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
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote discusses the relationship between writing and existence, emphasizing how our creations serve as a reflection of our mortality and essence.
Jacques Derrida's quote explores the profound connection between writing and the human experience of life and death. He expresses the idea that each written word is a testament to our existence, capturing moments that signify not only our mortality but also the hope that our thoughts and creations will endure beyond our time. In this sense, writing becomes a way to confront death, allowing us to express our legacy while acknowledging the inevitability of our demise.
Themes
WritingLifeDeathLegacyExistence
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech about creativity and the permanence of art, one might quote Derrida to emphasize that our works outlive us.
More from Jacques Derrida
All quotes →Everything 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 – 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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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
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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