Jacques Derrida (Philosopher)

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 men

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 poet

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

— Jacques Derrida language

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 time

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 teaching

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

— Jacques Derrida end

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

— Jacques Derrida think

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

— Jacques Derrida being

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 work

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 men

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

— Jacques Derrida

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

— Jacques Derrida culture

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

— Jacques Derrida language

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 language

Who ever said that one was born just once?

— Jacques Derrida

We are all mediators, translators.

— Jacques Derrida media

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 philosophy

Certain readers resented me when they could no longer recognize their territory, their institution.

— Jacques Derrida read

I do not believe in pure idioms. I think there is naturally a desire, for whoever speaks or writes, to sign in an idiomatic, irreplaceable manner.

— Jacques Derrida desire

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 life

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

— 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 philosophy

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 believe

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 personality

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 time

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 others gaze that wins out and decides.

— Jacques Derrida men

It is also the becoming-space of the spoken chain - which has been called temporal or linear; a becoming-space which makes possible both writing and every correspondence between speech and writing, every passage from one to the other. The activity or productivity connoted by the a of différance refers to the generative movement in the play of differences. The latter are neither fallen from the sky nor inscribed once and for all in a closed system, a static structure that a synchronic and taxonomic operation could exhaust. Differences are the effects of transformations, and from this vantage the theme of différance is incompatible with the static, synchronic, taxonomic, ahistoric motifs in the concept of structure.p. 28

— Jacques Derrida writing

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