An act of naming should quite rightly enable me to call any-thing a self-portrait, not only any drawing, ‘portrait’ or not, but everything that happens to me, that I can affect, or that affects me.
Survival in the conventional sense of the term means to continue to live, but also to live after death.
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.
I wrote some bad poetry that I published in North African journals, but even as I withdrew into this reading, I also led the life of a kind of young hooligan.
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.
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.
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.
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.
One often speaks without seeing, without knowing, without meaning what one says.
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.
My most resolute opponents believe that I am too visible, that I am a little too alive, that my name echoes too much in the texts which they nevertheless claim to be inaccessible.
I love language as I love life itself!
Certain readers resented me when they could no longer recognize their territory, their institution.
Such a caring for death, an awakening that keeps vigil over death, a conscience that looks death in the face, is another name for freedom.
Even if we’re in a state of hopelessness, a sense of expectation is an integral part of our relationship to time. Hopelessness is possible only because we do hope that some good, loving someone could come. If that’s what Heidegger meant, then I agree with him.
I rightly pass for an atheist.
I absolutely forbade all public photographs of myself. I like photography, I don’t have anything against it, but...
I believe in the value of the book, which keeps something irreplaceable, and in the necessity of fighting to secure its respect.
These years of the Ecole Normale were an ordeal. Nothing was handed to me on the first try.
No one will ever know from what secret I am writing and the fact that I say so changes nothing.