"A strange resilience"

Without plays like a strange resilience, neither an energy or a functioning. X without X no longer appears to function. But if it does, it is not as one thinks.
-Derrida, "Pas"

On each occasion one will have to make complex gestures to explain that one is acting, despite contamination, in this particular way, because one believes that it is better to do this rather than that, that a particular act chosen is in such-and-such a situation more likely to do such-and-such than another possible act. These gestures are anything but pragmatic, they are strategic evaluations that attempt to measure up to the formalization of the machine.

-Derrida, "Nietzsche and the Machine," 237