Jacques Derrida

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

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

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

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

“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.”

“In general, I try and distinguish between what one calls the Future and “l’avenir” [the ‘to come]. The future is that which – tomorrow, later, next century – will be. 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.”

“Let us being again. To take some examples: why should “literature” still designate that which already breaks away from literature—away from what has always been conceived and signified under that name—or that which, not merely escaping literature, implacably destroys it? (Posed in these terms, the question would already be caught in the assurance of a certain fore-knowledge: can “what has always been conceived and signified under that name” be considered fundamentally homogeneous, univocal, or nonconflictual?) To take other examples: what historical and strategic function should henceforth be assigned to the quotation marks, whether visible or invisible, which transform this into a “book,” or which still make the deconstruction of philosophy into a “philosophical discourse”?”

“I do everything I think possible or acceptable to escape from this trap.”

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

“These critics organize and practice in my case a sort of obsessive personality cult which philosophers should know how to question and above all, to moderate.”

“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.”

“In Algeria, I had begun to get into literature and philosophy. I dreamed of writing-and already models were instructing the dream, a certain language governed it.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“Why is it the philosopher who is expected to be easier and not some scientist who is even more inaccessible?”

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