The blindness that opens the eye is not the one that darkens vision. Tears and not sight are the essence of the eye.
Jacques DerridaRead
Such a caring for death, an awakening that keeps vigil over death, a conscience that looks death in the face, is another name for freedom.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The acceptance of death can lead to a deeper sense of freedom and consciousness.
In this quote, Jacques Derrida suggests that an awareness and acknowledgment of death allows individuals to live more freely and authentically. By confronting mortality and embracing the inevitability of death, one gains a form of liberation from fear and societal constraints, fostering a more profound understanding of life and personal existence.
Themes
DeathFreedomConsciousnessLifePhilosophy
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech about embracing life experiences, one might quote Derrida to emphasize the importance of recognizing mortality.
More from Jacques Derrida
All quotes βEverything is arranged so that it be this way, this is what is called culture.
Jacques DerridaRead
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.
Jacques DerridaRead
Psychoanalysis has taught that the dead β a dead parent, for example β can be more alive for us, more powerful, more scary, than the living. It is the question of ghosts.
Jacques DerridaRead
The trace I leave to me means at once my death, to come or already come, and the hope that it will survive me. It is not an ambition of immortality; it is fundamental. I leave here a bit of paper, I leave, I die; it is impossible to exit this structure; it is the unchanging form of my life. Every time I let something go, I live my death in writing.
Jacques DerridaRead
Every discourse, even a poetic or oracular sentence, carries with it a system of rules for producing analogous things and thus an outline of methodology.
Jacques DerridaRead
Similar quotes
The essence of a person is not the clothing she wears or the things he does. People who love them do not stop loving them when they change clothing or do other things. Your essence is not even your history, culture, race, or what you think and do. It is your soul.
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It is already possible to imagine a society in which the majority of the population, that is to say, its laborers, will have almost as much leisure as in earlier times was enjoyed by the aristocracy. When one recalls how aristocracies in the past actually behaved, the prospect is not cheerful.
W. H. AudenRead
OBLIVION, n. The state or condition in which the wicked cease from struggling and the dreary are at rest. Fame's eternal dumping ground.
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When we can see the image of God where we don't want to see the image of God, then we see with eyes not our own.
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When one begins to think about it, America depends rather heavily on women's passive dependence, their femininity. Femininity, if one still wants to call it that, makes American women a target and a victim of the sexual sell.
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There is no extrahistorical or eternalist or abstractivistically pure standpoint where we can get oriented in the absolute Truth per se before dealing with the concrete lineaments of how we happen exist in this time and place. We are participants in a dynamic system and we know its profile only by its action in organizing how we interact together and how we see our own selves. "The truth is the whole," and the whole is a system of living energy: our life as human and historical spirits.
Kenny SmithRead