"If you are not a jot wiser by reading him the first time over--never fear--read him again . . . and . . . read . . . forty times through a piece, and never understand a single word."
I want to pay tribute to his memory here and to recall all that I owe to the trust and encouragement he gave me, even when, as he one day told me, he did not see at all where I was going. That was in 1966 during a colloquium in the United States in which we were both taking part. After a few friendly remarks on the paper I had just given, Jean Hippolyte added, “That said, I really don’t see where you are going.” I think I replied to him more or less as follows: “If I clearly saw ahead of time where I was going, I don’t really believe that I would take another step to get there.” Perhaps I then thought that knowing where one is going may no doubt help in orienting one’s thinking, but that it has never made anyone take a single step, quite the opposite in fact. What is the good of going where one knows oneself to be going and where one knows that one is destined to arrive? Recalling this reply today, I am not sure that I really understand it very well, but it surely did not mean that I never see or never know where I am going and that to this this extent, to the extent that I do not know, it I not certain that I ever taken any step or said anything at all."
--Jacques Derrida, "Punctuations: The Time of a Thesis," in The Eyes of the University, 115
For God's sake, Mr. Storyteller, you ask, where are they going? And I answer: for God's sake, Reader, does any of us know where we're going? Where are you going?
--Denis Diderot, Jacques the Fatalist, 41
With all this, Madam,—and what confounded every thing as much on the other hand, my uncle Toby had that unparalleled modesty of nature I once told you of, and which, by the bye, stood eternal sentry upon his feelings, that you might as soon—But where am I going? these reflections crowd in upon me ten pages at least too soon, and take up that time, which I ought to bestow upon facts.
--Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy
Three dotted lines indicating the time Jacques Derrida allows his reader to of reread (with Derrida) two paragraphs from Martin Heidegger's "Origin of the Work of Art" in three languages (German, French, and English) in Jacques Derrida dialogue without identified speakers, "Restitutions," in The Truth in Painting
Reading is a vice which can replace all other vices or temporarily take their place in more intensely helping people live, it is an aberration a consuming passion. No, I don’t take any drugs, I take books, of course I have certain preferences, many books don’t suit me at all, some I take only in the morning, others at night, there are books I don’t ever let go, I drag them around with me in the apartment, carrying them from the living room into the kitchen, I read them in the hall standing up, I don’t use a bookmark, I don’t move my lips while reading, early on I learned to read very well, I don’t remember the method, but you ought to look into it. They must have used an excellent method in our provincial elementary schools, at least back when I learned to read.
--Ingeborg Bachmann, Malina: A Novel, trans. Philip Boehm (Teaneck, NJ: Holmes & Meier, 1990), 57-58.
"The prevailing ideas entertained by him and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution, were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically . . . . Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner- stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. "
