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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
Firsts
Nothing
First
Trying
Years
Ordeal
Ordeals
Handed

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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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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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I rightly pass for an atheist.
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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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The circle of the return to birth can only remain open, but this is a chance, a sign of life, and a wound.
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I love language as I love life itself!
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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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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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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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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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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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As soon as there is language, generality has entered the scene.
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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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Surviving - that is the other name of a mourning whose possibility is never to be awaited.
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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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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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I do everything I think possible or acceptable to escape from this trap.
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Who ever said that one was born just once?
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We are all mediators, translators.
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