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
My most resolute opponents believe that I am too visible, that I am a little too alive, that my name echoes too much in the texts which they nevertheless claim to be inaccessible.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote reflects on the tension between visibility and accessibility in intellectual discourse.
In this quote, Jacques Derrida discusses the paradox of being both highly visible and perceived as overly present in intellectual discussions. He highlights that despite his prevalent presence in texts, there are those who dismiss his contributions as overly pronounced or too accessible, pointing to a broader conversation about knowledge, elitism, and the struggle for intellectual affirmation in a complex landscape.
Themes
VisibilityIntellectualismOppositionDiscourseKnowledge
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be used in a lecture about the challenges of being a public intellectual.
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.
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
To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.
Mary MccarthyRead
Back in the thirties we were told we must collectivize the nation because the people were so poor. Now we are told we must collectivize the nation because the people are so rich.
William F. Buckley, Jr.Read
The guilty are allowed, by human laws, bloody as they are, to speak in their own defence before they are condemned.
Mary Wollstonecraft ShelleyRead
If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be a vegetarian.
Paul MccartneyRead
When you're...stepping over a guy on the sidewalk...does it ever occur to you to think, 'Wow. Maybe our system doesn't work?'
Bill HicksRead
For three million years we were hunter-gatherers, and it was through the evolutionary pressures of that way of life that a brain so adaptable and so creative eventually emerged. Today we stand with the brains of hunter-gatherers in our heads, looking out on a modern world made comfortable for some by the fruits of human inventiveness, and made miserable for others by the scandal of deprivation in the midst of plenty.
Richard LeakeyRead