Derrida Quotes

• The poet…is the man of metaphor: while the philosopher is interested only in the truth of meaning, beyond even signs and names, and the sophist manipulates empty signs…the poet plays on the multiplicity of signifieds.

  Jacques Derrida

  Men, Play, Names

  Jacques Derrida (1982). “Marges de la Philosophie”, p.248, University of Chicago Press

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• I'm not sure how far Derrida's later 'theological' interests are really rooted in post-structuralism or whether they don't rather reflect a kind of Kantian-Marxist trajectory - with a French twist on the centrality of liberty, equality and fraternity (cf. Politics of Friendship). Not to mention the role of Levinas and, behind Levinas, Judaism's twinning of eschatology and the call for justice.

  George Pattison

  Cfs, Justice, Liberty

  "Towards hope". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. July 18, 2014.

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• The smouldering eroticism of great European actresses like Jeanne Moreau demonstrated to my generations women's archetypal mystery and glamour, completely missing from the totalitarian world-view of the misogynist Foucault. For me, the big French D is not Derrida, but Deneuve.

  Camille Paglia

  Views, Missing, Generations

  "Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders: Academe in the Hour of the Wolf". Camille Paglia, "Arion", Third Series, Volume 1, No. 2, Spring 1991.

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• The followers of Derrida are pathetic, snuffling in French pockets for bits of pieces of a deconstructive method already massively and coherently presented and with a mature sense of the sacred in Buddhism and Hinduism.

  Camille Paglia

  Buddhism, Followers, Pieces

  Camille Paglia (2011). “Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays”, p.211, Vintage

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• I'm interested in philosophical psychology, people like Nietzsche, Freud, Alcan, Foucault, Derrida.

  Hanif Kureishi

  Philosophical, People, Psychology

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• The assumption that Derrida always knows what he is talking about is not Derridean.

  Timothy Morton

  Talking, Assumption, Knows

  Timothy Morton (2012). “The Ecological Thought”, p.139, Harvard University Press

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• It's time for a recovery and reassessment of North American thinkers. Marshall McLuhan, Leslie Fiedler and Norman O. Brown are the linked triad I would substitute for Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, whose work belongs to ravaged postwar Europe and whose ideas transfer poorly into the Anglo-American tradition.

  Camille Paglia

  Recovery, Europe, Ideas

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• I guess both Nabokov and Popper had, in different ways, immunized me against the fashion for French-influenced literary theory in the '70s, '80s, and '90s - "immunized" in the sense that they made me no longer susceptible to this epidemic cultural virus. I looked into Derrida and found that he rarely seemed to be interested in truth; he was more interested in making a splash.

  Brian Boyd

  Fashion, Different

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• When I was in college, it was Jacques Derrida. Everyone was dropping quotes. I remember thinking that was important - and I don't say that it's not now - but we're just living our lives. I don't have time to think about that.

  Fernando Mastrangelo

  College, Thinking, Important

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• The French still offer Sartre and Derrida rather than Pascal.

  Robert Bly

  Pascal, Offers, Stills

  Source: www.utne.com

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• When one emphasizes, as Jacques Derrida once remarked, one always overemphasizes.

  Terry Eagleton

  Terry Eagleton (2013). “The Illusions of Postmodernism”, p.80, John Wiley & Sons

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• Me and Kirby are very collaborative and it changes from film to film. The first project we worked on together, Derrida, we co-directed. The last film Outrage, I was the producer and he was the director. This film was much more of a collaboration - he is the director and I am the producer - but this is a film by both of us.

  Amy Ziering

  Together, Directors, Collaboration

  Source: blogs.indiewire.com

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• It was in reading Tristam Shandy that I noticed how it is primarily men who gravitate towards the game-playing self-reflexive style. There is an alienation from emotion in it, a Nervous Nelly fear of letting go and being "exposed." As an attitude towards life, it betrays a perpetual adolescence. Those who hurled themselves after Derrida were not the most sophisticated but the most pretentious, and least creative members of my generation of academics.

  Camille Paglia

  Letting Go, Attitude, Reading

  "Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders : Academe in the Hour of the Wolf". Arion, Third Series, Vol. 1, No. 2, Spring 1991.

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• Lacan , Derrida and Foucault are the perfect prophets for the weak, anxious academic personality, trapped in verbal formulas and perennially defeated by circumstances. They offer a self-exculpating cosmic explanation for the normal professorial state of resentment, alienation, dithering passivity and inaction.

  Camille Paglia

  Self, Perfect, Personality

  "Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders: Academe in the Hour of the Wolf". Camille Paglia, "Arion", Third Series, Volume 1, No. 2, Spring 1991.

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• Given Loughner's obsession with meaninglessness and language, maybe Foucault & Derrida deserve some fault here, too.

  Walter Kirn

  Faults, Language, Obsession

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• I used to teach at Yale, which was at one time a center of postmodernist literary theory. Derrida was there. Paul de Man was there.

  Harry Frankfurt

  Men, Literary Theory, Yale

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• French intellectual life has, in my opinion, been turned into something cheap and meretricious by the 'star' system. It is like Hollywood. Thus we go from one absurdity to another - Stalinism, existentialism. Lacan, Derrida - some of them obscene ( Stalinism), some simply infantile and ridiculous ( Lacan, Derrida). What is striking, however, is the pomposity and self-importance, at each stage.

  Noam Chomsky

  Stars, Self, Intellectual

  Noam Chomsky, Jean Bricmont, Julie Franck (2010). “Chomsky Notebook”, p.72, Columbia University Press

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• 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.'

  Jeffrey Eugenides

  Philosophy, Writing, Criticism

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