Why is it the philosopher who is expected to be easier and not some scientist who is even more inaccessible?- Jacques Derrida
Who ever said that one was born just once?
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.
We are all mediators, translators.
To pretend, I actually do the thing: I have therefore only pretended to pretend.
These years of the Ecole Normale were an ordeal. Nothing was handed to me on the first try.
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.
The first problem of the media is posed by what does not get translated, or even published in the dominant political languages.
The circle of the return to birth can only remain open, but this is a chance, a sign of life, and a wound.
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.
Still today, I cannot cross the threshold of a teaching institution without physical symptoms, in my chest and my stomach, of discomfort or anxiety. And yet I have never left school.
No one gets angry at a mathematician or a physicist whom he or she doesn't understand, or at someone who speaks a foreign language, but rather at someone who tampers with your own language.
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.
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.
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.
