Jacques Derrida Quotes

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

  Jacques Derrida

  Topics in Uncategorized

• I always dream of a pen that would be a syringe.

  Jacques Derrida

  Topics in Dream

  Tags in Writing

• Why is it the philosopher who is expected to be easier and not some scientist who is even more inaccessible?

  Jacques Derrida

• Who ever said that one was born just once?

  Jacques Derrida

• Whatever precautions you take so the photograph will look like this or that, there comes a moment when the photograph surprises you. It is the other’s gaze that wins out and decides.

  Jacques Derrida

• We are all mediators, translators.

  Jacques Derrida

• To pretend, I actually do the thing: I have therefore only pretended to pretend.

  Jacques Derrida

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

  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

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

  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

• 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.

  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

• 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.

  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

• 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.

  Jacques Derrida

• In Algeria, I had begun to get into literature and philosophy. I dreamed of writing-and already models were instructing the dream, a certain language governed it.

  Jacques Derrida

• If this work seems so threatening, this is because it isn’t simply eccentric or strange, but competent, rigorously argued, and carrying conviction.

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

  Jacques Derrida

Jacques Derrida (28)

Birth:	15th July, 1930
Death:	9th October, 2004
Nationality:	French
Profession:	Philosopher

About

Jacques Derrida was born in El Biar, Algeria. He was a French philosopher. He is best known for developing a form of semiotic analysis known as deconstruction, which he discussed in numerous texts, and developed in the context of phenomenology. He is one of the major figures associated with post-structuralism and postmodern philosophy. During his career he published more than 40 books, together with hundreds of essays and public presentations. He wrote several books include: Of Grammatology, Margins of philosophy, The Post Card, Limited Inc, Specters of Marx, The gift of death, Archive Fever, Politics of Friendship, The Post Card, and The Work of Mourning.

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