Quote

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.

Jacques Derrida

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Writing
Dies
Fundamentals
Every
Hope
Ambition
Something
Means
Structure
Unchanging
Time
Death
Paper
Exit
Life
Form
Already
Trace
Live
Leave
Immortality
Come
Bits
Fundamental
Mean
Impossible
Survive

More quotes by Jacques Derrida

Image
Certain readers resented me when they could no longer recognize their territory, their institution.
Jacques Derrida
Image
We are given over to absolute solitude. No one can speak with us and no one can speak for us we must take it upon ourselves, each of us must take it upon himself.
Jacques Derrida
Image
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.
Jacques Derrida
Image
I rightly pass for an atheist.
Jacques Derrida
Image
Each time this identity announces itself, someone or something cries: Look out for the trap, youre caught. Take off, get free, disengage yourself.
Jacques Derrida
Image
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
Jacques Derrida
Image
The first problem of the media is posed by what does not get translated, or even published in the dominant political languages.
Jacques Derrida
Image
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
Image
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.
Jacques Derrida
Image
Who ever said that one was born just once?
Jacques Derrida
Image
Beyond the touchline there is nothing.
Jacques Derrida
Image
Monsters cannot be announced. One cannot say: 'Here are our monsters,' without immediately turning the monsters into pets.
Jacques Derrida
Image
I always dream of a pen that would be a syringe.
Jacques Derrida
Image
Even if we're in a state of hopelessness, a sense of expectation is an integral part of our relationship to time. Hopelessness is possible only because we do hope that some good, loving someone could come. If that's what Heidegger meant, then I agree with him.
Jacques Derrida
Image
I do everything I think possible or acceptable to escape from this trap.
Jacques Derrida
Image
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.
Jacques Derrida
Image
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
Jacques Derrida
Image
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.
Jacques Derrida
Image
Surviving - that is the other name of a mourning whose possibility is never to be awaited.
Jacques Derrida
Image
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.
Jacques Derrida