts of the past, as well as singular works of our own time. Deconstruction is also a certain thinking about tradition and context. Mark Taylor evokes this with great clarity in the course of a remarkable introduction. He reconstitutes a set of premises without which no deconstruction could have seen the light of day.
Jacques Derrida / Philosopher
Memories
Philosophy
Reading
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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 / Philosopher
Able
Real
Unexpected
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A determination or an effect within a system which is no longer that of a presence but of a diffrance, a system that no longer tolerates the opposition of activity and passivity, nor that of cause and effect, or of indetermination and determination, etc., such that in designating consciousness as an effect or a determination, one continues - for strategic reasons that can be more or less lucidly deliberated and systematically calculated - to operate according to the lexicon of that which one is de-limiting.
Jacques Derrida / Philosopher
Determination
Etc
Lexicon
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During the fifteen or twenty years in which I tried - it was not always easy with publishers, newspapers, etc. - to forbid photographs, it was not at all in order to mark a sort of blank, absence, or disappearance of the image; it was because the code that dominates at once the production of these images, the framing they are made to undergo, the social implications (showing the writer's head framed in front his bookshelves, the whole scenario) seemed to me to be, first of all, terribly boring, but also contrary to what I am trying to write and to work on.
Jacques Derrida / Philosopher
Order
Writing
Years
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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 / Philosopher
Doubt
Secret
What If
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Jacques Derrida Quotes - Page 2

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