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
Certain readers resented me when they could no longer recognize their territory, their institution.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote reflects on how changes in perspective can alienate individuals from familiar contexts and institutions.
Jacques Derrida addresses how readers can feel estranged when their established understandings and familiar frameworks are challenged. This sense of resentment arises when common interpretations are disrupted, prompting individuals to confront the complexity of their own beliefs and the nature of their institutions, which may no longer hold the same meaning for them.
Themes
PerspectiveAlienationInstitutionChangeUnderstanding
In practice
Example use cases
In a literary discussion about the evolution of modern narratives.
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.
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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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The state does not function as we desired. A man is at the wheel and seems to lead it, but the car does not drive in the desired direction. It moves as another force wishes.
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