Jacques Derrida Quotes

“There are always differences, tensions, paradoxes between what a text says (or what an author wants to say, or thinks s/he is saying) and what a text does.”
― Nicholas Royle, Jacques Derrida

“In truth, Derrida has always been preoccupied (in the strongest senses of that word) by what precedes or exceeds language.”
― Nicholas Royle, Jacques Derrida

“Deconstruction wouldn’t make much sense without the structures that are subject to destructuring.”
― Nicholas Royle, Jacques Derrida

“Differance brings together the two notions of differing and deferring.”
― Nicholas Royle, Jacques Derrida

“The question ‘Why Derrida?’ is absurd: it makes me smile. There is something at once appalling and hilarious about it. It is like asking ‘Why culture?’, ‘Why education?’, ‘Why think?”
― Nicholas Royle, Jacques Derrida

“A text is a ‘fabric of traces’ governed by a logic of the ‘nonpresent remainder’, by what thus figures the impossibility of pure presence, the impossibility of absolute plenitude of meaning or intention.”
― Nicholas Royle, Jacques Derrida

“A text always remains in crucial ways ‘imperceptible’.”
― Nicholas Royle, Jacques Derrida

“Everyday life would be impossible without metalanguage. But the notion of metalanguage entails a logic of the supplement. There is something ‘maddening’ about the notion: metalanguage is, in short, both necessary and impossible. We cannot do without it, but there is no metalanguage as a discrete language: it is both part of and not part of its so-called object language.”
― Nicholas Royle, Jacques Derrida

“A writer can never have complete command or mastery over what s/he writes. Neither can a reader.”
― Nicholas Royle, Jacques Derrida

“What one repeatedly finds in Derrida’s work is the uncanny effect by which one is invited to sense the unfolding of all of his thinking starting out from anywhere, from any idea, any word, any thought that happens to be at issue. ‘Deconstruction’ is perhaps the best-known word for this.”
― Nicholas Royle, Jacques Derrida

“In order to be what it ‘is’, a text is an essentially vitiated, impure, open, haunted thing, consisting of traces and traces of traces: no text is purely present, nor was there some purely present text in the past.”
― Nicholas Royle, Jacques Derrida