128 Quotes by Jacques Derrida

Be alert to these invisible quotation marks, even within a word.

One of the meanings of what is called a victim ( a victim of anything or anyone whatsoever) is precisely to be erased in its meaning as victim. The absolute victim is a victim who cannot even protest. One cannot even identify the victim as victim. He or she cannot even present himself or herself as such. He or she is completely covered by language, annihilated by history, a victim one cannot identify.

That which I call a text is practically everything… Speech is a text, gesture is a text, reality is a text in this new sense. This is not about re-establishing graphocentrism alongside logocentrism or phonocentrism or text-centrism. The text is not a centre. The text is an openness without borders, of ever-differentiating references.

the constancy of God in my life is called by other names, so that I quite rightly pass for an atheist

Contrary to what phenomenology—which is always phenomenology of perception—has tried to make us believe, contrary to what our desire cannot fail to be tempted into believing, the thing itself always escapes.

One can, of course, speak several languages. There are speakers who are competent in more than one language. Some even write several languages at a time (prostheses, grafts, translation, transposition) . But do they not always do it with a view to an absolute idiom? and in the promise of a still unheard-of language? of a sole poem previously inaudible?

For there to be a gift, there must be no reciprocity, return, exchange, countergift, or debt. (...) For there to be a gift, it is necessary that the donee not give back, amortize, reimburse, (...)

There is no sense in doing without the concepts of metaphysics in order to attack metaphysics. We have no language—no syntax and no lexicon—which is alien to this history; we cannot utter a single destructive proposition which has not already slipped into the form, the logic, and the implicit postulations of precisely what it seeks to contest.

Deconstruction never had meaning or interest, at least in my eyes, than as a radicalization, that is to say, also within the tradition of a certain Marxism, in a certain spirit of Marxism