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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.

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
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Freedom
Awakening
Death
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I am like a child ready for the apocalypse, I am the apocalypse itself, that is to say, the ultimate and first event of the end, the unveiling and the verdict.
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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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I have always had school sickness, as others have seasickness. I cried when it was time to go back to school long after I was old enough to be ashamed of such behavior.
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Certain readers resented me when they could no longer recognize their territory, their institution.
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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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Monsters cannot be announced. One cannot say: 'Here are our monsters,' without immediately turning the monsters into pets.
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Actually, when I write, there is a feeling of necessity, of something that is stronger than myself that demands that I must write as I write.
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As soon as there is language, generality has entered the scene.
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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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It is to have a compulsive, repetitive, and nostalgic desire for the archive, an irrepressible desire to return to the origin, a homesickness, a nostalgia for the return to the most archaic place of absolute commencement
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Every discourse, even a poetic or oracular sentence, carries with it a system of rules for producing analogous things and thus an outline of methodology.
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There is nothing outside of the text. [Fr., Il n'y a pas de hors-texte.]
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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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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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We are all mediators, translators.
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I do everything I think possible or acceptable to escape from this trap.
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I rightly pass for an atheist.
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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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These years of the Ecole Normale were an ordeal. Nothing was handed to me on the first try.
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