Quotes from Jacques Derrida

by this very forgetting, he arrives at a sense for truth.

simply one problem among others.

Limiting the potencies of repetition to presence

to what Derrida, following Husserl, calls "the relation to the object" [84])

Metaphysics is a closed system;

I'm in favor or tradition. I'm respectful of and a lover of the tradition. There's no deconstruction without the memory of the tradition.

What interests me about the eyes is that they are part of the body that doesn't age. In other words, if one looks for ones childhood across all the signs of aging in the body, the deterioration of musculature, the whitening of the hair, changes in height and weight, one can find one's childhood in the look of the eyes.

If things were simple, word would have gotten around.

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

La cuestión de la arquitectura es de hecho el problema del lugar, de tener lugar en el espacio

Je voudrais apprendre à vivre enfin.

Het solipsisme is geen verstandsverbijstering en geen sofisme; het is de wezenlijke structuur van de rede.

Writing is nothing but the representation of speech; it is bizarre that one gives more care to the determining of the image than to the object.—J.-J. Rousseau, Fragment inédit d'un essai sur les langues

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

These years of the Ecole Normale were an ordeal. Nothing was handed to me on the first try.

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

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.

There is nothing outside of the text.

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.

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.

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.

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