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Jacques Derrida Biography

Jacques Derrida

Jacques Derrida (/ˈdɛrɪdə/; French: [ʒak dɛʁida]; born Jackie Élie Derrida; 1930–2004) was a French philosopher 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.

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Jacques Derrida Quotes

Cinema plus Psychoanalysis equals the Science of Ghosts.

Cinema, Ghost, Ghosts, Plus, Science

No one will ever know from what secret I am writing and the fact that I say so changes nothing.

Changes, Facts, Nothing, Secret, Writing

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

Actually, Pretend, Pretended, Thing

I would like to write you so simply, so simply, so simply. Without having anything ever catch the eye, excepting yours alone,. . . so that above all the language remains self-evidently secret, as if it were being invented at every step, and as if it were burning immediately

Catch, Eye, Invented, Self, Write, Writing

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

Communication, Dream, Pen, Syringe, Would Be

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.

Level, Number, Numbers, Philosophy, Reckon, Responsibility

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.

Anxiety, Cross, School, Teaching, Threshold

Psychoanalysis has taught that the dead – a dead parent, for example – can be more alive for us, more powerful, more scary, than the living. It is the question of ghosts.

Ghosts, Parent, Powerful, Scary, Taught

Who ever said that one was born just once?

Born, Said

Within the university. . . you can study without waiting for any efficient or immediate result. You may search, just for the sake of searching, and try for the sake of trying. So there is a possibility of what I would call playing. It's perhaps the only place within society where play is possible to such an extent.

Education, Play, Searching, Waiting

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.

Gets, Language, Mathematician, Physicist, Speak

The only attitude (the only politics--judicial, medical, pedagogical and so forth) I would absolutely condemn is one which, directly or indirectly, cuts off the possibility of an essentially interminable questioning, that is, an effective and thus transforming questioning.

Attitude, Cuts, Cutting, Interminable, Medical

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.

Case, Nervous, Paris, School, Sick

Actually, when I write, there is a feeling of necessity, of something that is stronger than myself that demands that I must write as I write.

Writing, Feelings, Stronger, Actually, Demands

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.

Decides, Looks, Precautions, Surprise, Surprises, Winning

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.

Gesture, Gestures, Lead, Opening Up, Risk, Step

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.

Believe, Pure, Think, Thinking, Writing

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.

Aware, Case, Changed, Doubt, Secret, What If

The end of man (as a factual anthropological limit) is announced to thought from the vantage of the end of man (as a determined opening or the infinity of a telos ). Man is that which is in relation to his end, in the fundamentally equivocal sense of the word. Since always.

Equivocal, Infinity, Limits, Men, Vantage

A determination or an effect within a system which is no longer that of a presence but of a diffrance, a system that no longer tolerates the opposition of activity and passivity, nor that of cause and effect, or of indetermination and determination, etc. , such that in designating consciousness as an effect or a determination, one continues - for strategic reasons that can be more or less lucidly deliberated and systematically calculated - to operate according to the lexicon of that which one is de-limiting.

According, Deliberated, Determination, Etc, Lexicon

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