Happy birthday, Jacques Derrida! Here are some quotes from the philosopher .
“We must do the impossible, we must do and think the impossible. If only the possible happened, nothing more would happen. If I only did what I can do, I wouldn’t do anything.”
“What cannot be said above all must not be silenced, but written.”
“The disciple must break the glass, or better the mirror, the reflection, his infinite speculation on the master. And start to speak.”
“To live, by definition, is not something one learns. Not from oneself, it is not learned from life, taught by life. Only from the other and by death. In any case from the other at the edge of life. At the internal border or the external border, it is a heterodidactics between life and death.”
Interviewer: “Have you read all the books in here?”
Derrida (referring to his personal library): “No, only four of them. But I read those very, very carefully.”
All Nation-States are born and found themselves in violence.”
“The history of metaphysics, like the history of the West, is the history of these metaphors and metonymies. It’s matrix—If you will pardon me for demonstrating so little and for being elliptical in order to come more quickly to my principle theme—is the determination of Being as presence in all sense of this word.”
“In writing what he does not speak, what he would never say and, in truth, would probably never even think, the author of the written speech is already entrenched in the posture of the sophist; the man of non-presence and non-truth. Writing is thus already on the scene. The incompatibility between written and the true is clearly announced at the moment Socrates starts to recount the way in which men are carried out themselves by pleasure, become absent from themselves, forget themselves and die in the thrill of song.”
“The time is out of joint. The world is going badly. It is worn but its wear no longer counts. Old age or youth-one no longer counts in that way. The world has more than one age. We lack the measure of the measure. We no longer realize the wear, we no longer take account of it as of a single age in the progress of history. Neither maturation, nor crisis, nor even agony. Something else. What is happening is happening to age itself, it strikes a blow at the teleological order of history. What is coming, in which the untimely appears, is happening to time but it does not happen in time. Contretemps. The time is out of joint. Theatrical speech, Hamlet’s speech before the theater of the world, of history, and of politics. The age is off its hinges. Everything, beginning with time, seems out of kilter, unjust, dis-adjusted. The world is going very badly, it wears as it grows…”