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
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote suggests that all forms of communication are bound by specific rules that guide their creation and interpretation.
Jacques Derrida highlights the intrinsic relationship between language and methodology in communication. He argues that every type of discourse—whether poetic, prophetic, or otherwise—embodies a set of principles or rules that not only shape its content but also provide a framework for understanding and generating similar expressions. This insight emphasizes the complexities of meaning in language and the importance of recognizing the underlying structures that govern our interpretations and creations.
Themes
LanguageDiscourseMethodologyCommunicationRules
In practice
Example use cases
In a lecture on literary theory, one might reference Derrida's insight into how every text creates its own system of meaning.
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.
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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
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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