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
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote suggests that texts possess underlying complexities that elude immediate understanding, making them rich subjects for interpretation.
Jacques Derrida emphasizes that the essence of a text lies beyond its surface, requiring deeper exploration to uncover its intricate structures and meanings. He argues that these layers of a text are not hidden by secrets, but rather cannot be easily perceived or categorized, highlighting the complexities of language and interpretation.
Themes
TextInterpretationMeaningLanguagePhilosophy
In practice
Example use cases
In a literature seminar discussing the depths of narrative structure.
More from Jacques Derrida
All quotes →Everything is arranged so that it be this way, this is what is called culture.
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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 – a dead parent, for example – can be more alive for us, more powerful, more scary, than the living. It is the question of ghosts.
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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.
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
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