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.

Even if we’re in a state of hopelessness, a sense of expectation is an integral part of our relationship to time. Hopelessness is possible only because we do hope that some good, loving someone could come. If that’s what Heidegger meant, then I agree with him.

It is to have a compulsive, repetitive, and nostalgic desire for the archive, an irrepressible desire to return to the origin, a homesickness, a nostalgia for the return to the most archaic place of absolute commencement.

I recognize that I love – you – by this: that you leave in me a wound that I do not want to replace.

Er is niets buiten de tekst.

Everyone must assume their own death, that is to say, the one thing in the world that no one else can either give or take: therein resides freedom and responsibility.

Deconstruction never had meaning or interest, at least in my eyes, than as a radicalization, that is to say, also within the tradition of a certain Marxism, in a certain spirit of Marxism .

I absolutely forbade all public photographs of myself. I like photography, I don’t have anything against it, but...

I know a sentence that is still more terrifying, more terribly ambiguous than “I am alone,” and it is, isolated from any other determining context, the sentence that would say to the other: “I am alone with you.” Meditate on the abyss of such a sentence: I am alone with you, with you I am alone, alone in all the world.

Circumcision, that’s all I’ve ever talked about.