“If you read philosophical texts of the tradition, you'll notice they almost never said 'I,' and didn't speak in the first person. From Aristotle to Heidegger, they try to consider their own lives as something marginal or accidental. What was essential was their teaching and their thinking. Biography is something empirical and outside, and is considered an accident that isn't necessarily or essentially linked to the philosophical activity or system.” IfsThinkingTryingFirstsPersonsSaidSpeakTeachingActivityEssentialsTraditionPhilosophicalAccidentsBiographiesLinkedFirst PersonHeidegger Author:Jacques Derrida
“During the fifteen or twenty years in which I tried - it was not always easy with publishers, newspapers, etc. - to forbid photographs, it was not at all in order to mark a sort of blank, absence, or disappearance of the image; it was because the code that dominates at once the production of these images, the framing they are made to undergo, the social implications (showing the writer's head framed in front his bookshelves, the whole scenario) seemed to me to be, first of all, terribly boring, but also contrary to what I am trying to write and to work on.” WritingTryingYearsFirstsMadeWholeOrderSocialEasyFrontsMarkTwentiesPhotographProductionsBoringAbsenceContraryNewspapersCodeEtcBlankFifteenPublishersScenariosImplicationsFramedDisappearanceBookshelvesFraming Author:Jacques Derrida
“These years of the Ecole Normale were an ordeal. Nothing was handed to me on the first try.” TryingYearsFirstsOrdeals Author:Jacques Derrida
“I was wondering myself where I am going. So I would answer you by saying, first, that I am trying, precisely, to put myself at a point so that I do not know any longer where I am going.” KnowsTryingFirstsAnswersWonder Author:Jacques Derrida
“Within the university... you can study without waiting for any efficient or immediate result. You may search, just for the sake of searching, and try for the sake of trying. So there is a possibility of what I would call playing. It's perhaps the only place within society where play is possible to such an extent.” TryingMayPlayWaitingResultsEducationStudyPossibilityUniversitySakeEfficient Author:Jacques Derrida
