"To pretend, I actually do the thing: I have therefore only pretended to pretend"
About this Quote
Derrida turns a simple pose - pretending - into a trapdoor that collapses the difference between performance and reality. If pretending is done convincingly, then it is no longer a harmless imitation hovering at a safe distance from the real act; it becomes an act with consequences. The line is funny in a dry, philosophical way because it reads like a verbal Möbius strip: the moment you try to occupy the position of "just acting", the act happens anyway, and your supposed distance from it is revealed as another performance.
The intent is not to moralize about sincerity. It is to stress how easily our culture grants "pretense" the status of an alibi. Derrida is poking at the fantasy that intention can police meaning: if I claim I was only pretending, I get to keep the benefits of the act while dodging responsibility for it. His move is to show that this escape hatch is structurally unstable. The claim "I was only pretending" is itself a statement that does work in the world - it persuades, deflects, reframes - and that work is real.
Contextually, this sits inside Derrida's larger critique of clean binaries: speech/writing, original/copy, serious/play. Pretending looks like the copy of an action, but copies do not remain subordinate. Like a signature or a promise, a pretense "iterates": it can be repeated, detached from a stable origin, and still function. The subtext is unsettlingly contemporary: irony, roleplay, plausible deniability, "just joking" - all the rhetorical costumes we wear to act without owning the act.
The intent is not to moralize about sincerity. It is to stress how easily our culture grants "pretense" the status of an alibi. Derrida is poking at the fantasy that intention can police meaning: if I claim I was only pretending, I get to keep the benefits of the act while dodging responsibility for it. His move is to show that this escape hatch is structurally unstable. The claim "I was only pretending" is itself a statement that does work in the world - it persuades, deflects, reframes - and that work is real.
Contextually, this sits inside Derrida's larger critique of clean binaries: speech/writing, original/copy, serious/play. Pretending looks like the copy of an action, but copies do not remain subordinate. Like a signature or a promise, a pretense "iterates": it can be repeated, detached from a stable origin, and still function. The subtext is unsettlingly contemporary: irony, roleplay, plausible deniability, "just joking" - all the rhetorical costumes we wear to act without owning the act.
Quote Details
| Topic | Deep |
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