Jacques Derrida Quotes

To pretend, I actually do the thing: I have therefore only pretended to pretend.

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

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

I always dream of a pen that would be a syringe.

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

No one gets angry at a mathematician or a physicist whom he or she doesn't understand, or at someone who speaks a foreign language, but rather at someone who tampers with your own language.

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 signifieds.

I believe in the value of the book, which keeps something irreplaceable, and in the necessity of fighting to secure its respect.

If this work seems so threatening, this is because it isn't simply eccentric or strange, but competent, rigorously argued, and carrying conviction

Such a caring for death, an awakening that keeps vigil over death, a conscience that looks death in the face, is another name for freedom.

We are given over to absolute solitude. No one can speak with us and no one can speak for us; we must take it upon ourselves, each of us must take it upon himself.

how can I say 'I love you', if I know the love is you .. the word 'love' either as a verb or a noun would be destroyed in front of you

Cinema plus Psychoanalysis equals the Science of Ghosts.

Contrary to what phenomenology—which is always phenomenology of perception—has tried to make us believe, contrary to what our desire cannot fail to be tempted into believing, the thing itself always escapes.

The traditional statement about language is that it is in itself living, and that writing is the dead part of language.

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.

Surviving - that is the other name of a mourning whose possibility is never to be awaited.

I rightly pass for an atheist.

Il n'y a pas de hors-texte.

The wound can have (should only 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.

I would like to write you so simply, so simply, so simply. Without having anything ever catch the eye, excepting yours alone, ... so that above all the language remains self-evidently secret, as if it were being invented at every step, and as if it were burning immediately

I cannot respond to the call, the request, the obligation, or even the love of another, without sacrificing the other other, the other others

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.

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.

Cities have often been compared to language: you can read a city, it’s said, as you read a book. But the metaphor can be inverted. The journeys we make during the reading of a book trace out, in some way, the private spaces we inhabit. There are texts that will always be our dead-end streets; fragments that will be bridges; words that will be like the scaffolding that protects fragile constructions. T.S. Eliot: a plant growing in the debris of a ruined building; Salvador Novo: a tree-lined street transformed into an expressway; Tomas Segovia: a boulevard, a breath of air; Roberto Bolano: a rooftop terrace; Isabel Allende: a (magically real) shopping mall; Gilles Deleuze: a summit; and Jacques Derrida: a pothole. Robert Walser: a chink in the wall, for looking through to the other side; Charles Baudelaire: a waiting room; Hannah Arendt: a tower, an Archimedean point; Martin Heidegger: a cul-de-sac; Walter Benjamin: a one-way street walked down against the flow.

How can another see into me, into my most secret self, without my being able to see in there myself? And without my being able to see him in me. And if my secret self, that which can be revealed only to the other, to the wholly other, to God if you wish, is a secret that I will never reflect on, that I will never know or experience or possess as my own, then what sense is there in saying that it is my secret, or in saying more generally that a secret belongs, that it is proper to or belongs to some one, or to some other who remains someone. It's perhaps there that we find the secret of secrecy. Namely, that it is not a matter of knowing and that it is there for no one. A secret doesn't belong, it can never be said to be at home or in its place. The question of the self: who am I not in the sense of who am I but rather who is this I that can say who? What is the- I and what becomes of responsibility once the identity of the I trembles in secret?

In general, I try and distinguish between what one calls the Future and “l’avenir” [the ‘to come]. The future is that which – tomorrow, later, next century – will be. 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.

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

You always return to the water...

The lie is the future, one may venture to say [...]. To tell the truth is, on the contrary, to say what is or what will have been and it would instead prefer the past.

The French philosopher Jacques Derrida likens writing fiction to a software code that operates in the hardware of your mind. Stringing together separate macros that, combined, will create a reaction.

The Ethical can therefore end up making us irresponsible.

Was it John Searle who called Jacques Derrida the sort of philosopher who gives bullshit a bad name?

In 2004, Jacques Derrida said that a change was under way. Torture damages the inflicter as well as the inflicted. It’s no coincidence that one of the Abu Ghraib torturers came to the military directly from a job as a chicken processor. It might be slow, Derrida said, but eventually the spectacle of our abuse of animals will be intolerable to our sense of who we are.

... and in the homosexual phase which would follow Eurydice's death ... Orpheus sings no more, he writes.

Therefore we will not listen to the source itself in order to learn what it is or what it means, but rather to the turns of speech, the allegories, figures, metaphors, as you will, into which the source has deviated, in order to lose it or rediscover it—which always amounts to the same.

The difference between the who and the what at the heart of love, separates the heart. It is often said that love is the movement of the heart. Does my heart move because I love someone who is an absolute singularity, or because I love the way that someone is? Often love starts with some type of seduction. One is attracted because the other is like this or like that. Inversely, love is disappointed and dies when one comes to realize the other person doesn’t merit our love. The other person isn’t like this or that. So at the death of love, it appears that one stops loving another not because of who they are but because they are such and such. That is to say, the history of love, the heart of love, is divided between the who and what. The question of being, to return to philosophy, because the first question of philosophy is: What is it to be? What is “being”? The question of being is itself always already divided between who and what. Is “Being” someone or something? I speak of it abstractly, but I think that whoever starts to love, is in love or stops loving, is caught between this division of the who and the what. One wants to be true to someone—singularly, irreplaceably—and one perceives that this someone isn’t x or y. They didn’t have the properties, the images, that I thought I’d loved. So fidelity is threatened by the difference between the who and the what.

Every sign, linguistic or nonlinguistic, spoken or written (in the usual sense of this opposition), as a small or large unity, can be cited, put between quotation marks; thereby it can break with every given context, and engender infinitely new contexts in an absolutely nonsaturable fashion. This does not suppose that the mark is valid outside its context, but on the contrary that there are only contexts without any center of absolute anchoring. This citationality, duplication, or duplicity, this iterability of the mark is not an accident or anomaly, but is that (normal/abnormal) without which a mark could no longer even have a so-called “normal” functioning. What would a mark be that one could not cite? And whose origin could not be lost on the way?

The difficulties with the rule of readerly progression are many: one is that, if one followed the same pattern into adulthood, turning always to books of obvious increasing complexity, you’d be left ultimately with nothing but Finnegans Wake and the complete works of the French deconstructionist theorist Jacques Derrida to cheer your deathbed.

That philosophy died yesterday, since Hegel or Marx, Nietzsche, or Heidegger—and philosophy should still wander toward the meaning of its death—or that it has always lived knowing itself to be dying... that philosophy died one day, within history, or that it has always fed on its own agony, on the violent way it opens history by opposing itself to nonphilosophy, which is its past and its concern, its death and wellspring; that beyond the death, or dying nature, of philosophy, perhaps even because of it, thought still has a future, or even, as is said today, is still entirely to come because of what philosophy has held in store; or, more strangely still, that the future itself has a future—all these are unanswerable questions. By right of birth, and for one time at least, these are problems put to philosophy as problems philosophy cannot resolve.

There is no sense in doing without the concepts of metaphysics in order to attack metaphysics. We have no language—no syntax and no lexicon—which is alien to this history; we cannot utter a single destructive proposition which has not already slipped into the form, the logic, and the implicit postulations of precisely what it seeks to contest.

The bricoleur, says Levi-Strauss, is someone who uses 'the means at hand,' that is, the instruments he finds at his disposition around him, those which are already there, which had not been especially conceived with an eye to the operation for which they are to be used and to which one tries by trial and error to adapt them, not hesitating to change them whenever it appears necessary, or to try several of them at once, even if their form and their origin are heterogenous—and so forth. There is therefore a critique of language in the form of bricolage, and it has even been said that bricolage is critical language itself…If one calls bricolage the necessity of borrowing one's concepts from the text of a heritage which is more or less coherent or ruined, it must be said that every discourse is bricoleur.

There is no simple answer to such a question

There are things like reflecting pools, and images, an infinite reference from one to the other, but no longer a source, a spring. There is no longer any simple origin. For what is reflected it split in itself and not only as an addition to itself of its image. The reflection, the image, the double, splits what it doubles. The origin of the speculation becomes a difference. What can look at itself is not one; and the law of the addition of the origin to its representation, or the thing to its image, is that one plus one makes at least three.

That which I call a text is practically everything… Speech is a text, gesture is a text, reality is a text in this new sense. This is not about re-establishing graphocentrism alongside logocentrism or phonocentrism or text-centrism. The text is not a centre. The text is an openness without borders, of ever-differentiating references.

Derrida s’intéressait moins au roman qu’à l’écriture, et ce qui l’a fasciné c’est le fait que j’ai fait de l’écriture un roman.

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

Speech frightens me because, by never saying enough, I also say too much.

And cranky old Jacques Derrida notwithstanding, we do love our dichotomies.

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.

But because me and myself, as you no doubt are well aware, we are going to die, my relation—and yours too—to the event of this text, which otherwise never quite makes it, our relation is that of a structurally posthumous necessity. Suppose, in that case, that I am not alone in my claim to know the idiomatic code (whose notion itself is already contradictory) of this event. What if somewhere, here or there, there are shares in this non-secret’s secret? Even so the scene would not be changed. The accomplices, as you are once again well aware, are also bound to die.

... the central signified, the original or transcendental signified, is never absolutely present outside a system of differences. The absence of the transcendental signified extends the domain and the interplay of signification ad infinitum.

School of Resentment is a term coined by critic Harold Bloom to describe related schools of literary criticism which have gained prominence in academia since the 1970s and which Bloom contends are preoccupied with political and social activism at the expense of aesthetic values.[1] Broadly, Bloom terms "Schools of Resentment" approaches associated with Marxist critical theory, including African American studies, Marxist literary criticism, New Historicist criticism, feminist criticism, and poststructuralism—specifically as promoted by Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. The School of Resentment is usually defined as all scholars who wish to enlarge the Western canon by adding to it more works by authors from minority groups without regard to aesthetic merit and/or influence over time, or those who argue that some works commonly thought canonical promote sexist, racist or otherwise biased values and should therefore be removed from the canon. Bloom contends that the School of Resentment threatens the nature of the canon itself and may lead to its eventual demise. Philosopher Richard Rorty[2] agreed that Bloom is at least partly accurate in describing the School of Resentment, writing that those identified by Bloom do in fact routinely use "subversive, oppositional discourse" to attack the canon specifically and Western culture in general.

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.

Everyone must assume their own death, that is to say, the one thing in the world that no one else can either give or take: therein resides freedom and responsibility.

Be alert to these invisible quotation marks, even within a word.

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

Philosophers are doomed to find Hegel waiting patiently at the end of whatever road we travel. (Richard Porty) Hegelianism only extends its historical domination, finally unfolding its immense enveloping resources without obstacle. (Jacques Derrida)

What must a text be if it can, by itself in a way, turn itself in order to shine again, after an eclipse, with a different light, in a time that is no longer that of its productive source (and was it ever contemporaneous with it?), and then again repeat this resurgence after several deaths, counting, among several others, those of the author, and the simulacrum of a multiple extinction?

I do not teach truth as such; I do not transform myself into a diaphanous mouthpiece of eternal pedagogy: I settle accounts , however I can, on a certain number of problems; with you and with me or me, and through you, me and me, with a certain number of authorities represented here. I understand that the place I am now occupying will not be left out of the exhibit or withdrawn form the scene. Nor do I intend to withhold even that which I shall call, to save time, an autobiographical demonstration, although I must ask you to shift its sense a little and to listen to it with another ear. I wish to take a certain pleasure in this, so that you may learn this pleasure from me.

Here again, the difference between the effective and the virtual, between mourning and its possibility, seems fragile and porous. The anguished apprehension of mourning (without which the act of friendship would not spring forth in its very energy) insinuates itself a priori and anticipates itself; it haunts and plunges the friend, before mourning, into mourning. This apprehension weeps before the lamentation, it weeps death before death, and this is the very respiration of friendship, the extreme of its possibility. Hence surviving is at once the essence, the origin and the possibility, the condition of possibility of friendship; it is the grieved act of loving. This time of surviving thus gives the time of friendship.

Not all of Derrida's writing is to everyone's taste. He had an irritating habit of overusing the rhetorical question, which lends itself easily to parody: 'What is it, to speak? How can I even speak of this? Who is this "I" who speaks of speaking?

Let us narrow the arguments down further. In certain respects, the theme of supplementarity is certainly no more than one theme among others. It is in a chain, carried by it. Perhaps one could substitute something else for it. But it happens that this theme describes the chain itself, the being-chain of a textual chain, the structure of substitution, the articulation of desire and of language, the logic of all conceptual oppositions taken over by Rousseau…It tells us in a text what a text is, it tells us in writing what writing it, in Rousseau’s writing it tells us Jean-Jacque’s desire etc…the concept of the supplement and the theory of writing designate textuality itself in Rousseau’s text in an indefinitely multiplied structure—en abyme.

Let us being again. To take some examples: why should “literature” still designate that which already breaks away from literature—away from what has always been conceived and signified under that name—or that which, not merely escaping literature, implacably destroys it? (Posed in these terms, the question would already be caught in the assurance of a certain fore-knowledge: can “what has always been conceived and signified under that name” be considered fundamentally homogeneous, univocal, or nonconflictual?) To take other examples: what historical and strategic function should henceforth be assigned to the quotation marks, whether visible or invisible, which transform this into a “book,” or which still make the deconstruction of philosophy into a “philosophical discourse”?

life carries with it things that are not: the ghosts of the dead, of possible futures not realised, pasts that could have been.

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.

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

The blindness that opens the eye is not the one that darkens vision.

Pharmakon means drug, but as Jacques Derrida and others have pointed out, the word in Greek famously refuses to designate whether poison or cure. It holds both in the bowl.

But to learn to live, to learn it from oneself and by oneself, all alone, to teach oneself to live (“I would like to learn to live finally”), is that not impossible for a living being? Is it not what logic itself forbids? To live, by definition, is not something one learns. Not from oneself, it is not learned from life, taught by life. Only from the other and by death. In

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.

In order to approach now the very concept of forgiveness, logic and common sense agree for once with the paradox: it is necessary, it seems to me, to begin from the fact that, yes, there is the unforgivable. Is this not, in truth, the only thing to forgive? The only thing that calls for forgiveness? If one is only prepared to forgive what appears forgivable, what the church calls 'venial sin', then the very idea of forgiveness would disappear. If there is something to forgive, it would be what in religious language is called mortal sin, the worst, the unforgivable crime or harm.

And still the text will remain, if it is really cryptic and parodying (and I tell you that it is so through and through. I might as well tell you since it won’t be of any help to you. Even my admission can very well be a lie because there is dissimulation only if one tells the truth, only if one tells that one is telling the truth), still the text will remain indefinitely open, cryptic and parodying.

Writing is nothing but the representation of speech; it is bizarre that one gives more care to the determining of the image than to the object.—J.-J. Rousseau, Fragment inédit d’un essai sur les langues

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”?

In the proper sense of the word, religion exists once the secret of the sacred, orgiastic, or demonic mystery has been, if not destroyed, at least integrated, and finally subjected to the sphere of responsibility.

It goes without saying that these effects do not suffice to annul the necessity for a “change of terrain.” It also goes without saying that the choice between these two forms of deconstruction cannot be simple and unique. A new writing must weave and interlace these two motifs of deconstruction. Which amounts to saying that one must speak several languages and produce several texts at once. I would like to point out especially that the style of the first deconstruction is mostly that of the Heideggerian questions, and the other is mostly the one which dominates France today. I am purposely speaking in terms of a dominant style: because there are also breaks and changes of terrain in texts of the Heideggerian type; because the “change of terrain” is far from upsetting the entire French landscape to which I am referring; because what we need, perhaps, as Nietzsche said, is a change of “style”; and if there is style, Nietzsche reminded us, it must be plural.

Elu jaatamine pole muud kui teatavat sorti mõte surmast. See pole ei vastandumine ega ka ükskõiksus surma suhtes. Tõepoolest, võiks peaaegu öelda et midagi vastupidist, kui see poleks omakorda liiga lihtne vastandumisele järele andmine

The fact is that the buildings here were not made to speak to the world as we know it, but to the citizens of the USSR. Visible from afar and unfailingly spectacular, they are effectively monuments, ideological markers endowed with an almost mystical aura by their positioning in space and expressive power. "By its incongruity, by its inhuman stature" writes the philosopher Jacques Derrida, "the monumental dimension serves to emphasize the non-representable nature of the very concept that it evokes." This concept, whether in Grodno, Kiev or Dushanbe, is might. The might of power. A power that would soon become illusory and whose crumbling is indeed manifested by the growing stylistic diversity of this architecture.

Still less, despite appearances, will it have been a collection of three “essays” whose itinerary it would be time, after the fact, to recognize; whose continuity and underlying laws could now be pointed out; indeed, whose overall concept or meaning could at last, with all the insistence required on such occasions, be squarely set forth. I will not feign, according to the code, either premeditation or improvisation. These texts are assembled otherwise; it is not my intention here to present them.

there is no replacement as such in that pleasure retains its dominance. The reality principle “does not abandon the intention of ultimately obtaining pleasure, but it nevertheless demands and carries into effect the postponement of satisfaction, the abandonment of a number of possibilities of gaining satisfaction and the temporary toleration of unpleasure as a step on the long indirect road to pleasure.

(the pharmakon is neither remedy now poison, neither good nor evil, neither the inside nor the outside, neither speech nor writing; the supplement is neither a plus nor a minus, neither an outside nor the complement of an inside, neither accident nor essence, etc.; the hymen is neither confusion nor distinction, neither identity nor difference, neither consummation nor virginity, neither the veil nor unveiling, neither the inside nor the outside, etc.; the gram is neither a signifier nor a signified, neither a sign nor a thing, neither a presence nor an absence, neither a position nor a negation, etc.; spacing is neither space nor time; the incision is neither the incised integrity of a beginning, or of a simple cutting into, nor simple secondarity. Neither/nor, that is, simultaneously either or; the mark is also the marginal limit, the march, etc.)

These two poles, the unconditional and the conditional, are absolutely heterogeneous, and must remain irreducible to one another. They are nonetheless indissociable: if one wants, and it is necessary, forgiveness to become effective, concrete, historic; if one wants it to arrive, to happen by changing things, it is necessary that this purity engage itself in a series of conditions of all kinds (psychosociological, political, etc.). It is between these two poles, irreconcilable but indissociable, that decisions and responsibilities are to be taken. Yet despite all the confusions which reduce forgiveness to amnesty or to amnesia, to acquittal or prescription, to the work of mourning or some political therapy of reconciliation, in short to some historical ecology, it must never be forgotten, nevertheless, that all of that refers to a certain idea of pure and unconditional forgiveness, without which this discourse would not have the least meaning. What complicates the question of ‘meaning’ is again what I suggested a moment ago: pure and unconditional forgiveness, in order to have its own meaning, must have no ‘meaning’, no finality, even no intelligibility. It is a madness of the impossible.

181. Pharmakon means drug, but as Jacques Derrida and others have pointed out, the word in Greek famously refuses to designate whether poison or cure. It holds both in the bowl. In the dialogues Plato uses the word to refer to everything from an illness, its cause, its cure, a recipe, a charm, a substance, a spell, artificial color, and paint.

Western philosophy exhibits schemas such as the substance-attributes relation, where substance is the present being which the attributes modify;

five traits: decision, desire, will, closure, and security.

Glu de l'étang lait de ma mort noyée [Glue of the pool milk of my death drowned]

Er is niets buiten de tekst.

There are always differences, tensions, paradoxes between what a text says (or what an author wants to say, or thinks s/he is saying) and what a text does.

Differance brings together the two notions of differing and deferring.

Deconstruction wouldn’t make much sense without the structures that are subject to destructuring.

In truth, Derrida has always been preoccupied (in the strongest senses of that word) by what precedes or exceeds language.

What are man’s truths after all? They are man’s irrefutable errors.

If things were simple, word would have gotten around.

Religion is responsibility or it is nothing at all. Its history derives its sense entirely from the idea of a passage to responsibility.

The progress of writing is thus a natural progress. And it is a progress of reason.

by this very forgetting, he arrives at a sense for truth.

Je voudrais apprendre à vivre enfin.

Metaphysics is a closed system;

we seem to know who we are,

Language bears within itself the necessity of its own critique.

Every revolution, whether atheistic or religious, bears witness to a return of the sacred ― in the form of enthusiasm or fervour, otherwise known as the presence of the gods within us

Are you a relativist simply because you say, for instance, that the other is the other, and that every other is other than the other? If I want to pay attention to the singularity of the other, the singularity of the situation, the singularity of language, is that relativism? … No, relativism is a doctrine which has its own history in which there are only points of view with no absolute necessity, or no references to absolutes. That is the opposite to what I have to say. … I have never said such a thing. Neither have I ever used the word relativism.

Parallel to other theorists of subjective interdependency, the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas held that because the self is constituted only through its relationship to the other, we are ethically compelled to that other's care. Drawing on this idea and on cultures of hospitality, the French philosopher Jacques Derrida advocated an ethics of limitless hospitality to 'the stranger.

For there to be a gift, there must be no reciprocity, return, exchange, countergift, or debt. (...) For there to be a gift, it is necessary that the donee not give back, amortize, reimburse, (...)

The 1980s witnessed radical advances in the theorisation of the study of literature in the universities. It had begun in France in the 1960s and it made a large impact on the higher education establishments of Britain and America. New life was breathed into psychoanalytic and Marxist theory, while structuralism gave way to post-structuralism. The stability of the text as a focus of study was challenged by deconstruction, a theory developed by the French philosopher, Jacques Derrida, which represented a complete fracture with the old liberal-formalist mode of reading. Coherence and unity were seen as illusory and readers were liberated to aim at their own meanings. Hardy’s texts were at the centre of these theoretical movements, including one that came to prominence in the 1980s, feminism.

The word archive Jacques Derrida tells us, comes from the ancient Greek work “the house of the ruler.” When I first learned about this etymology, I was taken with the use of house (a lover of haunted house stories, I'm a sucker for architecture metaphors), but it is the power, the authority, that is the most telling element. What is placed in or left out of the archive is a political act, dictated by the archivist and the political context in which she lives. This is true whether it’s a parent deciding whats worth recording of a child’s early life or---like Europe and its Stolpersteines, its “stumbling blocks’"---a continent publicly reckoning with its past. Here is where Sebastian took his first fat-footed baby steps; here is the house where Judith was living when we took her to her death.

I remain ‘torn’ (between a ‘hyberbolic’ ethical vision of forgiveness, pure forgiveness, and the reality of a society at work in pragmatic processes of reconciliation). But without power, desire, or need to decide. The two poles are irreducible to one another, certainly, but they remain indissociable. In order to inflect politics, or what you just called the ‘pragmatic processes’, in order to change the law (which, thus, finds itself between the two poles, the ‘ideal’ and the ‘empirical’ – and what is more important to me here is, between these two, this universalising mediation, this history of the law, the possibility of this progress of the law), it is necessary to refer to a ‘“hyperbolic” ethical vision of forgiveness’. Even if I were not sure of the words ‘vision’ or ‘ethics’ in this case, let us say that only this inflexible exigence can orient a history of laws, and evolution of the law. It alone can inspire here, now, in the urgency, without waiting, response and responsibilities.

One of the meanings of what is called a victim ( a victim of anything or anyone whatsoever) is precisely to be erased in its meaning as victim. The absolute victim is a victim who cannot even protest. One cannot even identify the victim as victim. He or she cannot even present himself or herself as such. He or she is completely covered by language, annihilated by history, a victim one cannot identify.

You do not eat these carnivorous animals, you imitate them; you hunger only for the innocent and gentle beast who do no harm to anyone, who are attached to you, who serve you,and that you devour as a reward for their servicers.

If the invention of derivatives was the financial world's modernist dawn, the current crisis is unsettlingly like the birth of postmodernism. For anyone who studied literature in college in the past few decades, there is a weird familiarity about the current crisis: value, in the realm of finance capital, parallels the elusive nature of meaning in deconstrucitonism. According to Jacques Derrida, the doyen of the school, meaning can never be precisely located; instead, it is always 'deferred,' moved elsewhere, located in other meanings, which refer and defer to other meanings—a snake permanently and necessarily eating its own tail. This process is fluid and constant, but at moments the perpetual process of deferral stalls and collapses in on itself. Derrida called this moment an 'aporia,' from a Greek term meaning 'impasse.' There is something both amusing and appalling about seeing his theories acted out in the world markets to such cataclysmic effect.

From this point of view, Rousseau knew that death is not the simple outside of life. Death by writing also inaugurates life. “I can certainly say that I never began to live, until I looked upon myself as a dead man” (Confessions, Book 6 [p. 236]).

No one can deny seriously any more, or for very long, that men do all they can in order to dissimulate this cruelty or to hide it from themselves; in order to organize on a global scale the forgetting or misunderstanding of this violence, which some would compare to the worst cases of genocide (there are also animal genocides: the number of species endangered because of man takes one’s breath away). One should neither abuse the figure of genocide nor too quickly consider it explained away. It gets more complicated: the annihilation of certain species is indeed in process, but it is occurring through the organization and exploitation of an artificial, infernal, virtually interminable survival, in conditions that previous generations would have judged monstrous, outside of every presumed norm of a life proper to animals that are thus exterminated by means of the continued existence or even their overpopulation. As if, for example, instead of throwing a people into ovens and gas chambers (let’s say Nazi) doctors and geneticists had decided to organize the overproduction and overgeneration of Jews, gypsies, and homosexuals by means of artificial insemination, so that, being continually more numerous and better fed, they could be destined in always increasing numbers for the same hell, that of the imposition of genetic experimentation, or extermination by gas or by fire.

Freud does at this point shift ground. He moves from an energetic to a topological model of the psyche. So that there be no contradiction, Freud assigns the pleasure principle to its own agency of the personality. “We know,” Freud reminds us, “that the pleasure principle is proper to a primary method of working on the part of the mental apparatus, but that, from the point of view of the self-preservation of the organism among the difficulties of the external world, it is from the very outset inefficient and even highly dangerous.” That is, the PP is blind. In itself, it is not a tendency but pure automaticity which, with respect to another topos undergoes a mutation by which is “is replaced by the reality principle.” A change in place obviates the contradiction but sets the places into relation by which the PP becomes the reality principle (RP.)

There is today in the world a dominant discourse […] This dominating discourse often has the manic, jubilatory, and incantatory form that Freud assigned to the so-called triumphant phase of mourning work. The incantation repeats and ritualizes itself, it holds forth and holds to formulas, like any animistic magic. To the rhythm of a cadenced march, it proclaims: Marx is dead, communism is dead, very dead, and along with it its hopes, its discourse, its theories, and its practices. It says: long live capitalism, long live the market, here’s to the survival of economic and political liberalism!

For the same reason there is nowhere to begin to trace the sheaf or the graphics of differance. For what is put into question is precisely the quest for a rightful beginning, an absolute point of departure, a principal responsibility. The problematic of writing is opened by putting into question the value of the arkhe. What I will propose here will not be elaborated simply as a philosophical discourse, operating according to principles, postulates, axioms, or definitions, and proceeding along the discursive lines of a linear order of reasons. In the delineation of differance everything is strategic and adventurous. Strategic because no transcendent truth present outside the field of writing can govern theologically the totality of the field. Adventurous because this strategy is a not simple strategy in the sense that strategy orients tactics according to a final goal, a telos or theme of domination, a mastery and ultimate reappropriation of the development of the field. Finally, a strategy without finality, what might be called blind tactics, or empirical wandering if the value of empiricism did not itself acquire its entire meaning in opposition to philosophical responsibility. If there is a certain wandering in the tracing of differance, it no more follows the lines of philosophical-logical discourse than that of its symmetrical and integral inverse, empirical-logical discourse. The concept of play keeps itself beyond this opposition, announcing, on the eve of philosophy and beyond it, the unity of chance and necessity in calculations without end.

What interests me about the eyes is that they are part of the body that doesn't age. In other words, if one looks for ones childhood across all the signs of aging in the body, the deterioration of musculature, the whitening of the hair, changes in height and weight, one can find one's childhood in the look of the eyes.

Las costumbres se volvieron más libres, pero, desde el punto de vista cultural, con la desaparición de toda una ilustre generación —Mauriac, Camus, Sartre, Aron, Merleau Ponty, Malraux—, en aquellos años vino una discreta retracción cultural, en la que, en vez de creadores, los maîtres à penser pasaron a ser los críticos, estructuralistas primero, a la manera de Michel Foucault y Roland Barthes, y luego los deconstructivistas, tipo Gilles Deleuze y Jacques Derrida, de arrogantes y esotéricas retóricas, aislados en sus cábalas de devotos y alejados del gran público, cuya vida cultural, a consecuencia de esa evolución, resultó banalizándose cada vez más.

The end of life, its goal and its end point, is this return to the inorganic, so that life and the evolution of life are but a detour…of the inorganic, a race to death…death (the end toward which life tends) is inscribed as an internal law and not as an accident of life. … It is life that is an accident, inasmuch as life dies “for internal reasons.

That is why the maxim of natural goodness: “Do to others as you would have them do unto you” should be tempered by this other maxim, “much less perfect indeed, but perhaps more useful; do good to yourself with as little evil as possible to others” (Second Discourse, p. 156) [p. 185; translation modified]. The latter is put “in place” of the former.

One can, of course, speak several languages. There are speakers who are competent in more than one language. Some even write several languages at a time (prostheses, grafts, translation, transposition) . But do they not always do it with a view to an absolute idiom? and in the promise of a still unheard-of language? of a sole poem previously inaudible?

Pharmakon means drug, but as Jacques Derrida and others have pointed out, the word in Greek famously refuses to designate whether poison or cure. It holds both in the bowl. In the dialogues Plato uses the word to refer to everything from an illness, its cause, its cure, a recipe, a charge, a substance, a spell, artificial color, and paint. Plato does not call fucking pharmakon, but then again, while he talks plenty about love, Plato does not say much about fucking. In the Phaedrus, the written word is also notoriously called pharmakon. The question up for debate between Socrates and Phaedrus is whether the written word kills memory or aids it- whether it cripples the mind's power, or whether it cures it of its forgetfulness.

I’m in favor or tradition. I’m respectful of and a lover of the tradition. There’s no deconstruction without the memory of the tradition. I couldn’t imagine what the university could be without reference to the tradition, but a tradition that is as rich as possible and that is open to other traditions, and so on... I think that people who try to represent what I’m doing or what so called "deconstruction" is doing, as, on the one hand, trying to destroy culture or, on the other hand, to reduce it to a kind of negativity, to a kind of death, are misrepresenting deconstruction. Deconstruction is essentially affirmative. It’s in favor of reaffirmation of memory, but this reaffirmation of memory asks the most adventurous and the most risky questions about our tradition, about our institutions, about our way of teaching, and so on.

Post-structuralism is a reaction to structuralism and works against seeing language as a stable, closed system. It is a shift from seeing the poem or novel as a closed entity, equipped with definite meanings which it is the critic's task to decipher, to seeing literature as irreducibly plural, an endless play of signifiers which can never be finally nailed down to a single center, essence, or meaning. Jan Rybicki, 2003

შეუძლებელია გწამდეს ღმერთის, თუ არ ხარ ღრმად ათეისტი. ამის გარეშე ღვთის რწმენა გულუბრყვილობაა და გარედან თავსმოხვეული. იმისათვის, რომ გქონდეს ღმერთისადმი ნამდვილი, შინაგანი რწმენა, იგი უნდა ექვემდებარებოდეს აბსოლუტურ დაეჭვებას. მე ვერ ვიტყვი, რომ ვარ ათეისტი, მაგრამ ვერც იმას ვიტყვი, რომ მწამს. ვთვლი, რომ ეს განაცხადი სასაცილოა: "მე ვიცი, რომ მე მწამს". როგორ შეიძლება ამის ცოდნა? განა შესაძლებელია იმის თქმა, რომ მწამს, ან ათეისტი ხარ?

everything can be translated, but in a loose translation, in the loose sense of the word "translation." I am not even talking about poetry, only about prosody, about metrics (accent and quantity in the time of pronunciation). In a sense, nothing is untranslatable; but in another sense, everything is untranslatable; translation is another name for the impossible. In another sense of the word "translation," of course, and from one sense to the other-it is easy for me always to hold firm between these two hyperboles which are fundamentally the same, and always translate each other.

Jean-Jacques chooses to be absent and to write. Paradoxically, he will hide himself to show himself better, and he will confide in written speech: “I would love society like others, if I were not sure of showing myself not only at a disadvantage, but as completely different from what I am. The part that I have taken of writing and hiding myself is precisely the one that suits me. If I were present, one would never know what I was worth” (Confessions). The admission is singular and merits emphasis: Jean-Jacques breaks with others, only to present himself to them in written speech. Protected by solitude, he will turn and re-turn his sentences at leisure.1

Nietzsche is a favourite, since he made the point explicitly: ‘There are no truths,’ he wrote, ‘only interpretations.’ Either what Nietzsche said is true – in which case it is not true, since there are no truths – or it is false. But it is only from the standpoint of the Enlightenment that this response seems like a refutation. The new curriculum is in the business of marginalizing refutation, just as it marginalizes truth. This explains the appeal of those recent thinkers – Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Richard Rorty – who owe their intellectual eminence not to their arguments but to their role in giving authority to the rejection of authority, and to their absolute commitment to the impossibility of absolute commitments. In each of them you find the view that truth, objectivity, value or meaning are chimerical, and that all we can have, and all we need to have, is the warm security of our own opinion.1 Hence it is in vain to argue against the new authorities. No argument, however rational, can counter the massive ‘will to believe’ that captures their normal readers. After all, a rational argument assumes precisely what they ‘put in question’ – namely, the possibility of rational argument. Each of them owes his reputation to a kind of religious faith: faith in the relativity of all opinions, including this one. For this is the faith on which a new form of membership is founded – a first-person plural of denial.

One can see in the description of the earnest game of Ernst, the eldest grandson of grandfather Freud, not a theoretical argument that would allow one to conclude that there is a repetition compulsion or a death drive or a limit to the pleasure principle—you know that he does not do this—but an auto-biography of Freud, not simply an auto-biography of Freud writing his life but living description of his own writing, of his way of writing what he writes, especially in Beyond, the fascination this story of the spool holds for readers stemming perhaps less from its demonstrative value than from its value as a repetition en abyme of what Freud does in Beyond, this value of a repetition en abyme of Freud's writing, having itself a relation of structural mimesis with the relation between the pleasure principle and the death drive, this latter not being opposed to the former but hollowing it out, en abyme, orignarily, at the origin of the origin.

Le persone che sono state costrette ad abbandonare la patria, gli esiliati, i deportati, gli espulsi, gli sradicati, i nomadi hanno in comune due sospiri, due nostalgie: i loro morti e la loro lingua. Da un lato vorrebbero tornare, in pellegrinaggio almeno, ai luoghi in cui i loro morti hanno l'ultima dimora. D'altro canto, gli esiliati, i deportati, gli espulsi, gli sradicati, gli apolidi, i nomadi senza legge, gli stranieri assoluti continuano spesso a voler riconoscere la lingua, la lingua detta materna, come loro estrema patria, cioè l'estrema dimora. [...] La cosiddetta lingua materna non sarebbe insomma una specie di seconda pelle che portiamo addosso, una casa mobile? Ma anche una casa inamovibile, visto che si sposta insieme a noi. La lingua resiste a ogni moto poiché si sposta insieme a me. È la cosa meno inamovibile, il corpo proprio più mobile che resta la condizione stabile, ma portatile, di tutte mobilità: per usare il fax o il telefono cellulare, bisogna che porti su di me, con me, in me, come me, il più mobile dei telefoni e cioè una lingua, una bocca e un orecchio che per mettano di parlare-ascoltarsi.

Their moral philosophy is but a description of their own passions. Leviathan, Chapter 46 The origins of what has come to be called the woke movement are in the decay of liberalism. The movement is most powerful in English-speaking countries – tellingly, the countries where classical liberalism was strongest. Beyond the Anglosphere, in China, the Middle East, India, Africa and most of continental Europe, it is regarded with indifference, bemusement or contempt. While its apostles regard it as a universal movement of human emancipation, it is recognized in much of the world as a symptom of Western decline – a hyperbolic version of the liberalism the West professed during its brief period of seeming hegemony after the Cold War. Hyper-liberal ideology plays a number of roles. It operates as a rationale for a failing variety of capitalism, and a vehicle through which surplus elites struggle to secure a position of power in society. Insofar as it expresses a coherent system of ideas, it is the anti-Western creed of an antinomian intelligentsia that is ineffably Western. Psychologically, it provides an ersatz faith for those who cannot live without the hope of universal salvation inculcated by Christianity. Contrary to its right-wing critics, woke thinking is not a variant of Marxism. No woke ideologue comes anywhere close to Karl Marx in rigour, breadth and depth of thought. One function of woke movements is to deflect attention from the destructive impact on society of market capitalism. Once questions of identity become central in politics, conflicts of economic interests can be disregarded. Idle chatter of micro-aggression screens out class hierarchy and the abandonment of large sections of society to idleness and destitution. Flattering those who protest against slights to their well-cultivated self-image, identity politics consigns to obloquy and oblivion those whose lives are blighted by an economic system that discards them as useless. Neither is woke thinking a version of ‘post-modernism’. There is nothing in it of Jacques Derrida’s playful subtlety or Michel Foucault’s mordant wit. Derrida never suggested every idea should be deconstructed, nor did Foucault suppose society could do without power structures. Just as fascism debased Nietzsche’s thinking, hyper-liberalism vulgarizes post-modern philosophy. In their economic

the late 1960s are key, since they witnessed the emergence of French social Theorists such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-François Lyotard, who were the original architects of what later came to be known simply as “Theory.

the constancy of God in my life is called by other names, so that I quite rightly pass for an atheist

Husserl’s philosophy belongs to “the philosophy” (44), it belongs to what Derrida calls “the metaphysics of presence” (22). The phrase “the metaphysics of presence” has been the locus of much controversy insofar as it seems to homogenize the history of Western philosophy.

Derrida is especially interested in the schema of derivation (44).

as if perception and thought were independent of the sign,

we seem to be present to ourselves,

presence and self-presence (89).

to what Derrida, following Husserl, calls “the relation to the object” [84]),

we seem to be present, we desire the same,

The most important thing in life cannot be said, only written, to twist a famous saying by Jacques Derrida

[José] Maceda thought a lot about opposites, and how they seemed to him to be a Western obsession. In an essay called A Concept of Time in a Music of Southeast Asia, he references Jacques Derrida on the subject: Good vs. evil, being vs. nothingness, presence vs. absence, truth vs. error, identity vs. difference, mind vs. matter, man vs. woman. soul vs. body, life vs. death, nature vs. culture...

From the streets of France to the heart of American evangelical Christianity, the past three hundred years have seen many changes in the nature of redistributive social justice. Jean-Jacques Rousseau imagined a centralized power capable of achieving egalitarian equality. Karl Marx wanted to accomplish this dream through the redistribution of resources from the haves to the have-nots. Walter Rauschenbusch Christianized socialism under the banner of “social justice.” Antonio Gramsci believed it was the cultural hegemony, and not simply the haves, which was actually responsible for oppressing the have-nots. György Lukács saw capitalism as an oppressive mindset and not just an economic system. The Frankfurt School developed critical theory to analyze oppression in cultural institutions. French postmodernists, like Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault deconstructed language and knowledge as social constructs and power dynamics. Kimbery Williams Crenshaw developed intersectionality, which attempts to construct a new hierarchy based on a matrix of socially constructed victim categories. Achieving social justice has gone from the redistribution of income to the redistribution of privilege, from the liberation of the lower classes to the liberation of culturally constructed identities, from lamenting victimhood to promoting victimhood, and from changing society through politics to changing politics through society. No social organization remains unaffected. Gramsci’s “long march through the institutions” is almost complete. The final stage is to capture the last stand for Western Civilization and conscious of the country—the American evangelical church.

The path from knowledge, as a general form of domination, to administrative power might seem more circuitous. Does the kind of esoteric knowledge we encounter at Chavín, often founded in hallucinogenic experience, really have anything in common with the accounting methods of the later Inca? It seems highly unlikely – until, that is, we recall that even in much more recent times, qualifications to enter bureaucracies are typically based on some form of knowledge that has virtually nothing to do with actual administration. It’s only important because it’s obscure. Hence in tenth-century China or eighteenth-century Germany, aspiring civil servants had to pass exams on proficiency in literary classics, written in archaic or even dead languages, just as today they will have had to pass exams on rational choice theory or the philosophy of Jacques Derrida. The arts of administration are really only learned later on and through more traditional means: by practice, apprenticeship or informal mentoring.

melankolik, unutmayı reddeden kişidir.

Thinkers powerfully influenced by Marx and overwhelmingly influential in much of the academy today (such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida) modified the Marxist simplification essentially by replacing “economics” with “power”—as if power were the single motivating force behind all human behavior (as opposed, say, to competent authority, or reciprocity of attitude and action).

In all the questions in which he intervened, Derrida was what I call a brave man of peace. He was brave because it takes a lot of courage not to enter into the division as it is constituted. And he was a man of peace because identifying what excepts itself from that opposition is, as a general rule, the road to peace. For any true peace is based upon an agreement not about that which exists, but about that which non-exists … This diagonal obstinacy, this rejection of abrupt metaphysically derived divisions, is obviously not suited to stormy times when everything comes under the law of decisiveness, here and now. That is what kept Derrida apart from the truth of the red years between 1968 and 1976. Because the truth of those years spoke its name with the words: ‘One divides into two.’ What we desired, in poetic terms, was the metaphysics of radical conflict, and not the patient deconstruction of oppositions. And Derrida could not agree about that.64

Originalmente, la pista para entender la performatividad del género me la proporcionó la interpretación que Jacques Derrida hizo de «Ante la ley», de Kafka. En esa historia, quien espera a la ley se sienta frente a la puerta de

... an analysis of postmodernist literary criticism and its relevance to the criminal justice system, but in fact a hodgepodge of arcane theories and suppositions that became so byzantine even I couldn’t understand them. Something about Jacques Derrida, Sir Edward Coke, and Antonin Scalia meet My Cousin Vinnie. Not that the inability to understand your own work disqualifies you from publication.

Distanciamento entre clitóris e vagina – objeto de tantas análises e psicanálises. Distanciamento entre clitóris e pênis. Distanciamento entre clitóris e falo, o primeiro se recusando, ao contrário do pênis, a obedecer à lei do segundo. Distanciamento entre o biológico e o simbólico, a carne e o sentido. Distanciamento, enfim, entre os “sujeitos” do feminismo e os próprios feminismos. Distanciamento entre os corpos. Distanciamento entre o destino anatômico do sexo e a plasticidade social do gênero. Distanciamento entre dado de nascimento e intervenção cirúrgica. Distanciamento entre a reivindicação da existência da “mulher” e a rejeição dessa categoria. Distanciamento entre um “nós, as mulheres” e uma multiplicidade de experiências que impede unificar ou universalizar esse “nós” e essas “mulheres”. O distanciamento não é apenas a diferença – diferença entre o mesmo e o outro, ou diferença em relação a si mesmo. A diferença – inclusive a diferença sexual – é só uma manifestação do distanciamento. O distanciamento fratura a identidade paradoxal da diferença, revela a multiplicidade nela contida. É portanto surpreendente que tenha sido escolhido um órgão, uma parte do corpo ou do sexo – o clitóris – para acomodar essa multiplicidade de distanciamentos. Por que privilegiar o clitóris e não outras zonas, não necessariamente genitais? Porque ele é um símbolo mudo. Em primeiro lugar, contam-se nos dedos os filósofos que se arriscaram a falar dele, enquanto fazem inúmeras referências a outras partes do corpo da mulher, seios, vagina ou ninfas, por exemplo. A falocracia da linguagem filosófica já não é um mistério. Batizando-a de “falocentrismo” ou “falogocentrismo”,10 Jacques Derrida, o pioneiro, submeteu-a à desconstrução questionando suas características principais: privilégio concedido à retidão, à ereção (modelo arquitetônico de tudo que fica em pé), à visibilidade, ao simbolismo do falo, e ao mesmo tempo redução da mulher à matéria-matriz, à mãe, à vagina-útero. Em filosofia, nunca se fala do prazer da mulher.

Our fascination with the gothic peaks in times of anxiety, panic, and upheaval. The Victorian gothic revival of the 1890s was stoked by scientific, technological, and social change. Industrialization and urbanization sparked feelings of alienation. Darwin's theories of evolution and the changing roles of women fanned racist, misogynistic, homophobic, and colonialist fears of 'primitivism,' moral decay, and sexual depravity. In the nineteenth century, terror-inducing imagery had shifted away from crumbling castles to crime-infested cities, and fear of villains and ghosts was supplanted by a fear of madness and degeneration. In the twentieth century, we celebrated/mourned the death of authorship, of the grand narrative, of the self, 'going-one-better in eschatological eloquence,' as Jacques Derrida put it, 'the end of history...the end of subject, the end of man, the end of the West, the end of Oedipus, the end of the earth, Apocalypse Now.' A few years into the new millennium, we were zombie hordes, stalking social media for brains. The gothic is the fucked-either-way-and-freaking-the-fuck-out school of artistic interpretation, the hysterical framework of doom. And this tension between horror as morality tale and horror as decadent spectacle is, I believe, what fueled the pandemic of tabloid stories about wayward starlets that raged throughout 2006 and 2007. Celebrity train wreck stories begin, conservatively, as cautionary tales. A young woman, unprotected or legally emancipated, has moved alone from the relatively sheltered and secluded condition of parent-managed child stardom (because who, nowadays, is more cut off from the world than a child star?) into a corrupt and dangerous world, where her beauty, fame, youth, fortune, and sexual allure are regarded with a charged, ambivalent awe. She is instantly besieged with dangers, and preyed upon by unscrupulous adults. Until they can be contained again, by marriage or paternal protection, she exists in a constant state of uncertainty and peril. The peril is created, of course, by the 'author' - the media outlets that shape the train wreck's life, again and again, into thrilling, chilling tales of suspense.

Het solipsisme is geen verstandsverbijstering en geen sofisme; het is de wezenlijke structuur van de rede.

La muerta del Creador implica finalmente la muerte del creador. Lo cual no impide que Michel Foucault y Jacques Derrida firmen como autores de sus libros...

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 W r i t i n g a n d D i f f e r e n c e

The following day, Sylviane Agacinski commented on this declaration in her journal, which was published a few months later: I read in Libération that Jacques Derrida did not vote in the first round as he was ‘in a bad mood with all the candidates’. So it’s a question of mood, yet again!

Sylviane Agacinski, who was a friend of Catherine, was present in the audience. Even though Sylviane was still one of the authors published in the series ‘La philosophie en effet’, Jacques and she were no longer on speaking terms. ‘But after the thesis defence,’ recalls Catherine Malabou, ‘he came over to us. He talked briefly with Sylviane, asking her how Daniel was, before adding: “I bless him every day.” The two of us were left staring at one another, thunderstruck.’40

Derrida had not seen the child again, apart from one completely chance encounter. One day, coming out of a plane in an airport in the south of France, he recognized Sophie Agacinski, Sylviane’s sister, and her husband Jean-Marc Thibault. Jacques was about to greet them when a young boy ran up to hug them. No doubt about it: this had to be Daniel, who had come to spend a few days’ holiday with his uncle and aunt. At the same moment, the three adults understood the situation: without knowing it, Daniel and Jacques had just been travelling in the same plane. As if at a loss, Derrida turned away.

As Marguerite Derrida puts it: ‘I’ve always thought that it was mainly through his capacity for listening that Jacques could seduce women.

In spite of ups and downs, the union between Jacques and Marguerite remained essential and indestructible. Nothing could undermine it over the forty-eight years of their life together. According to Avital Ronell, ‘Marguerite never considered anyone to be a rival. She always had something nice to say about the women who were close or too close to Jacques, which does not mean that she did not suffer because of them.

Ultimately, the only thing that sometimes annoyed Marguerite was Jacques’s jealous temperament. ‘He wasn’t happy when he couldn’t reach me straightaway.

Post-Marxists like Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida go further. They hold that our lives are culturally determined: our language shapes our thoughts, and individuality or subject-hood is an illusion. Even if “singularity” is undeniable, individuality is an artificial construct “constituted by a web of forces of which consciousness is the effect rather than the point of origin.”23 The postmodern deconstruction

Mystical writing was indeed the forerunner of today's radical theology and deconstruction... Jacques Derrida can be described as an intellectual subversive whose work leads to the view that any text may be interpreted to mean almost anything, and as a mystic will. Well, yes, mystical writing is indeed politically and linguistically subversive and always was so the mystic seeks to create an effect of religious happiness by liberating religious language from the Babylonian captivity of metaphysics. When the writing does succeed in melting God and the soul down into each other, the effect of happiness is astonishing.

Here it isn't a matter of knowing what the other knows, for Abraham doesn't know anything. It isn't a matter of sharing his faith, for the latter must remain an initiative of absolute singularity. And moreover, we don't think or speak of Abraham from the point of view of a faith that is sure of itself, any more than did Kierkegaard...Our faith is not assured because a faith never can be, it must never be a certainty. We share with Abraham what cannot be shared, a secret we know nothing about, neither him nor us. To share a secret is not to know or to reveal the secret, it is to share we know not what: nothing that can be known, nothing that can be determined.

For the concept of the supplement - which here determines that of the representative image - harbors within itself two significations whose cohabitation is as strange as it is necessary. The supplement adds itself, it is a surplus, a plenitude enriching another plenitude, the fullest measure of presence. But the supplement supplements. It adds only to replace. It intervenes or insinuates itself in-the-place-of; if it fills, it is as one fills a void. If it represents and makes an image, it is by the anterior default of a presence. The sign is always the supplement of the thing itself. The supplement will always be the moving of the tongue or acting through the hands of others. In it everything is brought together: Progress as the possibility of perversion, regression toward an evil that is not natural and that adheres to the power of substitution, that permits us to absent ourselves and act by proxy, through the hands of others. Through the written. This substitution always has the form of the sign. The scandal is that the sign, the image, or the representer, become forces and make "the world move". Blindness to the supplement is the law. We must begin wherever we are and the thought of the trace, which cannot take the scent into account, has already taught of the trace, which cannot not take the scent into account, has already taught us that it was impossible to justify a point of departure absolutely, Wherever we are: in a text where we already believe ourselves to be.

We had a great department there; we were something. We were pretty much at the top of the university. So we were treated well by the administration. In 1966 we held a symposium. We were the first to bring the deconstructionists like Jacques Derrida and others to the United States. Many of my colleagues were hostile to that. They felt it was very bad. Two years later they were all converted to deconstruction. That left me somewhat disconcerted, and I left for Buffalo.   SB: Why did that bother you?   RG: Well it bothered me because deconstruction is against reality. They say everything is language. I think, as I said before when talking about my study of ritual, the way I read a theorist like Frazer is that you can choose either to say everything is language or everything is a fluid reality of violence that takes various shapes and can be named in different ways. That’s my way. Out of the sight of reality but not against language. I say it can be named different ways, but behind the solid stuff are human relations and the violence that creates a false peace. What they say is that everything is about language; everything is play, futility. There is no reality. You don’t have to worry about anything. Ultimately it becomes dull and stupefying, this doing away with reality. I think that day is finished.   Ultimately

Language being the break with madness, it adheres more thoroughly to its essence and vocation, makes a cleaner break with madness, if it pits itself against madness more freely and gets closer and closer to it: to the point of being separated from it only by the “transparent sheet” of which Joyce speaks, that is, by itself—for this diaphaneity is nothing other than the language, meaning, possibility, and elementary discretion of a nothing that neutralizes everything.

A writer can never have complete command or mastery over what s/he writes. Neither can a reader.

Everyday life would be impossible without metalanguage. But the notion of metalanguage entails a logic of the supplement. There is something ‘maddening’ about the notion: metalanguage is, in short, both necessary and impossible. We cannot do without it, but there is no metalanguage as a discrete language: it is both part of and not part of its so-called object language.

A text always remains in crucial ways ‘imperceptible’.

A text is a ‘fabric of traces’ governed by a logic of the ‘nonpresent remainder’, by what thus figures the impossibility of pure presence, the impossibility of absolute plenitude of meaning or intention.

The question ‘Why Derrida?’ is absurd: it makes me smile. There is something at once appalling and hilarious about it. It is like asking ‘Why culture?’, ‘Why education?’, ‘Why think?

In order to be what it ‘is’, a text is an essentially vitiated, impure, open, haunted thing, consisting of traces and traces of traces: no text is purely present, nor was there some purely present text in the past.

What one repeatedly finds in Derrida’s work is the uncanny effect by which one is invited to sense the unfolding of all of his thinking starting out from anywhere, from any idea, any word, any thought that happens to be at issue. ‘Deconstruction’ is perhaps the best-known word for this.

responsibility itself must cohabit with frivolity, this need not be cause for gloom.

simply one problem among others.

L'ospitalità assoluta esige che io apra la mia dimora e che la offra non soltanto allo straniero (provvisto di un cognome, di uno statuto sociale di straniero eccetera), ma all' altro assoluto, sconosciuto, anonimo, e che gli dia luogo, che lo lasci venire, che lo lasci arrivare e aver luogo nel luogo che gli offro, senza chiedergli né reciprocità (l'entrata in un patto) e neppure il suo nome.

Ovunque la privacy venga violata, ovunque una violazione sia comunque sentita come tale, si può prevedere una reazione nel senso della chiusura, sia all'interno della famiglia, sia, allargando il cerchio, etnocentrica e nazionalistica, perciò virtualmente xenofoba: non diretta contro lo straniero in quanto tale ma, paradossalmente, contro la potenza tecnica anonima (straniera alla lingua e alla religione, oltre che alla famiglia e alla nazione) che minaccia, insieme alla «privacy», le condizioni tradizionali dell'ospitalità. [...] In casa mia voglio essere il padrone per potere ricevere chi voglio. Comincio a considerare lo straniero indesiderabile, e virtualmente nemico, chiunque invada la mia privacy, la mia ipseità, il mio potere d'ospitalità, la mia sovranità di ospite. L’altro diviene così un individuo ostile del quale rischio di diventare ostaggio.

Il doloroso paradosso riguarda la coestensività della democratizzazione dell'informazione e del campo della polizia: i poteri della polizia e della politicizzazione aumentano via via che la comunicazione, la permeabilità e la trasparenza democratiche allargano il loro spazio e la loro fenomenalità, il loro venire alla luce. [...] La socialità privata tende ad allungare le antenne al di là del territorio nazionale alla velocità della luce. Allora lo Stato, trovandosi di colpo più piccolo, più debole di tali potenze private non statali, infra- e soprastatali al tempo stesso, lo Stato classico - o la cooperazione di Stati classici - fa degli immani sforzi per recuperare e sorvegliare, contenere e riappropriarsi di quello che a gran velocità gli sta sfuggendo. La sua azione si esplica talvolta in una riorganizzazione del diritto, con nuovi testi di legge, ma anche in nuove ambizioni della polizia.

Alla domanda se si debba consegnare un amico rifugiatosi in casa nostra a degli assassini che gli danno la caccia, Kant rispose senza esitare: «sì, non si deve mai mentire, neppure agli assassini». [...] È meglio la rottura del dovere d'ospitalità piuttosto che quella del dovere assoluto di verità, fondamento dell'umanità e della socialità umana in generale. L'ospitalità è dovuta allo straniero, certo, ma resta, come diritto, condizionata, e perciò condizionata nella sua dipendenza dall'incondizionalità che sta alla base del diritto.

one must earn the right to critique a position by understanding it and being able to express it in a way that its adherents will be happy to own and endorse as correct. It is the important principle of audi alteram partem: listen to the other side. In terms of understanding a philosopher’s writing, this means that until we have understood not only what position someone holds, but also the reasons why he holds it—or, in other words, why that person finds his position attractive—we have not yet understood it.

ELLE NE PARLE PAS L'INNOMMÉE OR TU L'ENTENDS MIEUX QUE MOI AVANT MOI EN CE MOMENT MÊME

le plus ancien encore à venir ~ elle ne parle pas l'innommée or tu l'entends mieux que moi avant moi en ce moment même

Una de las acciones principales de la nueva ética mundial es la deconstrucción de la realidad y el rechazo de lo dado, la celebración de la diversidad, la libertad de elegir, el holismo y la ambivalencia. Por esta razón se apoyan en filósofos del deconstruccionismo como Jacques Derrida,

I’m in favor or tradition. I’m respectful of and a lover of the tradition. There’s no deconstruction without the memory of the tradition.

La plume de Jacques Derrida pourrait à son tour nous suggérer une interprétation « disphallique » de la fin textuelle : lorsque Creangă écrit, pour clore son conte, que « le pope court toujours », n'entend-il point par là signifier l'impossibilité radicale, pour le lecteur comme pour le scripteur, de sortir de l'univers phallocentrique ?

If we are bound and determined to speak in terms of reference, nuclear war is the only possible referent of any discourse and any experience that would share their condition with that of literature. If, according to a structuring hypothesis, a fantasy or phantasm, nuclear war is equivalent to the total destruction of the archive, if not of the human habitat, it becomes the absolute referent, the horizon and the condition of all the others.

If we are bound and determined to speak in terms of reference, nuclear war is the only possible referent of any discourse and any experience that would share their condition with that of literature. If, according to a structuring hypothesis, a fantasy or phantasm, nuclear war is equivalent to the total destruction of the archive, if not of the human habitat, it becomes the absolute referent, the horizon and the condition of all the others...This absolute referent of all possible literature is on par with the absolute effacement of any possible trace; it is thus the only ineffaceable trace, it is so as the trace of what is entirely other, "trace du tout autre." This is the only absolute trace - effaceable, ineffaceable. The only "subject" of all possible literature, of all possible criticism, its only ultimate and a-symbolic referent, unsymbolizable, even unsignifiable; this is, if not the nuclear age, if not the nuclear catastrophe, at least that toward which nuclear discourse and the nuclear symbolic are still beckoning: the remainderless and a-symbolic destruction of literature. Literature and literary criticism cannot speak of anything else, they can have no other ultimate referent, they can only multiply their strategic maneuvers in order to assimilate that unassimilable wholly other. They are nothing but those maneuvers and that diplomatic strategy, with the "double talk" that can never be reduced to them. For simultaneously, that "subject" cannot be a nameable "subject," nor that "referent" a nameable referent. Then the perspective of nuclear war allows us to re-elaborate the question of the referent. What is a referent? In another way, to elaborate the question of the transcendental ego, the transcendental subject, Husserl's phenomenology needed, at some point, the fiction of total chaos. Capable of speaking only of that, literature cannot help but speak of other things as well, and invent strategies for speaking of other things, for putting off the encounter with the wholly other, an encounter with which, however, this relationless relation, this relation of incommensurability cannot be wholly suspended, even though it is precisely its epochal suspension. This is the only invention possible.

The means are a technology of the sign, the “technical mastery” of the sign (65).

how to justify . . . the decision which subordinates a reflection on the sign to a logic?

it is based on the foundation, as in Descartes, of the “I am,” the foundation of subjectivity and consciousness

this desire,

Limiting the potencies of repetition to presence

This semantic plurality is captured in Jacques Derrida’s (1996a; 2005) distinction between testis (being present as a third party) and superstes (having lived through and living on after the catastrophe), which are two concurrent conditions of testimony.7 For Derrida there is thus an important connection between testimony and testament: “the question of testimonium [is] no different from that of the testamentum, of all the testaments, in other words, of surviving in dying, of sur-viving before and beyond the opposition between living and dying […]” (2005: 66).

Now, what I call faith in this case is like something that I said about justice and the gift, something that is presupposed by the most radical deconstructive gesture. You cannot address the other, speak to the other, without an act of faith, without testimony. What are you doing when you attest to something? You address the other and ask, “believe me.” Even if you are lying, even in a perjury, you are addressing the other and asking the other to trust you. This “trust me, I am speaking to you” is of the order of faith, a faith that cannot be reduced to a theoretical statement, to a determinative judgment; it is the opening of the address to the other. So this faith is not religious, strictly speaking; at least it cannot be totally determined by a given religion. That is why this faith is absolutely universal.

Epigraph, Chapter 10 "If things were simple, word would have gotten around." ~Jacques Derrida, 'Limited Inc.

What this finally comes to mean, in slightly less elaborate terms, is (a) that historical discourse, like political discourse (and, as we shall see, journalistic discourse) is a series of decisions, of revisions, many or most of which are calculated to certain ends, while others are accidental; and (b) that myth treats these choices as inevitable, presents such discourses as faits accompli, thereby lending an apparently— but falsely—natural (predestined) grounding to choices that, ultimately, could have turned out otherwise. In a sense, this is also what Jacques Derrida sought to do through deconstruction: to challenge the center, or the grounding, of those “truths that we hold to be self-evident,” as the expression goes, to expose human constructs as constructs, and to “de-construct” (emphasis on the first syllable of construct, as a noun) ourselves, that is, rid ourselves of the burden of such assumptions. In exposing those “self-evident” groundings as fallacies, we encounter both the curse and the blessing of the shifting center: on the one hand we realize that all reality becomes somehow less reliable in the process, mutable as the center shifts, now this way, now that; on the other, we are liberated from constructs masquerading as absolute truths. Thus is all language politicized.43

the operation that substitutes writing for speech also replaces presence by value: to the I am or to the I am present thus sacrificed, a what I am or a what I am worth is preferred. “If I were present, one would never know what I was worth.” I renounce my present life, my present and concrete existence in order to make myself known in the ideality of truth and value. A wellknown schema. The battle by which I wish to raise myself above my life even while I retain it, in order to enjoy recognition, is in this case within myself, and writing is indeed the phenomenon of this battle.

La cuestión de la arquitectura es de hecho el problema del lugar, de tener lugar en el espacio

Freud writes, “The facts which have caused us to believe in the dominance of the pleasure principle in mental life also find expression in the hypothesis that the mental apparatus endeavors to keep the quantity of excitation present in it as low as possible or at least to keep it constant. This latter hypothesis is only another way of stating the pleasure principle; for if the work of the mental apparatus is directed towards keeping the quantity of excitation low, then anything that is calculated to increase that quantity is bound to be felt as adverse to the functioning of the apparatus, that is as unpleasurable. The pleasure principle follows from the principle of constancy: actually the latter principle was inferred from the facts which forced us to adopt the pleasure principle.