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
Survival in the conventional sense of the term means to continue to live, but also to live after death.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Survival transcends mere existence; it encompasses the legacy we leave behind after death.
Jacques Derrida reflects on the concept of survival, positing that it is not limited to the physical act of living but extends into the realm of posthumous existence. This suggests that our actions and contributions can resonate beyond our lifetime, influencing others and contributing to a collective legacy that endures even after we are gone.
Themes
SurvivalLegacyExistenceDeathPhilosophy
In practice
Example use cases
During a memorial service, one might use this quote to highlight how the values of the deceased continue to live on.
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
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Everyone wants to be foremost in this future-and yet death and the stillness of death are the only things certain and common to all in this future! How strange that this sole thing that is certain and common to all, exercises almost no influence on men, and that they are the furthest from regarding themselves as the brotherhood of death! It makes me happy to see that men do not want to think at all of the idea of death!
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We only confess our little faults to persuade people that we have no big ones.
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