Literary Birthday – 15 July – Jacques Derrida

Jacques Derrida was born 15 July 1930, and died 9 October 2004.

Seven Quotes

  1. I believe in the value of the book, which keeps something irreplaceable, and in the necessity of fighting to secure its respect.
  2. 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.
  3. What cannot be said above all must not be silenced but written.
  4. 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.
  5. I always dream of a pen that would be a syringe.
  6. The traditional statement about language is that it is in itself living, and that writing is the dead part of language.
  7. 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

by Amanda Patterson

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Posted on: 15th July 2014
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