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
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote suggests that people often react with anger when their own language or understanding is challenged, rather than when faced with incomprehension in other domains.
Jacques Derrida's quote reflects on the nature of communication and the emotional responses it elicits. It highlights the idea that people are more likely to feel frustration or anger towards someone who alters or disrupts their own familiar way of expressing themselves, in contrast to those who operate outside their understanding, such as mathematicians, physicists, or speakers of foreign languages. This underscores the personal connection individuals have to their own language and communication styles, hinting at the deeper significance of language in fostering identity and understanding.
Themes
LanguageCommunicationAngerPhilosophyUnderstanding
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion on linguistic relativity, one might quote Derrida to illustrate how personal language frameworks can influence emotional responses.
More from Jacques Derrida
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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.
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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.
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A text is not a text unless it hides from the first comer, from the first glance, the law of its composition and the rules of its game. A text remains, moreover, forever imperceptible. Its laws and rules are not, however, harbored in the inaccessibility of a secret; it is simply that they can never be booked, in the present, into anything that could rigorously be called a perception.
Jacques DerridaRead
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