Jacques Derrida Short Quotes

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As soon as there is language, generality has entered the scene.

Jacques Derrida
What cannot be said above all must not be silenced but written.

Jacques Derrida
I do everything I think possible or acceptable to escape from this trap.

Jacques Derrida
Everything is arranged so that it be this way, this is what is called culture.

Jacques Derrida
We need to interpret interpretations more than to interpret things. Montaigne.

Jacques Derrida
Surviving - that is the other name of a mourning whose possibility is never to be awaited.

Jacques Derrida
Writing in the common sense is the dead letter, it is the carrier of death. It exhausts life.

Jacques Derrida
I am one of those marranes who no longer say they are Jews even in the secret of their own hearts.

Jacques Derrida
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
I never give in to the temptation to be difficult just for the sake of being difficult. That would be too ridiculous.

Jacques Derrida
Amy Kofman: Have you read all the books in here?
Derrida: No, only four of them. But I read those very, very carefully.

Jacques Derrida
I became the stage for the great argument between Nietzsche and Rousseau. I was the extra ready to take on all the roles.

Jacques Derrida
Monsters cannot be announced. One cannot say: 'here are our monsters', without immediately turning the monsters into pets.

Jacques Derrida
The first problem of the media is posed by what does not get translated, or even published in the dominant political languages.

Jacques Derrida
I believe in the value of the book, which keeps something irreplaceable, and in the necessity of fighting to secure its respect.

Jacques Derrida
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.

Jacques Derrida
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
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.

Jacques Derrida
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
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.

Jacques Derrida
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.

Jacques Derrida
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.

Jacques Derrida
My most resolute opponents believe that I am too visible, that I am a little too alive, that my name echoes too much in the texts which they nevertheless claim to be inaccessible.

Jacques Derrida
Still today, I cannot cross the threshold of a teaching institution without physical symptoms, in my chest and my stomach, of discomfort or anxiety. And yet I have never left school.

Jacques Derrida
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.

Jacques Derrida