Daily Inspiration Quote by Jacques Derrida

A Derrida line that smuggles a demolition charge into the cozy grammar of common sense: “Who ever said that one was born just once?” It’s posed as an innocent question, but it functions like a pry bar. The target isn’t biology; it’s the metaphysics we staple to it. “Born” usually anchors identity to an origin story - one beginning, one self, one life that can be narrated cleanly. Derrida’s question makes that anchoring look like a superstition dressed up as fact.

The trick is the “who.” He’s not disputing the event of birth so much as the authority behind the claim that birth is singular and definitive. Who authorized that rule? Where is it written? In Derrida’s world, a lot of what passes for natural is really a cultural decision that’s been repeated until it looks inevitable. The line riffs on his broader project: undoing the fantasy of pure origins, stable presence, and a self identical to itself across time.

“Just once” is the pressure point. It hints that we’re continually “born” through language, institutions, and acts of recognition: named, classified, documented, translated, diagnosed, credentialed. Each iteration reconstitutes the subject, not as a clean reboot but as a revision with leftovers and glitches. You don’t get one birth; you get a series of inaugurations that never fully coincide with you.

Contextually, this is Derrida’s deconstructive instinct in miniature: treat the most ordinary assumption as a citation, not a law of nature. The question doesn’t offer an alternative doctrine; it forces the reader to notice how doctrine is made.