Jacques Derrida
Deconstruction
Sayings by Jacques Derrida
To love is to give what one does not have to someone who does not want it.
The book is a tomb.
The present is always already past.
To be is to be written.
The question of the other is always a question of alterity.
The university is a space of unconditional hospitality.
To pretend, I actually do the thing: I have therefore only pretended to pretend.
The future can only be anticipated in the form of an absolute danger.
Deconstruction is justice.
I am at war with myself.
The animal looks at us, and we are naked before it.
Every discourse is a hostage to its own rhetoric.
The ghost is not simply a dead or missing person, but a social figure.
The archive is a place of power.
The meaning of meaning is infinite différance.
Deconstruction is not a demolition, but a careful dismantling to understand how a text or concept is put together.
The sign is always a sign of the supplement.
Writing is the name of these two things at once: the movement of signifying production and the undoing of presence.
The trace is not a presence but a simulacrum of a presence that dislocates, displaces, and refers beyond itself.
There is no pure origin.