Jacques Derrida

The trace is not a presence but is rather the simulacrum of a presence that dislocates, displaces, and refers beyond itself. The trace has no place, but rather the topos of its displacement is always other.

What is called 'objectivity,' scientificity, etc., is the price paid for the effacement of the subject or, what is the same thing, for the effacement of the text's own textual character.

We must begin wherever we are and the thought of the trace, which is not a concept, is already inscribed in the text.

The book is not only the object that is read, but the very activity of reading.

Writing is the disappearance of the subject.

The death of the author is the birth of the reader.

Everything begins with reproduction. If we are to believe in the absolute beginning of the absolute, it must be the reproduction of the absolute.

The future can only be anticipated in the form of an absolute danger. It is that which breaks absolutely with the present and cannot be anticipated.

Deconstruction is not an operation that consists in dismantling structures but in showing that they have always been already dismantled.

The center is not the center.

Differance is the non-origin of the origin.

There is no royal road to deconstruction.

The animal looks at us, and we are naked before it. Thinking perhaps begins there.

A text is not a text unless it hides from the first comer, from the first glance, the law of its composition and the rules of its game.

Every sign, linguistic or nonlinguistic, spoken or written (in the usual sense of this opposition), as a small or large unity, can be cited, put in quotation marks; in so doing, it can break with every given context, engendering an infinity of new contexts in a manner which is absolutely illimitable.

A ghost is never dead.

The meaning of a text is not to be found in the intention of the author.

The supplement is neither a plus nor a minus, neither an outside nor an inside, but the becoming-other of the sign.

What is proper to man is not to be proper to himself.

The living present is not a living present.