Jacques Derrida Quotes

In working towards ways of reading Mann, so that his own advances in suggesting new perspectives will become more vivid, I do some fairly standard philosophical analysis of ideas in Nietzsche and Schopenhauer.

I always wanted to put a sign up on the road to Yale saying, 'Beware: Deconstruction Ahead.'

All they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with a rope and torture a confession out of it. They begin beating it with a hose to find out what it really means.

Deconstruction: peering suspiciously at the text, I wait for it to make a slip and betray itself.

I think the purpose of deconstruction is to take something apart and see how it works. If you're not going to put it back together again and watch it go, what's the point?

To say that an author is a reader or a reader an author, to see a book as a human being or a human being a book, to describe the world as text or a text as the world, are ways of naming the readers craft.

Deconstruction glorifies the critic, humiliates the author, and makes the reader wonder why he bothered.

Deconstruction never had meaning or interest, at least in my eyes, than as a radicalization, that is to say, also within the tradition of a certain Marxism, in a certain spirit of Marxism.

One of the reasons I like Barthes more than other writers of that ilk is because he had a literary quality.

Critics and academics often employ theories and philosophers in order to help them understand and dissect movies and books.

...I will continue to underscore that I don't think authorial intent is all that important to a reading experience, and I certainly don't think the job of reading is to divine authorial intent.

As for the discipline, we [me and Frank Moore Cross] belong to two different disciplines. One involves research and archaeological materials. Mine is more interpretive. But it is the love for the text that is there, and that is what makes the whole adventure of reading and studying and sharing worthwhile.

A novel is a machine for generating interpretations.

The ambition of much of today's literary theory seems to be to find ways to read literature without imagination.

Every reader should remember the diffidence of Socrates, and repair by his candour the injuries of time: he should impute the seeming defects of his author to some chasm of intelligence, and suppose that the sense which is now weak was once forcible

What on earth is modern exegesis up to? Oh, little lazy one! Some red wine and up! Off you go, brandishing your fork, stripped of Ophelia's useless ornaments, fire in your large nostrils, out to rake the muck of metaphors.

The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.

One literature differs from another, either before or after it, not so much because of the text as for the manner in which it is read.

I'm kind of a nerd when it comes to literature and theory. I wish I could have more of that in life, but I don't because I'm always reading scripts or things to prepare for movies when I'm reading.

Until the 20th century it was generally assumed that a writer had said what he had to say in his works.

The point of literary criticism in anthropology is not to replace research, but to find out how it is that we are persuasive.

When I was in college, I was a semiotics major, which is this hopelessly pretentious body of French literary theory.

Literary theory has become a parody of science, generating its own arcane jargon. In the process, tragically, it discourages love of literature for its own sake.

As a universal history of philosophy, the history of philosophy must become one great unity.

Jacques Derrida is a very important thinker and philosopher who has made serious contributions to both philosophy and literary criticism. Roland Barthes is the one I feel most affinity for, and Michel Foucault, well, his writing influenced my novel, 'Middlesex.'