14 Quotes by Nicholas Royle

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?

A writer can never have complete command or mastery over what s/he writes. Neither can a reader.

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.

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.

A text always remains in crucial ways ‘imperceptible’.

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.

Deconstruction wouldn’t make much sense without the structures that are subject to destructuring.

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

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.