Jacques Derrida was born 15 July 1930, and died 9 October 2004.
Seven Quotes
- I believe in the value of the book, which keeps something irreplaceable, and in the necessity of fighting to secure its respect.
- 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.
- What cannot be said above all must not be silenced but written.
- But 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.
- I always dream of a pen that would be a syringe.
- The traditional statement about language is that it is in itself living, and that writing is the dead part of language.
- 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.
Jacques Derrida was a French philosopher who published more than 40 books, as well as hundreds of essays. He is best known for developing a form of semiotic analysis known as deconstruction. He is one of the major figures associated with post-modern philosophy. His works include Writing and Difference.
Source for an image of the author
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