Jacques Derrida quotes

" 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. " # Colleges and Universities # Happiness # Love

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

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

" 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. " # Science and Scientists # Dreams # Ideas

" 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 and God, the relation of man to God, the project of becoming God as the project constituting human-reality. Atheism changes nothing in this fundamental structure. " # Atheism # Metaphysics # Change

" 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. " # Books - Reading # Poetry and Poets # Literature

" il n'y a pas de hors-texte " # Food and Eating # Quotations # Books - Reading

" But 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. " # Psychoanalysis