Top 80 Jacques Derrida Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “There is nothing outside the text.”

— Jacques Derrida

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

— Jacques Derrida

3. “I am like a child ready for the apocalypse, I am the apocalypse itself, that is to say, the ultimate and first event of the end, the unveiling and the verdict.”

— Jacques Derrida

4. “We are all mediators, translators.”

— Jacques Derrida

5. “Beauty only happens once.”

— Jacques Derrida

6. “Monsters cannot be announced. One cannot say: ‘Here are our monsters,’ without immediately turning the monsters into pets.”

— Jacques Derrida

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

— Jacques Derrida

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

— Jacques Derrida

9. “If things were simple, word would have gotten around.”

— Jacques Derrida

10. “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

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

— Jacques Derrida

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

— Jacques Derrida

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

— Jacques Derrida

14. “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.”

— Jacques Derrida

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

— Jacques Derrida

16. “I love language as I love life itself!”

— Jacques Derrida

17. “If I only did what I can do, I wouldn’t do anything.”

— Jacques Derrida

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

— Jacques Derrida

19. “The end approaches, but the apocalypse is long lived.”

— Jacques Derrida

20. “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

21. “Certain readers resented me when they could no longer recognize their territory, their institution.”

— Jacques Derrida

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

— Jacques Derrida

23. “I never give in to the temptation to be difficult just for the sake of being difficult. That would be too ridiculous.”

— Jacques Derrida

24. “Beyond the touchline there is nothing.”

— Jacques Derrida

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

— Jacques Derrida

26. “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

27. “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

28. “Circumcision, that’s all I’ve ever talked about.”

— Jacques Derrida

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

— Jacques Derrida

30. “I absolutely forbade all public photographs of myself. I like photography, I don’t have anything against it, but...”

— Jacques Derrida

31. “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

32. “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.”

— Jacques Derrida

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

— Jacques Derrida

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

— Jacques Derrida

35. “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

36. “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

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

— Jacques Derrida

38. “Who ever said that one was born just once?”

— Jacques Derrida

39. “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

40. “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

41. “Cinema plus Psychoanalysis equals the Science of Ghosts.”

— Jacques Derrida

42. “I rightly pass for an atheist.”

— Jacques Derrida

43. “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.”

— Jacques Derrida

44. “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.”

— Jacques Derrida

45. “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

46. “I recognize that I love – you – by this: that you leave in me a wound that I do not want to replace.”

— Jacques Derrida

47. “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

48. “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.”

— Jacques Derrida

49. “It is just that there be law, but law is not justice.”

— Jacques Derrida

50. “Every text participates in one or several genres, there is no genreless text; there is always a genre and genres, yet such participation never amounts to belonging.”

— Jacques Derrida