Everything is arranged so that it be this way, this is what is called culture.
Jacques DerridaRead
The blindness that opens the eye is not the one that darkens vision. Tears and not sight are the essence of the eye.
Interpretation
What this quote means
True understanding comes from emotional depth rather than mere observation.
In this quote, Jacques Derrida emphasizes the idea that profound insights often stem from emotional experiences rather than superficial seeing. He suggests that the ability to perceive and understand the world deeply often requires a form of 'blindness' to conventional views, allowing us to connect with our feelings, represented by tears, which reveal a deeper essence of awareness beyond sight alone.
Themes
UnderstandingEmotionPerceptionInsightAwareness
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech about personal growth, one might quote this to highlight the importance of emotional experiences.
More from Jacques Derrida
All quotes βNo 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.
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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.
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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
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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