'There is nothing outside the text'

There is one statement by Derrida which he regarded as the axial statement of his whole essay on Rousseau (part of the highly influential Of Grammatology, 1967), and which is perhaps his most quoted and famous statement ever. It's the assertion that "there is nothing outside the text" (il n'y a pas de hors-texte), which means that “there is no such a thing as out-of-the-text”, in other words, the context is an integral part of the text.

We can call "context" the entire "real-history-of-the-world," if you like, in which this value of objectivity and, even more broadly, that of truth (etc.) have taken on meaning and imposed themselves. That does not in the slightest discredit them. In the name of what, of which other "truth," moreover, would it?


One of the definitions of what is called deconstruction would be the effort to take this limitless context into account, to pay the sharpest and broadest attention possible to context, and thus to an incessant movement of recontextualization.
The phrase which for some has become a sort of slogan, in general so badly understood, of deconstruction ("there is nothing outside the text" [il n'y a pas de hors-texte]), means nothing else: there is nothing outside context. In this form, which says exactly the same thing, the formula would doubtless have been less shocking. I am not certain that it would have provided more to think about.

Critics of Derrida have countless times quoted it as a slogan to characterize and stigmatize deconstruction. Some commentators have said that it means that it is not possible to think outside of the philosophical system, or that there is no experience of reality outside of language. With regards to the broadness of the concept of "text", he added:

I take great interest in questions of language and rhetoric, and I think they deserve enormous consideration; but there is a point where the authority of final jurisdiction is neither rhetorical nor linguistic, nor even discursive. The notion of trace or of text is introduced to mark the limits of the linguistic turn. This is one more reason why I prefer to speak of 'mark' rather than of language. In the first place the mark is not anthropological; it is prelinguistic; it is the possibility of language, and it is every where there is a relation to another thing or relation to an other. For such relations, the mark has no need of language.