Jacques Derrida
French-Algerian · 1930–2004
French-Algerian philosopher who developed deconstruction, a critical approach that interrogates the assumptions underlying Western metaphysics.
Wikipedia ↗“Pour feindre, je fais effectivement la chose : je n'ai donc fait que feindre de feindre.”
French
“To pretend, I actually do the thing: I have therefore only pretended to pretend.”
“Tout signe, linguistique ou non linguistique, parlé ou écrit, peut être cité, mis entre guillemets; par là il peut rompre avec tout contexte donné, engendrer à l'infini de nouveaux contextes, de façon absolument non saturable.”
French
“Every sign, linguistic or nonlinguistic, spoken or written, 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.”
“Pour la même raison, il n'y a nulle part où commencer à tracer le faisceau ou le graphique de la différance. Car ce qui est mis en question, c'est justement la quête d'un commencement de droit, d'un point de départ absolu, d'une responsabilité principielle.”
French
“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.”
“Jamais la violence, l'inégalité, l'exclusion, la famine et donc l'oppression économique n'ont affecté autant d'êtres humains, dans l'histoire de la terre et de l'humanité.”
French
“Never have violence, inequality, exclusion, famine, and thus economic oppression affected as many human beings in the history of the earth and of humanity. Instead of singing the advent of the ideal of liberal democracy and of the capitalist market in the euphoria of the end of history, instead of celebrating the "end of ideologies" and the end of the great emancipatory discourses, let us never neglect this obvious macroscopic fact, made up of innumerable singular sites of suffering.”