Introducing Derrida Quotes

“Derrida’s view, writing has characteristics that can’t be decided within these oppositions. It disrupts the oppositions. It plays across good and bad, curative and injurious. There is neither simply cure nor simply poison. The characteristics of writing inhabit “interior” memory while also being “external”. “Living” speech shares in the characteristics of “dead” writing. Writing refuses to settle down as the mere “appearance” of “true” knowledge.”
― Jeff Collins, Introducing Derrida: A Graphic Guide

“Undecidables disrupt this oppositional logic. They slip across both sides of an opposition but don’t properly fit either. They are more than the opposition can allow. And because of that, they question the very principle of “opposition”.”
― Jeff Collins, Introducing Derrida: A Graphic Guide

“an undecidable presence-absence at the origin of meaning.”
― Jeff Collins, Introducing Derrida: A Graphic Guide

“Neither simply present nor simply absent, the trace is an undecidable. The relay of differences (pig, big, bag, rag, rat, etc) depends upon a structural undecidability, a play of presence and absence at the origin of meaning. Undecidability at the “origin”, between presence and absence.”
― Jeff Collins, Introducing Derrida: A Graphic Guide

“lost. So the /p/ is in a way present, though not simply so. It is carried as a trace in the /b/, necessarily”
― Jeff Collins, Introducing Derrida: A Graphic Guide

“From this comes Saussure’s famous pronouncement – the structure of language is purely differential: “Whether we take the signified or the signifier, language has neither ideas nor sounds that existed before the linguistic system, but only conceptual and phonic differences that have issued from the system.” Meaning is no longer simply a correlation of signifier/signified. Everything depends on differences. At the level of linguistic sounds, we can substitute the sound /p/ for the sound /b/ in big. The sounds don’t mean anything in themselves, but we can tell the difference between them. The difference makes possible a different meaning – the concept:”
― Jeff Collins, Introducing Derrida: A Graphic Guide

“Instead of countering Plato’s argument, or approving it or modifying it, Derrida insists on its instabilities. It is inhabited at every turn by an undecidability that it cannot fully master.”
― Jeff Collins, Introducing Derrida: A Graphic Guide

“but rather a sort of joker, a floating signifier, a wild card, one who puts play into play.” And this joker is the inventor of play, of games of draughts, dice,”
― Jeff Collins, Introducing Derrida: A Graphic Guide

“Every act of his is marked by an unstable ambivalence. He is the god of calculation, arithmetic and rational science; and he also presides over the occult sciences, astrology and alchemy. He is the god of magic formulae, of secret accounts, of hidden texts. And so he is the god of medicine. The god of writing is the god of the pharmakon…”
― Jeff Collins, Introducing Derrida: A Graphic Guide

“So Thoth opposes his father-king, but he opposes what he himself repeats. He opposes himself. Thoth, the demi-god, is undecidable. And so is Theuth, his Greek counterpart…”
― Jeff Collins, Introducing Derrida: A Graphic Guide

“Once the aberrant logic of the pharmakon is let loose, it poisons the fixity and clarity of the other oppositions grouped around it. For instance, Plato’s argument relies on father/son, Egyptian/Greek, original/derivation. Can we be sure of these? In Derrida’s hands, they start to unravel. He turns to the “original” Egyptian myth where the characters are Thoth and King Ammon. Thoth is the son of the sun god, Ammon.”
― Jeff Collins, Introducing Derrida: A Graphic Guide

“So as a last resort, can deconstruction be described as a project? Not if it has an outcome staked out in advance, a goal which predetermines its movements. Such a goal would govern foundationally. Deconstruction might clear pathways for its movements, but not knowing entirely where they lead.”
― Jeff Collins, Introducing Derrida: A Graphic Guide

“Unformed, monstrous, and perhaps unidentifiable, deconstruction has moved virally through fields beyond philosophy and theory. Derrida advanced its progress in architecture, art, politics and law. And especially, in literature…”
― Jeff Collins, Introducing Derrida: A Graphic Guide

“elements or origins.”
― Jeff Collins, Introducing Derrida: A Graphic Guide

“Secondly, is there “something” to be defined or translated? Derrida resisted the suggestion that there is a concept of deconstruction, simply present to the word, outside of the word’s inscription in sentences and phrases determined by the undecidables. There’s no such concept simply to pass over into other words, other languages.”
― Jeff Collins, Introducing Derrida: A Graphic Guide

“Undecidability and derailments of communication are always and already at work, in all discourse – in law, politics, education, the military, medicine, etc, as well as in philosophy and theory.”
― Jeff Collins, Introducing Derrida: A Graphic Guide

“• Derrida’s texts aren’t located “outside” the texts they examine, in a position of attempted mastery or privileged authority. He doesn’t simply reject or oppose them. It’s more a strategy of inhabiting them, making a destabilizing passage through them, undoing their presuppositions and desedimenting them: stirring up their underlying levels.”
― Jeff Collins, Introducing Derrida: A Graphic Guide

“Derrida has argued that communication is always subject to iterability, citation and grafting. If so, it can’t be taken as a guaranteed, masterable passage of meanings. Language, Derrida says, is a “non-masterable dissemination”. If that’s the case, we lose absolute assurance that we can “say what we mean” or “know what someone is thinking”.”
― Jeff Collins, Introducing Derrida: A Graphic Guide

“Does this eradicate CONTEXT? For Derrida, no. There are contexts, but they have no centre and can never entirely govern meanings.”
― Jeff Collins, Introducing Derrida: A Graphic Guide

“Iterability has many implications. CITATION is always possible. We can always lift out a sequence of words from a written tract. We can make an extract, and it can still function meaningfully. GRAFTING is equally possible. We can insert the stolen sequence (whose property was it?) into other chains of writing. As Derrida writes: “No context can enclose it.” Hence writing is writing always with stolen words. Not to mention all of its quotations, plagiarisms, imitations, pastiches, etc.”
― Jeff Collins, Introducing Derrida: A Graphic Guide

“Writing must therefore be ITERABLE* – repeatable, but in the sense of repeatable-with-difference. We can repeat marks we can identify; and to identify marks, we have to be able to repeat them. We could not identify or read a writing we could not repeat. It would not be legible. Iterability undermines “context” as a final governor of meanings. Repeatability implies repetition elsewhere”
― Jeff Collins, Introducing Derrida: A Graphic Guide

“Ultimately, can context master the play of differance and provide meaning with a safe haven from undecidability?”
― Jeff Collins, Introducing Derrida: A Graphic Guide

“Différance is actively disruptive. Language, thought and meaning aren’t to be allowed the comfort of their daily routines. If that leaves philosophical language ruined, sick with its own instabilities, what about ordinary language and everyday communication? Can we rely on grounded decidability in the supermarket, the office and the lecture hall?”
― Jeff Collins, Introducing Derrida: A Graphic Guide

“4 Insertion between words and concepts: Différance is neither a word (in French) nor a concept (a signified). It doesn’t exist; it’s not a present-being, a “thing” with essence and existence. It refuses the question, “What is différance?”. Better to write: différance Derrida crosses out the verb of being, putting it under erasure (“sous rature”: borrowed from Heidegger). Both there and not there, cancelled but not ejected, present and absent.”
― Jeff Collins, Introducing Derrida: A Graphic Guide

“1 Insertion between speech and writing: Différance is pronounced the same as différence. If spoken, différance cannot be heard. But differance can be read. It privileges writing, while inhabiting speech as a possibility. 2 Insertion between nouns and verbs: Differance is neither noun nor verb. It plays between “thing” and “doing”, between entity and action:-a foundational opposition of philosophy. 3 Insertion between the sensible and the intelligible: Différance plays across both sides of the Saussurian sign (signifier and signified).”
― Jeff Collins, Introducing Derrida: A Graphic Guide

“This strikes at the very roots of Western metaphysics, because it’s the claim to full presence which underpins metaphysical concepts and procedures.”
― Jeff Collins, Introducing Derrida: A Graphic Guide

“Now, if the trace is a constant sliding between presence and absence, those philosophical words cannot establish full, replete presence.”
― Jeff Collins, Introducing Derrida: A Graphic Guide

“Concepts need their physical sounds, their scripted marks, etc. Even if we can imagine words “inside our head”, we are conjuring their signifiers, their sensory aspects.”
― Jeff Collins, Introducing Derrida: A Graphic Guide

“So now we begin to understand the paradoxical phonocentric “history of silence”, that repression of writing which can scarcely be acknowledged.”
― Jeff Collins, Introducing Derrida: A Graphic Guide

“In speech, the speaker and the listener have to be present in at least two senses:- A Present to the words in a spatial sense B Present at a particular moment in time in which the words are uttered. Therefore it seems that the speakers’ thoughts are as close as possible to their words. The thoughts are present to the words. So speech offers the most direct access to consciousness. The voice can seem to be consciousness itself.”
― Jeff Collins, Introducing Derrida: A Graphic Guide