J. DERRIDA: I have the feeling – again speaking hastily in straightforward terms of immediate feelings – I have the feeling that what I am doing is more referential than most discourses that I call into question. The impossibility of reducing reference, that is what I am trying to say – and of reducing the other. What I'm doing is thinking about difference along with thinking about the other. And the other is the hard core of reference. It's exactly what we can't reinsert into interiority, into the homogeneity of some protected place. So thinking about difference is thinking about “ference.” And the irreducibility of “ference” is the other. It's what is other, which is different.

J. CREECH: The irreducibility of what, did you call it?

J. DERRIDA: “Ference.” Reference. Of “that which carries.”

J. CREECH: Ah, I see.

J. DERRIDA: Yes, a referent is what “carries back to.” Referent, means “referring to the other.” And I think that the ultimate referent is the other. And the other is precisely what can never allow itself to be closed again within any closure whatsoever. So that's what I'm trying to say. It is just as paradoxical for me to see this thought translated as a thought without reference, as it is to see textual thought translated as thought about language. Language games. It's just as topsy-turvy in the one case as in the other from “Deconstruction in America: An Interview with Jacques Derrida,” James Creech, Peggy Kamuf, and Jane Todd