Jacques Derrida
Developed deconstruction to challenge binary oppositions in texts and thought.
Quotes by Jacques Derrida
There is nothing outside the text.
Deconstruction is not a dismantling of structures but rather a demonstration that they have already dismantled themselves.
The trace is not a presence but is rather the simulacrum of a presence that dislocates, displaces, and refers beyond itself.
Writing is the disappearance of the natural voice.
The supplement is an exteriority, a surplus, an addition, but it is also that which completes, makes whole, and fills a lack.
There is no outside-text, there is no outside-context.
The future can only be anticipated in the form of an absolute danger.
Justice, in its very essence, is undecidable.
The gift is only possible as an impossible thing.
To deconstruct is to make explicit the implicit hierarchies and assumptions within a text or system.
The end of man is not the end of the world, but the end of a certain representation of man.
The book is not a container, but a passage.
The signature is always both present and absent.
Hospitality is the unconditional welcoming of the other, without asking for anything in return.
The archive is not simply a place of storage, but a place of commencement and command.
The animal looks at us, and we are naked before it.
The event is always singular, always unique, always unrepeatable.
The name is always a promise, a call, an invocation.
The secret is not something hidden, but something that cannot be revealed.
The monster is that which resists categorization, that which exceeds the norm.