Quotes About Interpretation

The sensible world is full of gaps, ellipses, allusions.

But therein lies the virtue of language: it is language which propels us toward the things it signifies. In the way it works, language hides itself from us. Its triumph is to efface itself and to take us beyond the words to the author's very thoughts, so that we imagine we are engaged with him in a wordless meeting of minds.

We may say that there are two languages. First, there is language after the fact, or language as an institution, which effaces itself in order to yield the meaning which it conveys. Second, there is the language which creates itself in its expressive acts, which sweeps me on from the signs toward meaning—sedimented language and speech.

Thus the highest point of truth is still only perspective.

I cut straight through the scribbling to the book, because I have built up in myself a strange expressive organism which can not only interpret the conventional meaning of the book's words and techniques but can even allow itself to be transformed and endowed with new organs by the book.

What if language expresses as much by what is between words as by words themselves? By that which it does not "say" as by what it "says"? And what if, hidden in empirical language, there is a second-order language in which signs once again lead the vague life of colors, and in which significations never free themselves completely from the intercourse of signs?

It is impossible, in this world, to separate things from their way of appearing...Form and content – what is said and the way in which it is said – cannot exist separately from one another.

Stimuli...are given to neural elaboration and translated into a linguistic system of the nervous system. Between the exterior world and the living organism, there is an insertion of a whole that orders, coordinates, and interprets: the nervous system is a mirror of the world...The higher animal thus constructs an Umwelt that has a Gegenwelt, a rejoinder in its nervous system.

The body is not comprehensible in the actual.

Every external perception is immediately synonymous with a certain perception of my body, just as every perception of y body is made explicit in the language of external perception.

Se demander si le mode est réel, ce n'est pas entendre ce que l'on dit.

Se demander si le monde et réel, ce n'est pas entendre ce que l'on dit.

Writers don't have the impression that they are creating or inventing because they are, in effect, in the process of deciphering the hieroglyphics of their landscape.

We carry in our incarnate being the alphabet & the grammar of life, but this does not presuppose an achieved meaning either in us or in it.

To speak or to write is truly to translate an experience which, without the word that it inspires, would not become a text.

The perception of forms, understood very broadly as structure, grouping, or configuration should be considered our spontaneous way of seeing.

Ambiguity cannot be resolved, but it can be understood as ultimate.

The world is nothing but world-as-meaning

Experience anticipates a philosophy and philosophy is but an elucidated experience.

As a system of motor powers or perceptual powers, our body is not an object for an 'I think': it is a totality of lived significations that moved toward it's equilibrium.

Institution of a work, like the institution of a love, intends a sense as open sense, which develops by means of proliferation, by curves, decentering and recenterimg, zigzag, ambiguous passage, with a sort of identity between the whole and the parts, the beginning and end. A sort of existential eternity by means of self-interpretation.

There is a fitting together of different perspectival views; there is no fitting together of all of them in an absolute knowledge which is completely decentered and final...The passage from the particular to the universal is never finished.

Rather than imprisoning it, language is like a magic machine for transporting the 'I' into the other person's perspective.

One reason why the painter takes up his brush is that in one sense the art of painting still remains to be created...Painting is always something to be created.