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Derrida Quotes

Browse 39 quotes about Derrida.

Derrida Quotes

“The differences between the sexes are found in babies, and across cultures, too -so this is not some weird WEIRD phenomenom. Given a choice, neonate girls spend more time looking at faces, while neonate boys spend more time looking at things.”

FeminismEqualityGenderLgbtqProgressivesDerridaDeconstructionismRadical Left
Book:A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life
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“When we say that men are taller than women, the words -on average- are implied. Pointing to the existence of your friend Rhonda, who really is quite tall, does not negate the statistical truth that, on average, men are still taller than women.”

FeminismEqualityGenderLgbtqProgressivesDerridaDeconstructionismRadical Left
Book:A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life
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“The most direct critique [in the TV series The Prisoner] of what might be called the politics-industry of late capitalism, however, is undoubtedly [the episode] “Free for All”, both the funeral dirge for the national mass party and the unofficial founding charter of the New Left. In many ways, “Free for All” is the logical complement to the visual innovations and luminous mediatic strategies of “A., B. & C.”; whereas the latter identifies the space of the editing room as a new kind of cultural zone, and thus transforms a certain visual recursion into a protomorphic video library of images, the former concentrates not on the image per se but on the messages and texts transmitted by such—or what Derrida would identify as the thematic of a dissemination which is never quite identical with what is being disseminated. But where deconstruction and post-structuralism promptly sealed off this potentially explosive insight behind the specialized ghettos of linguistics or ontological philosophy, and thus unwittingly perpetuated precisely the authoritarian monopoly over theory authorized by the ontologies in the first place, the most insightful intellectuals of the New Left (most notably, Adorno and Sartre) would insist on the necessarily mediated nature of this dissemination, i.e. the fact that the narrative-industries of late capitalism are hardly innocent bystanders in the business of accumulation, but play an indispensable role in creating new markets, restructuring old ones, and ceaselessly legitimating, transacting and regulating the sway of the commodity form over society as a whole.”

DerridaSartre2003AdornoPoststructuralismThe PrisonerNew LeftInformation Uprising
Book:The World is Watching: Video as Multinational Aesthetics, 1968-1995
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“Like the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School, postmodernism seeks to institutionalize dishonesty as a legitimate school of thought. The idea of truth as the ultimate goal of the intellectual is discarded. In its place, scholars are asked to pursue political objectives--so long as those political objectives are the 'correct' ones. Postmodernism is not fringe within the community of scholars. It is central. This tells us a great deal about the life of the mind today. Peruse any university course catalogue, and you find names like Foucault, Derrida, and Barthes. Scour the footnotes of scholarly books and journals and a similar story unfolds. With the primacy of philosophies--postmodernism, Critical Theory, and even the right-leaning Straussianism--that exalt dishonesty in the service of supposedly noble causes, is it at all surprising that liars like Alfred Kinsey, Rigoberta Menchu, Alger Hiss, and Margaret Sanger have achieved a venerated status among the intellectuals?”

PostmodernismDerridaFoucaultCritical TheoryBarthesMargaret SangerAlger HissAlfred KinseyRigoberta MenchuSodomites
Book:Intellectual Morons: How Ideology Makes Smart People Fall for Stupid Ideas
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“One problem with taking on a physical or mental disability as an identity is that it disincentivizes any possible mitigation of the disability.”

LeftIdeologyProgressivePostmodernismWokeSjwDerridaFoucault
Book:Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody
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“Consequently, we now have Social Justice texts -forming a kind of Gospel of Social Justice- that express, with absolute certainty, that all white people are racist, all men are sexist, racism and sexism are systems that can exist and oppress absent even a single person with racist of sexist intentions or beliefs (in the usual sense of the terms). sex is not biological and exists on a spectrum, language can be literal violence, denial of gender identity is killing people, the wish to remedy disability and obesity is hateful, and everything needs to be decolonized.”

LeftIdeologyProgressivePostmodernismWokeSjwDerridaFoucault
Book:Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody
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“Mental health activism also frequently regards mental illness as a marginalized identity. One problem with this approach is that people tend to get attached to their identities and this may discourage some from seeking treatment and trying to recover.”

LeftIdeologyProgressivePostmodernismWokeSjwDerridaFoucault
Book:Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody
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“Communism is a great example of the human tendency to fail to appreciate how our best theories can fail catastrophically in practice, l even if their adherents are motivated by an idealistic vision of "the greater good".”

LeftIdeologyProgressivePostmodernismWokeSjwDerridaFoucaultProgressivenism
Book:Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody
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“Social Justice cannot succeed because it does not correspond with reality or with core human intuitions of fairness and reciprocity and because it is an idealistic metanarrative.”

LeftIdeologyProgressivePostmodernismWokeSjwDerridaFoucault
Book:Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody
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“People in liberal systems are free to believe anything they wish, and they're free to argue for anything they want, but to claim that such beliefs are knowledge and demand they be respected as such is another matter.”

LeftIdeologyProgressivePostmodernismWokeSjwDerridaFoucault
Book:Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody
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“While actually intersex individuals are real and incredibly rare, and actually transgendered people are also real and very rare, much of modern "gender ideology" is dangerous and contagious, and many of the interventions (hormonal, surgical) are not reversible.”

EqualityGenderLgbtqProgressivesDerridaDeconstructionismRadical Left
Book:A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life
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“Or, to put it another way, presuppositional apologetics--such as that developed by Francis Schaeffer, but also by Cornelius Van Til and, to a degree, Herman Dooeyeweerd--rejects classical apologetics precisely because presuppositionalism recognizes the truth of Derrida's claim that everything is interpretation (though I am admittedly radicalizing their intuitions).”

PhilosophyInterpretationPostmodernismApologeticsDerridaPresuppositional Apologetics
Book:Who's Afraid of Postmodernism?: Taking Derrida, Lyotard, and Foucault to Church
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“Most Bible-readers of a conservative stamp will look askance at deconstructionism. But its proposed model is in fact too close for comfort to many models implicitly adopted within (broadly speaking) the pietist tradition. The church has actually institutionalized and systematized ways of reading the Bible which are strangely similar to some strands of postmodernism. In particular, the church has lived with the gospels virtually all its life, and familiarity has bred a variety of more or less contemptible hermeneutical models. Even sometimes within those circles that claim to take the Bible most seriously—often, in fact, there above all—there is a woeful refusal to do precisely that, particularly with the gospels. The modes of reading and interpretation that have been followed are, in fact, functions of the models of inspiration and authority of scripture that have been held, explicitly or (more often) implicitly within various circles, and which have often made nonsense of any attempt to read the Bible historically. The devout predecessor of deconstructionism is that reading of the text which insists that what the Bible says to me, now, is the be-all and end-all of its meaning; a reading which does not want to know about the intention of the evangelists, the life of the early church, or even about what Jesus was actually like. There are some strange bedfellow in the world of literary epistemology.”

Bible StudyPostmodernismDeconstructionHermeneuticsDerridaExegesisDeconstructionismNew Historicism
Book:The New Testament and the People of God
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“So that to give a commentary on the text, such as we are attempting here, is to reinforce the illusion that a present meaning exists–that a text can be presented. When I try to present a commentary (as I am doing here), I necessarily resist the suction of the play of meanings which attempts to suck any such attempt–which it produces–back into a void. If I try to explain the text, I forget that the production of my explanation is already related to its dissolution, its disappearance into a textual void, a void between any two readings, a void which is always already producing another reading, and its dissolution.”

PostmodernismDeconstructionDisseminationDerrida1997
Book:Derrida for Beginners
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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.”

SelfStatesPerfectPersonalityCircumstancesOffersNormalWeakExplanationProphetFormulasAnxiousCosmicAcademicResentmentTrappedDefeatedAlienationInactionPassivityLacanDerrida
Author:Camille Paglia
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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.”

MenSelfReadingGamesEmotionAttitudeCreativeGenerationsStyleLetting GoMembersNervousExposedBetrayPerpetualSophisticatedAdolescenceAlienationMy GenerationPretentiousAttitude Towards LifeDerrida
Author:Camille Paglia
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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.”

KindInterestJusticeBehindsLibertyRolesPostsNot SureRootedJudaismTwistsTheologicalMarxistFraternityTrajectoryCfsEschatologyDerridaStructuralism
Author:George Pattison
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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.”

IdeasEuropeTraditionRecoveryBrownSubstitutesThinkerLinkedTransfersAmerican TraditionLacanDerridaLeslieTriads
Author:Camille Paglia
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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.”

SelfStarsOpinionStageIntellectualHollywoodImportanceRidiculousExistentialismAbsurdityObsceneSelf-importanceInfantileStalinismIntellectual LifeLacanDerridaPomposity
Book:Chomsky Notebook
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