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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
Ordeal
Ordeals
Handed
Firsts
Nothing
First
Trying
Years

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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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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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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 do everything I think possible or acceptable to escape from this trap.
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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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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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We are all mediators, translators.
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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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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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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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Such a caring for death, an awakening that keeps vigil over death, a conscience that looks death in the face, is another name for freedom.
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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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Who ever said that one was born just once?
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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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If things were simple, word would have gotten around.
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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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As soon as there is language, generality has entered the scene.
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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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