Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Beauty only happens once.
I rightly pass for an atheist.
There is nothing outside the text
We are all mediators, translators.
Beyond the touchline there is nothing.
I love language as I love life itself!
Who ever said that one was born just once?
I always dream of a pen that would be a syringe.
I speak only one language, and it is not my own.
Circumcision , that's all I've ever talked about.
If I only did what I can do, I wouldn't do anything
If things were simple, word would have gotten around.
The end approaches, but the apocalypse is long lived.
Cinema plus Psychoanalysis equals the Science of Ghosts.
As soon as there is language, generality has entered the scene.
What cannot be said above all must not be silenced but written.
I do everything I think possible or acceptable to escape from this trap.
There is nothing outside of the text. [Fr., Il n'y a pas de hors-texte.]
Everything is arranged so that it be this way, this is what is called culture.
One often speaks without seeing, without knowing, without meaning what one says.
To pretend, I actually do the thing: I have therefore only pretended to pretend.
Surviving - that is the other name of a mourning whose possibility is never to be awaited.
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 am one of those marranes who no longer say they are Jews even in the secret of their own hearts.
Certain readers resented me when they could no longer recognize their territory, their institution.
Survival in the conventional sense of the term means to continue to live, but also to live after death.
The circle of the return to birth can only remain open, but this is a chance, a sign of life, and a wound.
Why is it the philosopher who is expected to be easier and not some scientist who is even more inaccessible?
The blindness that opens the eye is not the one that darkens vision. Tears and not sight are the essence of the eye.
I never give in to the temptation to be difficult just for the sake of being difficult. That would be too ridiculous.
The traditional statement about language is that it is in itself living, and that writing is the dead part of language.
I became the stage for the great argument between Nietzsche and Rousseau. I was the extra ready to take on all the roles.
Monsters cannot be announced. One cannot say: 'Here are our monsters,' without immediately turning the monsters into pets.
The first problem of the media is posed by what does not get translated, or even published in the dominant political languages.
I believe in the value of the book, which keeps something irreplaceable, and in the necessity of fighting to secure its respect.
I’m no good for anything except taking the world apart and putting it together again (and I manage the latter less and less frequently).
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.
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 say things that contradict each other, that are in real tension with each other, that compose me, that make me live, and that will make me die.
Each time this identity announces itself, someone or something cries: Look out for the trap, youre caught. Take off, get free, disengage yourself.
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.
If this work seems so threatening, this is because it isn't simply eccentric or strange, but competent, rigorously argued, and carrying conviction.
Why is it apparently the philosopher who is expected to be "easier" and not some scientist or other who is even more inaccessible to the same readers?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.