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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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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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We are all mediators, translators.
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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 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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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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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.
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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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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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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 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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As soon as there is language, generality has entered the scene.
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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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I always dream of a pen that would be a syringe.
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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 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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Beyond the touchline there is nothing.
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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 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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Cinema plus Psychoanalysis equals the Science of Ghosts.
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