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.
There is nothing outside the text.
The traditional statement about language is that it is in itself living, and that writing is the dead part of language.
I am like a child ready for the apocalypse, I am the apocalypse itself, that is to say, the ultimate and first event of the end, the unveiling and the verdict.
These critics organize and practice in my case a sort of obsessive personality cult which philosophers should know how to question and above all, to moderate.
If this work seems so threatening, this is because it isn’t simply eccentric or strange, but competent, rigorously argued, and carrying conviction.
As soon as there is language, generality has entered the scene.
The first problem of the media is posed by what does not get translated, or even published in the dominant political languages.
Peace is only possible when one of the warring sides takes the first step, the hazardous initiative, the risk of opening up dialogue, and decides to make the gesture that will lead not only to an armistice but to peace.
The circle of the return to birth can only remain open, but this is a chance, a sign of life, and a wound.
I became the stage for the great argument between Nietzsche and Rousseau. I was the extra ready to take on all the roles.
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.
Why is it the philosopher who is expected to be easier and not some scientist who is even more inaccessible?
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.