128 Quotes by Jacques Derrida

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

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

An act of naming should quite rightly enable me to call any-thing a self-portrait, not only any drawing, ‘portrait’ or not, but everything that happens to me, that I can affect, or that affects me.

Capitalist societies can always heave a sigh of relief and say to themselves: communism is finished since the collapse of the totalitarianisms of the twentieth century and not only is it finished, but it did not take place, it was only a ghost They do no more than disavow the undeniable itself. a ghost never dies, it remains always to come and to come-back.

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

The boarding-school experience in Paris was very hard, I didn’t put up with it very well. I was sick all the time, or in any case frail, on the edge of a nervous breakdown.

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.

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

There is no simple answer to such a question.