“Echoing Nietzsche’s saying that “truth is a mobile army of metaphors,” Derrida calls metaphor “the beginning of language” and says that “language itself is metaphysics.””
“So Derrida’s project is not to think, speak, or write without metaphors, but to realize that we have been driven by metaphors all along.”
““[I]n a new metaphor the previous metaphor appears as such, is denounced in its origin, in its metaphorical functioning and in its necessity.” We are no longer the captives of a metaphor that we mistake for fact. Instead, we learn to feel ourselves gliding from metaphor to metaphor, to understand that this gliding is “the very movement of language” and that “the metaphorical process itself [is] historicity itself.””
“But once we have awakened to this metaphorical process, we can also detect a hint of something else at “the origin of language.” To appreciate “the finitude of meaning,” we may need to recognize “a certain silent permanence of non-meaning, or rather an absence of meaning that precedes the opposition between meaning and non-meaning.””
“This is the “shadowy zone against which [what seems self-evident] stands out.””
“In conclusion, Derrida points out that the words “being” and “history” are themselves metaphors, as is the name “Heidegger” — and even the word “metaphor” itself.”
“All this stands to be deconstructed. But deconstruction “will not be a gesture decided and accomplished once and for all, by someone in a book, a course, in words or deeds. It is accomplished slowly, patiently, it patiently takes hold of the whole of language, of science, of the human, of the world.””