Jacques Derrida Quotes

• 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

• I have always had trouble recognizing myself in the features of the intellectual playing his political role according to the screenplay that you are familiar with and whose heritage deserves to be questioned.

  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.

Related Authors

• Martin Buber
• Walker Percy
• Theodore Zeldin
• Marquis de Sade
• Sun Ra
• William Petty
• Nicolás Gómez Dávila
• Wilhelm Dilthey
• Nicholas Murray Butler
• Nicolas Malebranche

Advertisement

Today's Anniversary - 3rd January

Births

• 1966 - Roderick Rotol
• 1989 - Alex D. Linz
• 1969 - Michael Schumacher
• 1975 - Carla Gordon
• 1897 - Pola Negri

Deaths

• 2005 - Will Eisner
• 1965 - Milton Avery
• 2010 - Mary Daly
• 1967 - Mary Garden
• 2012 - Josef Skvorecky