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Contrary to what phenomenology- which is always phenomenology of perception- has tried to make us believe, contrary to what our desire cannot fail to be tempted into believing, the thing itself always escapes.

Jacques Derrida

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Jacques Derrida
Age: 74 †
Born: 1930
Born: July 15
Died: 2004
Died: October 9
Literary Critic
Philosopher
University Teacher
Writer
Jackie Derrida
Jackie Elie Derrida
Jackie Élie Derrida
J. Derrida
Failing
Phenomenology
Desire
Escapes
Cannot
Tempted
Thing
Believing
Believe
Contrary
Make
Fail
Always
Perception
Tried

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If things were simple, word would have gotten around.
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Monsters cannot be announced. One cannot say: 'Here are our monsters,' without immediately turning the monsters into pets.
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Such a caring for death, an awakening that keeps vigil over death, a conscience that looks death in the face, is another name for freedom.
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I would like to write you so simply, so simply, so simply. Without having anything ever catch the eye, excepting yours alone, ... so that above all the language remains self-evidently secret, as if it were being invented at every step, and as if it were burning immediately
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In philosophy, you have to reckon with the implicit level of an accumulated reserve, and thus with a very great number of relays, with the shared responsibility of these relays.
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Who ever said that one was born just once?
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I am one of those marranes who no longer say they are Jews even in the secret of their own hearts.
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I do everything I think possible or acceptable to escape from this trap.
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The trace I leave to me means at once my death, to come or already come, and the hope that it will survive me. It is not an ambition of immortality it is fundamental. I leave here a bit of paper, I leave, I die it is impossible to exit this structure it is the unchanging form of my life. Every time I let something go, I live my death in writing.
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These years of the Ecole Normale were an ordeal. Nothing was handed to me on the first try.
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Deconstruction never had meaning or interest, at least in my eyes, than as a radicalization, that is to say, also within the tradition of a certain Marxism, in a certain spirit of Marxism.
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Beyond the touchline there is nothing.
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No one gets angry at a mathematician or a physicist whom he or she doesn't understand, or at someone who speaks a foreign language, but rather at someone who tampers with your own language.
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The boarding-school experience in Paris was very hard, I didn't put up with it very well. I was sick all the time, or in any case frail, on the edge of a nervous breakdown.
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I say things that contradict each other, that are in real tension with each other, that compose me, that make me live, and that will make me die.
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These critics organize and practice in my case a sort of obsessive personality cult which philosophers should know how to question and above all, to moderate.
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The circle of the return to birth can only remain open, but this is a chance, a sign of life, and a wound.
Jacques Derrida
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But can one not conceive of a presence, and of a presence to itself of the subject before speech or signs, a presence to itself of the subject in a silent and intuitive consciousness? Such a question therefore presupposes that, prior to the sign, and outside it, excluding any trace and any différance, something like consciousness is possible.
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I’m no good for anything except taking the world apart and putting it together again (and I manage the latter less and less frequently).
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As soon as there is language, generality has entered the scene.
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