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
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.
In practice
This quote can be used in a lecture about the challenges of being a public intellectual.
The blindness that opens the eye is not the one that darkens vision. Tears and not sight are the essence of the eye.
Everything is arranged so that it be this way, this is what is called culture.
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.
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.
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.
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.
But there comes a moment in everybody's life when he must decide whether he'll live among the human beings or not - a fool among fools or a fool alone.
As I lay on my back in bed staring up at the blank, white ceiling the stillness seemed to grow bigger and bigger until I felt my eardrums would burst with it.
White privilege is the other side of racism. Unless we name it, we are in danger of wallowing in guilt or moral outrage with no idea of how to move beyond them. It is often easier to deplore racism and its effects than to take responsibility for the privileges some of us receive as a result of it... Once we understand how white privilege operates, we can begin to take steps to dismantle it on both a personal and institutional level.
The basis of a democratic state is liberty
Politics is a science. You can demonstrate that you are right and that others are wrong.
The next day, when I was sober, I thought again about the three of us, and about time's many paradoxes. For instance: that when we are young and sensitive, we are also at our most hurtful; whereas when the blood begins to slow, when we feel less sharply, when we are more armoured and have learnt how to bear hurt, we tread more carefully.
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