Psychoanalysis has taught that the dead -- a dead parent, for example -- can be more alive for us, more powerful, more scary, than the living. It is the question of ghosts.
JACQUES DERRIDA, New York Times Magazine, Jan. 23, 1994
I am like a child ready for the apocalypse, I am the apocalypse itself, that is to say, the ultimate and first event of the end, the unveiling and the verdict.
JACQUES DERRIDA, attributed, Arguing the Apocalypse
Monsters cannot be announced. One cannot say: 'Here are our monsters,' without immediately turning the monsters into pets.
JACQUES DERRIDA,"Some Statements and Truisms about Neologisms, Newisms, Postisms, Parasitisms, and other small Seismisms", The States of Theory
Now I don't know what perception is and I don't believe that anything like perception exists. Perception is precisely a concept, a concept of an intuition or of a given originating from the thing itself, present itself in its meaning, independently from language from the system of reference. And I believe that perception is interdependent with the concept of origin and of center and consequently whatever strikes at the metaphysics [of presence] of which I have spoken strikes also at the very concept of perception. I don't believe that there is any perception.
JACQUES DERRIDA, "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Human Discourses", The Structuralist Controversy
