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.
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.
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
Similar quotes
Christianity is a lifestyle - a way of being in the world that is simple, non-violent, shared, and loving. However, we made it into an established "religion" (and all that goes with that) and avoided the lifestyle change itself. One could be warlike, greedy, racist, selfish, and vain in most of Christian history, and still believe that Jesus is one's "personal Lord and Savior" . . . The world has no time for such silliness anymore. The suffering on Earth is too great.
Richard RohrRead
Perhaps there is no other knowing than the mere competence of the act. If at the heart of one's being, there is no self to which one ought to be true, then sincerity is simply nerve; it lies in the unabashed vigor of the pretense. But pretense is only pretense when it is assumed that the act is not true to the agent. Find the agent.
Alan WattsRead
But it is important to know this, to know your roots. To know where you started as a person. If not, your own life seems unreal to you. Like a puzzle. Vous comprenez? Like you have missed the beginning of a story and now you are in the middle of it, trying to understand.
Khaled HosseiniRead
I entirely concur in the propriety of resorting to the sense in which the Constitution was accepted and ratified by the nation. In that sense alone it is the legitimate Constitution.
James MadisonRead
As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so a life well spent brings happy death.
Leonardo Da VinciRead
A miracle is not the breaking of physical laws, but rather represents laws which are incomprehensible to us.
G. I. GurdjieffRead