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These years of the Ecole Normale were an ordeal. Nothing was handed to me on the first try.

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
Years
Ordeal
Ordeals
Handed
Firsts
Nothing
First
Trying

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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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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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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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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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As soon as there is language, generality has entered the scene.
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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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Each time this identity announces itself, someone or something cries: Look out for the trap, youre caught. Take off, get free, disengage yourself.
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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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I have always had school sickness, as others have seasickness. I cried when it was time to go back to school long after I was old enough to be ashamed of such behavior.
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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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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 love language as I love life itself!
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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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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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I do everything I think possible or acceptable to escape from this trap.
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If things were simple, word would have gotten around.
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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
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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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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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