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

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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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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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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.
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The first problem of the media is posed by what does not get translated, or even published in the dominant political languages.
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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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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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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 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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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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I always dream of a pen that would be a syringe.
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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.
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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 blindness that opens the eye is not the one that darkens vision. Tears and not sight are the essence of the eye.
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Who ever said that one was born just once?
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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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