Jacques Derrida
From Wikiquote
Jacques Derrida (15 July 1930 – 8 October 2004) was a French literary critic and philosopher who introduced the practice of "deconstruction".
[edit] Quotes
- Monsters cannot be announced. One cannot say: 'here are our monsters', without immediately turning the monsters into pets.
- Some Statements and Truisms about Neologisms, Newisms, Postisms, Parasitisms, and other small Seismisms, The States of Theory, ed. David Carroll, New York: Columbia University Press, 1989.
- 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.
- "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences," Writing and Difference, tr. w/ intro & notes by Alan Bass. The University of Chicago Press. Chicago, 1978. - p. 285
- At the end of Being and Nothingness...[,] Being in-itself and Being for-itself were of Being; and this totality of beings, in which they were effected, itself was linked up to itself, relating and appearing to itself, by means of the essential project of human-reality. What was named in this way, in an allegedly neutral and undetermined way, was nothing other than the metaphysical unity of man and God, the relation of man to God, the project of becoming God as the project constituting human-reality. Atheism changes nothing in this fundamental structure.
- "The Ends of Man," Margins of Philosophy, tr. w/ notes by Alan Bass. The University of Chicago Press. Chicago, 1982. (Original French published in Paris, 1972, as Marges de la philosophie.) - p. 116
- 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.
- "The Ends of Man," Margins of Philosophy, tr. w/ notes by Alan Bass. The University of Chicago Press. Chicago, 1982. (Original French published in Paris, 1972, as Marges de la philosophie.) - p. 123
- il n'y a pas de hors-texte
- Translation: There is nothing outside the text (alternatively and possibly more accurately this can be translated as 'there is no outside to the text')
- "Of Grammatology", tr. by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Johns Hopkins University Press. Baltimore, 1976. (Original French published by Éditions de Minuit, Paris, in 1967, as "De la grammatologie") 158-59
- 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)
- Amy Kofman: Have you read all the books in here?
Derrida: No, only four of them. But I read those very, very carefully.- Derrida (2003 documentary), referring to his personal library
[edit] Quotes about Derrida
- Michel Foucault once characterized Derrida's prose style to me as "obscurantisme terroriste." The text is written so obscurely that you can't figure out exactly what the thesis is (hence "obscurantisme") and then when one criticizes it, the author says, "Vous m'avez mal compris; vous êtes idiot" [roughly, "You misunderstood me; you are an idiot"] (hence "terroriste").
- Searle, John R., "Word Turned Upside Down." New York Review of Books, Volume 30, Number 16 · October 27, 1983.
