I know a sentence that is still more terrifying, more terribly ambiguous than “I am alone,” and it is, isolated from any other determining context, the sentence that would say to the other: “I am alone with you.” Meditate on the abyss of such a sentence: I am alone with you, with you I am alone, alone in all the world.

— Jacques Derrida

Jacques Derrida Quotes

I never give in to the temptation to be difficult just for the sake of being difficult. That would be too ridiculous.

— Jacques Derrida

Whatever precautions you take so the photograph will look like this or that, there comes a moment when the photograph surprises you. It is the other’s gaze that wins out and decides.

— Jacques Derrida

That is what deconstruction is made of: not the mixture but the tension between memory, fidelity, the preservation of something that has been given to us, and, at the same time, heterogeneity, something absolutely new, and a break.

— Jacques Derrida

Beyond the touchline there is nothing.

— Jacques Derrida

Circumcision, that’s all I’ve ever talked about.

— Jacques Derrida

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 .

— Jacques Derrida

I have always had school sickness, as others have seasickness. I cried when it was time to go back to school long after I was old enough to be ashamed of such behavior.

— Jacques Derrida

I have always had trouble recognizing myself in the features of the intellectual playing his political role according to the screenplay that you are familiar with and whose heritage deserves to be questioned.

— Jacques Derrida

In Algeria, I had begun to get into literature and philosophy. I dreamed of writing-and already models were instructing the dream, a certain language governed it.

— Jacques Derrida

A text is not a text unless it hides from the first comer, from the first glance, the law of its composition and the rules of its game. A text remains, moreover, forever imperceptible. Its laws and rules are not, however, harbored in the inaccessibility of a secret; it is simply that they can never be booked, in the present, into anything that could rigorously be called a perception.

— Jacques Derrida

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

— Jacques Derrida

There is no simple answer to such a question.

— Jacques Derrida

I know a sentence that is still more terrifying, more terribly ambiguous than “I am alone,” and it is, isolated from any other determining context, the sentence that would say to the other: “I am alone with you.” Meditate on the abyss of such a sentence: I am alone with you, with you I am alone, alone in all the world.

— Jacques Derrida

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.

— Jacques Derrida

What is certain is that I am not a Marxist, as someone said a long time ago, let us recall, in a witticism reported by Engels. Must we still cite Marx as an authority in order to say “I am not a Marxist”?

— Jacques Derrida

The wound can have just one proper name. I recognize that I love you by this: you leave in me a wound I do not want to replace.

— Jacques Derrida

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.

— Jacques Derrida

Infinite responsibility, therefore, no rest allowed for any form of good conscience.

— Jacques Derrida

I recognize that I love – you – by this: that you leave in me a wound that I do not want to replace.

— Jacques Derrida

Our faith is not assured, because faith can never be, it must never be a certainty.

— Jacques Derrida
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