Jacques Derrida

I don't know where to find a manifesto of deconstruction in Derrida's texts. There is no such thing.

The law is the element of foundation, and it is the element of madness.

Hospitality is the highest and oldest law.

No justice... seems possible or thinkable without the principle of some responsibility, beyond all calculable and programming rights and duties, beyond all juridical or political contracts, perhaps beyond the nation-state itself.

The trace is not a presence but the simulacrum of a presence that dislocates itself, displaces itself, refers itself, it properly has no site.

In a certain way, this is why I have always insisted on the fact that discipline is not a localizable object.

I am interested in the way that we look at things, the way that we see ourselves.

Deconstruction does not consist in passing from one text to another, but in demonstrating the inherent instability of texts.

The idea of the living individual is only a fiction, except in the nomadic distribution of singularities.

To do justice to a work of literature is to treat it as a living thing.

The phallus is the privilege of powerlessness.

Circumcision is a form of writing.

Democracy is the only paradigm that does not destroy the other.

Marx is the philosopher of the living dead.

The time is out of joint.

I am a citizen of the world, but I have a French passport.

Philosophy is the mourning of the death of God.

The supplement is the structure of the text.

Language is a virus.

To write is to forgive.