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.
I never give in to the temptation to be difficult just for the sake of being difficult. That would be too ridiculous.
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.
That is what deconstruction is made of: not the mixture but the tension between memory, fidelity, the preservation of something that has been given to us, and, at the same time, heterogeneity, something absolutely new, and a break.
Beyond the touchline there is nothing.
Circumcision, that’s all I’ve ever talked about.
Deconstruction never had meaning or interest, at least in my eyes, than as a radicalization, that is to say, also within the tradition of a certain Marxism, in a certain spirit of Marxism .
I have always had trouble recognizing myself in the features of the intellectual playing his political role according to the screenplay that you are familiar with and whose heritage deserves to be questioned.
In Algeria, I had begun to get into literature and philosophy. I dreamed of writing-and already models were instructing the dream, a certain language governed it.