"Each time this identity announces itself, someone or something cries: Look out for the trap, youre caught. Take off, get free, disengage yourself."
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Quote collection
Jacques Derrida quotes (page 3 of 5)
87 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"As soon as there is language, generality has entered the scene."
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"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."
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"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."
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"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."
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"What cannot be said above all must not be silenced but written."
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"Beauty only happens once."
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"As soon as we cease to believe in such an engineer and in a discourse which breaks with the received historical discourse, and as soon as we admit that every finite discourse is bound by a certain bricolage and that the engineer and the scientist are also species of bricoleurs , then the very idea of bricolage is menaced and the difference in which it took on its meaning breaks down."
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"I do everything I think possible or acceptable to escape from this trap."
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"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."
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"In a language, in the system of language, there are only differences. Therefore, a taxonomical operation an undertake the systematic, statistical, and classificatory inventory of a language."
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"The circle of the return to birth can only remain open, but this is a chance, a sign of life, and a wound."
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"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."
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"But can one not conceive of a presence, and of a presence to itself of the subject before speech or signs, a presence to itself of the subject in a silent and intuitive consciousness? Such a question therefore presupposes that, prior to the sign, and outside it, excluding any trace and any différance, something like consciousness is possible."
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"We are given over to absolute solitude. No one can speak with us and no one can speak for us; we must take it upon ourselves, each of us must take it upon himself."
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"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."
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"The first problem of the media is posed by what does not get translated, or even published in the dominant political languages."
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"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."
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"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."
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"Circumcision , that's all I've ever talked about."
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