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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).

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
Together
Frequently
Anything
Latter
Good
Manage
World
Apart
Putting
Except
Taking
Less

More quotes by Jacques Derrida

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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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Surviving - that is the other name of a mourning whose possibility is never to be awaited.
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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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Cinema plus Psychoanalysis equals the Science of Ghosts.
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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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I rightly pass for an atheist.
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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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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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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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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
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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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Monsters cannot be announced. One cannot say: 'Here are our monsters,' without immediately turning the monsters into pets.
Jacques Derrida
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I do everything I think possible or acceptable to escape from this trap.
Jacques Derrida
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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.
Jacques Derrida
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Beyond the touchline there is nothing.
Jacques Derrida
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We are all mediators, translators.
Jacques Derrida
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As soon as there is language, generality has entered the scene.
Jacques Derrida
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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.
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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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