Jacques Derrida Quotes

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.

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

I think the purpose of deconstruction is to take something apart and see how it works. If you're not going to put it back together again and watch it go, what's the point?

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

Skepticism is the first step on the road to philosophy.

The first step towards philosophy is incredulity.

Dialectic thought is an attempt to break through the coercion of logic by its own means.

I think that the world is very complex. I think that the movie is a good way to ask questions. To give answers, you would write a lot of books.

The great benefit of philosophy, which is also its great weakness, is that all its steps are taken in the spirit of doubt.

My profession is I'm a dissident philosopher.

That's something I learned as a philosophy major: The philosophy ethos is, always question, never rest.

The first thing you get from the humanities, when they're well taught, is critical thinking. Philosophy in particular can play that role, not just in universities but in schools as well.

There is nothing outside the text

If you've never met a student from the University of Chicago, I'll describe him to you. If you give him a glass of water, he says, 'This is a glass of water. But is it a glass of water? And if it is a glass of water, why is it a glass of water?' And eventually he dies of thirst.

Fuzzy thinking is, after all, just one step above not thinking at all. But to take the ideas of serious transformational thinkers and philosophers and throw the "new age" label at them is also abhorrent.

I see philosophy as a fairly abstract activity, as concerned mainly with the analysis of criticism and concepts, and of course most usefully of scientific concepts.

Why' is the only question that bothers people enough to have an entire letter of the alphabet named after it. The alphabet does not go 'A B C D What? When? How?' but it does go 'V W X Why? Z.

The assumption that Derrida always knows what he is talking about is not Derridean.

Thinking begins when you ask really difficult questions.

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.

Philosophy ought to question the basic assumptions of the age. Thinking through, critically and carefully, what most of us take for granted is, I believe, the chief task of philosophy, and the task that makes philosophy a worthwhile activity.

All sentences of the type 'deconstruction is X' or 'deconstruction is not X', a priori miss the point, which is to say that they are at least false. As you know, one of the principal things at stake in what is called in my texts 'deconstruction', is precisely the delimiting of ontology and above all of the third-person present indicative: S is P.

There is no rigorous and effective deconstruction without the faithful memory of philosophies and literatures, without the respectful and competent reading of texts of the past, as well as singular works of our own time. Deconstruction is also a certain thinking about tradition and context. Mark Taylor evokes this with great clarity in the course of a remarkable introduction. He reconstitutes a set of premises without which no deconstruction could have seen the light of day.

Whatever we think about and question a lot becomes questionable.

To philosophize is to doubt.