Jacques Derrida Quotes on Knowledge
Derrida's early work — Of Grammatology (1967), Writing and Difference, Speech and Phenomena — develops the deconstructive analysis of the metaphysics of presence that has, on Derrida's reading, organized the Western philosophical tradition since Plato. Différance — neither a word nor a concept but the play of differing and deferring through which signification is generated — names the irreducible movement that the privileging of speech over writing, presence over absence, identity over difference has systematically suppressed. The later Derrida of the political and ethical writings — Specters of Marx, Politics of Friendship, The Gift of Death — extends the deconstructive analysis to inheritance, hospitality, justice, and the relation to the religious traditions that the early work had read principally as documents of metaphysics.
Quotes
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“There is nothing outside of the text.”
Il n'y a pas de hors-texte. -
Attributed to Jacques Derrida:
“Deconstruction is not a method, and cannot be transformed into one.”
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Attributed to Jacques Derrida:
“The future can only be anticipated in the form of an absolute danger.”
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“Il n'y a pas de hors-texte.”
Of Grammatology (1967). G. Spivak translated this as "There is nothing outside the text," which Derrida opponents have characterized to mean that nothing exists but language. Later scholarship has translated it as "There is no outside-of-text" or "There is nothing free of context," i.e. all experience is mediated by interpretation. -
“The Ends of Man," Margins of Philosophy , tr. w/ notes by Alan Bass. The University of Chicago Press. Chicago, 1982. (original French published in Paris, 1972, as Marges de la philosophie ). p. 116”
At the end of Being and Nothingness , ... Being in-itself and Being for-itself were of Being ; and this totality of beings, in which they were effected, itself was linked up to itself, relating and appearing to itself, by means of the essential project of human-reality. What was named in this way, in an allegedly neutral and undetermined way, was nothing other than the metaphysical unity of man an -
“The Ends of Man," Margins of Philosophy , tr. w/ notes by Alan Bass. The University of Chicago Press. Chicago, 1982. (original French published in Paris, 1972, as Marges de la philosophie ). p. 123”
The end of man (as a factual anthropological limit) is announced to thought from the vantage of the end of man (as a determined opening or the infinity of a telos ). Man is that which is in relation to his end, in the fundamentally equivocal sense of the word. Since always. -
“What is called "objectivity," scientific for instance (in which I firmly believe, in a given situation) imposes itself only within a context which is extremely vast, old, firmly established, or rooted in a network of conventions … and yet which still remains a context.”
Limited Inc (1977) -
“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.”
Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences," Writing and Difference , tr. w/ intro & notes by Alan Bass. The University of Chicago Press. Chicago, 1978. p. 285 -
“Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences," Writing and Difference , tr. w/ intro & notes by Alan Bass. The University of Chicago Press. Chicago, 1978. p. 285”
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. -
“Monsters cannot be announced. One cannot say: 'here are our monsters', without immediately turning the monsters into pets.”
Some Statements and Truisms about Neologisms, Newisms, Postisms, Parasitisms, and other small Seismisms , The States of Theory, ed. David Carroll, New York: Columbia University Press, 1989. -
“Some Statements and Truisms about Neologisms, Newisms, Postisms, Parasitisms, and other small Seismisms , The States of Theory, ed. David Carroll, New York: Columbia University Press, 1989.”
Monsters cannot be announced. One cannot say: 'here are our monsters', without immediately turning the monsters into pets. -
“Whatever the poverty of our knowledge in this respect, it is certain that the question of the sign is itself more or less, or in any event something other, than a sign of the times. To dream of reducing it to a sign of the times is to dream of violence.”
Writing and Difference(1978) | Force and Signification -
“No one gets angry at a mathematician or a physicist whom he or she doesn't understand at all, or at someone who speaks a foreign language, but rather at someone who tampers with your own language, with this 'relation,' precisely, which is yours.”
Derrida Jacques, Elisabeth Weber (1995), Points...: Interviews, 1974-1994 . p. 115