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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

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
Place
Repetitive
Nostalgic
Archive
Nostalgia
Irrepressible
Origin
Archaic
Absolutes
Homesickness
Absolute
Compulsive
Return
Archives
Desire
Commencement

More quotes by Jacques Derrida

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There is nothing outside of the text. [Fr., Il n'y a pas de hors-texte.]
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I wrote some bad poetry that I published in North African journals, but even as I withdrew into this reading, I also led the life of a kind of young hooligan.
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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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I love language as I love life itself!
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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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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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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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If things were simple, word would have gotten around.
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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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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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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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Surviving - that is the other name of a mourning whose possibility is never to be awaited.
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Certain readers resented me when they could no longer recognize their territory, their institution.
Jacques Derrida
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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.
Jacques Derrida
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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
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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
Jacques Derrida
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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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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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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.
Jacques Derrida