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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.

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

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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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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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Certain readers resented me when they could no longer recognize their territory, their institution.
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I do everything I think possible or acceptable to escape from this trap.
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Cinema plus Psychoanalysis equals the Science of Ghosts.
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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.
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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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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.
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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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