For Work / Against Work
Debates on the centrality of work

Edmund Husserl's Origin of Geometry. An Introduction

by Derrida, Jacques (1989)

Key Passage

To constitute an ideal object is to put it at the permanent disposition of a pure gaze . Now, before being the constituted and exceeded auxiliary of an act which proceeds toward the truth of sense, Iinguistic ideality is the milieu in which the ideal object settles as what is sedimented or deposited . But here the act of primordial depositing is not the recording of a private thing, but the production of a common object, i.e., of an object whose original owner is thus dispossesed . Thus language preserves truth, so that truth can be regarded in the henceforth nonephemeral illumination of its sojourn ; but also so that it can lengthen that stay . For there would be no truth wIthout that wordhoarding [thésaurisation ], which is not only what deposits and keeps hold of the truth, but also that without which a project of truth and the idea of an infinite task would be unimaginable. That is why language is the element of the only tradition in which (beyond individual finitude) sense-retention and sense-prospecting are possible . (p.76)

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Derrida Citations

Translator

Leavey, J.

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