Wisdom of Jacques Derrida

Jacques Derrida (July 15th,1930 – October 9th, 2004) was a French Algerian philosopher and author of over 40 books and hundreds of essays. He significantly influenced philosophy, sociolinguistics, music, literature, architecture, applied linguistics, political theory, law, psychoanalysis, anthropology, and historiography.

Below we list some words of wisdom from Jacques Derrida.

"If things were simple, word would have gotten around."

"Who ever said that one was born just once?"

"We are all mediators, translators."

"Actually, when I write, there is a feeling of necessity, of something that is stronger than myself that demands that I must write as I write."

"I speak only one language, and it is not my own."

"What cannot be said above all must not be silenced but written."

"The poet…is the man of metaphor: while the philosopher is interested only in the truth of meaning, beyond even signs and names, and the sophist manipulates empty signs…the poet plays on the multiplicity of signifiers."

"Peace is only possible when one of the warring sides takes the first step, the hazardous initiative, the risk of opening up dialogue, and decides to make the gesture that will lead not only to an armistice but to peace."

"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."

"I do everything I think possible or acceptable to escape from this trap."

"Even if we're in a state of hopelessness, a sense of expectation is an integral part of our relationship to time. Hopelessness is possible only because we do hope that some good, loving someone could come. If that's what Heidegger meant, then I agree with him."

"Psychoanalysis has taught that the dead – a dead parent, for example – can be more alive for us, more powerful, more scary, than the living. It is the question of ghosts."

"I was wondering myself where I am going. So I would answer you by saying, first, that I am trying, precisely, to put myself at a point so that I do not know any longer where I am going."

"There is a future which is predictable, programmed, scheduled, foreseeable. But there is a future, l'avenir (to come) which refers to someone who comes whose arrival is totally unexpected. For me, that is the real future. That which is totally unpredictable. The Other who comes without my being able to anticipate their arrival. So if there is a real future, beyond the other known future, it is l'avenir in that it is the coming of the Other when I am completely unable to foresee their arrival."

"One often speaks without seeing, without knowing, without meaning what one says."

"There is nothing outside the text"

"I always dream of a pen that would be a syringe."
"To pretend, I actually do the thing: I have therefore only pretended to pretend."

"Learning to live ought to mean learning to die - to acknowledge, to accept, an absolute mortality - without positive outcome, or resurrection, or redemption, for oneself or for anyone else. That has been the old philosophical injunction since Plato: to be a philosopher is to learn how to die."

"If I only did what I can do, I wouldn't do anything"

"Within the university... you can study without waiting for any efficient or immediate result. You may search, just for the sake of searching, and try for the sake of trying. So there is a possibility of what I would call playing. It's perhaps the only place within society where play is possible to such an extent."

"The only attitude (the only politics--judicial, medical, pedagogical and so forth) I would absolutely condemn is one which, directly or indirectly, cuts off the possibility of an essentially interminable questioning, that is, an effective and thus transforming questioning."

"Everything is arranged so that it be this way, this is what is called culture."

"Monsters cannot be announced. One cannot say: 'Here are our monsters,' without immediately turning the monsters into pets."

"The end approaches, but the apocalypse is long lived."

"As soon as there is language, generality has entered the scene."

"I say things that contradict each other, that are in real tension with each other, that compose me, that make me live, and that will make me die."

"The trace I leave to me means at once my death, to come or already come, and the hope that it will survive me. It is not an ambition of immortality; it is fundamental. I leave here a bit of paper, I leave, I die; it is impossible to exit this structure; it is the unchanging form of my life. Every time I let something go, I live my death in writing."

"If you read philosophical texts of the tradition, you'll notice they almost never said 'I,' and didn't speak in the first person. From Aristotle to Heidegger, they try to consider their own lives as something marginal or accidental. What was essential was their teaching and their thinking. Biography is something empirical and outside, and is considered an accident that isn't necessarily or essentially linked to the philosophical activity or system."

"The blindness that opens the eye is not the one that darkens vision. Tears and not sight are the essence of the eye."

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