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

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Surviving - that is the other name of a mourning whose possibility is never to be awaited.
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As soon as there is language, generality has entered the scene.
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I love language as I love life itself!
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I always dream of a pen that would be a syringe.
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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 rightly pass for an atheist.
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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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Who ever said that one was born just once?
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Beyond the touchline there is nothing.
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There is nothing outside of the text. [Fr., Il n'y a pas de hors-texte.]
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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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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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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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Certain readers resented me when they could no longer recognize their territory, their institution.
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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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Monsters cannot be announced. One cannot say: 'Here are our monsters,' without immediately turning the monsters into pets.
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We are all mediators, translators.
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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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