Jacques Derrida
Jacques Derrida
Jacques Derridawas a French philosopher, born in Algeria. Derrida 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...
ProfessionPhilosopher
Date of Birth15 July 1930
Jacques Derrida quotes about
entered french-philosopher generality soon
As soon as there is language, generality has entered the scen.
plato philosophical mean
Learning to live ought to mean learning to die - to acknowledge, to accept, an absolute mortality - without positive outcome,or resurrection, or redemption, for oneself or for anyone else. That has been the old philosophical injunction since Plato: to be a philosopher is to learn how to die.
dream communication would-be
I always dream of a pen that would be a syringe.
teaching philosophical thinking
If you read philosophical texts of the tradition, you'll notice they almost never said 'I,' and didn't speak in the first person. From Aristotle to Heidegger, they try to consider their own lives as something marginal or accidental. What was essential was their teaching and their thinking. Biography is something empirical and outside, and is considered an accident that isn't necessarily or essentially linked to the philosophical activity or system.
trying answers firsts
I was wondering myself where I am going. So I would answer you by saying, first, that I am trying, precisely, to put myself at a point so that I do not know any longer where I am going.
simple ifs simple-words
If things were simple, word would have gotten around.
translators mediators
We are all mediators, translators.
teaching school anxiety
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.
desire return archives
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
what-if doubt secret
But because me and myself, as you no doubt are well aware, we are going to die, my relation—and yours too—to the event of this text, which otherwise never quite makes it, our relation is that of a structurally posthumous necessity. Suppose, in that case, that I am not alone in my claim to know the idiomatic code (whose notion itself is already contradictory) of this event. What if somewhere, here or there, there are shares in this non-secret’s secret? Even so the scene would not be changed. The accomplices, as you are once again well aware, are also bound to die.
deconstruction
There is nothing outside the text
practice personality philosopher
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.
opening-up risk gestures
Peace is only possible when one of the warring sides takes the first step, the hazardous initiative, the risk of opening up dialogue, and decides to make the gesture that will lead not only to an armistice but to peace.
roles argument stage
I became the stage for the great argument between Nietzsche and Rousseau. I was the extra ready to take on all the roles.