16 quotes
I am one of those marranes who no longer say they are Jews even in the secret of their own hearts.
Circumcision, that’s all I’ve ever talked about.
The disciple must break the glass, or better the mirror, the reflection, his infinite speculation on the master. And start to speak.
Writing and Difference (1978)
Monsters cannot be announced. One cannot say: 'here are our monsters', without immediately turning the monsters into pets.
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.
No differeance without alterity, no alterity without singularity, no singularity without here-now.
Specters of Marx (1993)
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.
Limited Inc (1977)
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.
It has no sense and cannot just unless it comes to terms with death. Mine as (well as) that of the other. Between life and death, then, this is indeed the place of a sententious injunction that always feigns to speak the just.
Specters of Marx (1993)
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.
Elisabeth Weber (1995)
Il n'y a pas de hors-texte.
Of Grammatology (1967)
Whatever the poverty of our knowledge in this respect, it is certain that the question of the sign is itself more or less, or in any event something other, than a sign of the times. To dream of reducing it to a sign of the times is to dream of violence.
Writing and Difference (1978)
In writing a history of madness, Foucault has attempted-and this is the greatest merit, but also the very infeasibility of his book-to write a history of madness itself. Itself. Of madness itself. That is by letting madness speak for itself.
Writing and Difference (1978)
Amy Kofman: Have you read all the books in here?
Derrida: No, only four of them. But I read those very, very carefully.
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.
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 law and its 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.
Dissemination (1972)