An Event, Perhaps Quotes

“life carries with it things that are not: the ghosts of the dead, of possible futures not realised, pasts that could have been.”
― Peter Salmon, An Event, Perhaps: A Biography of Jacques Derrida

“In all the questions in which he intervened, Derrida was what I call a brave man of peace. He was brave because it takes a lot of courage not to enter into the division as it is constituted. And he was a man of peace because identifying what excepts itself from that opposition is, as a general rule, the road to peace. For any true peace is based upon an agreement not about that which exists, but about that which non-exists … This diagonal obstinacy, this rejection of abrupt metaphysically derived divisions, is obviously not suited to stormy times when everything comes under the law of decisiveness, here and now. That is what kept Derrida apart from the truth of the red years between 1968 and 1976. Because the truth of those years spoke its name with the words: ‘One divides into two.’ What we desired, in poetic terms, was the metaphysics of radical conflict, and not the patient deconstruction of oppositions. And Derrida could not agree about that.64”
― Peter Salmon BA, An Event, Perhaps: A Biography of Jacques Derrida