Jacques Derrida Quotes

Deconstruction: peering suspiciously at the text, I wait for it to make a slip and betray itself.

The discourse on the Text should itself be nothing other than text, research, textual activity, since the Text is that social space which leaves no language safe, outside, nor any subject of the enunciation in position as judge, master, analyst, confessor, decoder. The theory of the Text can coincide only with a practice of writing.

Deconstruction glorifies the critic, humiliates the author, and makes the reader wonder why he bothered.

There is nothing outside the text

The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.

I was trained in the '50s as a New Critic. I remember what literature was like before the New Critics, when people stood up and talked about Shelley's soul and such things.

Literary theory has become a parody of science, generating its own arcane jargon. In the process, tragically, it discourages love of literature for its own sake.

I used to teach at Yale, which was at one time a center of postmodernist literary theory. Derrida was there. Paul de Man was there.

One of the reasons I like Barthes more than other writers of that ilk is because he had a literary quality.

Jacques Derrida is a very important thinker and philosopher who has made serious contributions to both philosophy and literary criticism. Roland Barthes is the one I feel most affinity for, and Michel Foucault, well, his writing influenced my novel, 'Middlesex.'

The critical method which denies literary modernity would appear - and even, in certain respects, would be - the most modern of critical movements.

I always wanted to put a sign up on the road to Yale saying, 'Beware: Deconstruction Ahead.'

To say that an author is a reader or a reader an author, to see a book as a human being or a human being a book, to describe the world as text or a text as the world, are ways of naming the readers craft.

As soon as we cease to believe in such an engineer and in a discourse which breaks with the received historical discourse, and as soon as we admit that every finite discourse is bound by a certain bricolage and that the engineer and the scientist are also species of bricoleurs , then the very idea of bricolage is menaced and the difference in which it took on its meaning breaks down.

I hate intellectual discussion. When I hear the words 'phenomenology' or 'structuralism', I reach for my buck knife.

Given Loughner's obsession with meaninglessness and language, maybe Foucault & Derrida deserve some fault here, too.

I question: do we really understand the differences between modernist and postmodernist?

When I was in college, I was a semiotics major, which is this hopelessly pretentious body of French literary theory.

Critics and academics often employ theories and philosophers in order to help them understand and dissect movies and books.

I tried to take seriously the idea that if you tortured language you might arrive at some new truth. Later it became clear to me that I was retreading ground by fighting the literary battles of the 1950s and 1960s, and that I was actually a bit bored by some of the books I professed to love.

I like Jacques Derrida; I think he's funny. I like my philosophy with a few jokes and puns. I know that that offends other philosophers; they think he's not taking things seriously, but he comes up with some marvellous puns. Why shouldn't you have a bit of fun while dealing with the deepest issues of the mind?

The book is not simply the object that one holds in one's hands, and it cannot remain within the little parallelpiped that contains it: its unity is variable and relative. As soon as one questions that unity, it loses its self-evidence; it indicates itself, constructs itself, only on the basis of a complex field of discourse.

I was really grateful to have a chance to have some really in-depth study about the power of language using a philosopher who taught at the University of Chicago by the name of Paul Ricoeur. I'm really happy to be in Chicago because a lot of what I do is rooted in his approach to language.

I was reading a lot of Jacques Derrida at the time, writing 'Beth.' He actually talked about zombies.