Politics & Power Quote by Jacques Derrida

Derrida is needling a complacent idea that the “media” mainly fails by bias in what it covers. He’s pointing to a prior, quieter gate: what never becomes legible in the first place. The “first problem” isn’t spin; it’s the invisibility produced before a story can even enter the arena of debate. Translation here isn’t just linguistic labor. It’s a regime of selection that decides which experiences can be rendered into the idioms power recognizes.

“Dominant political languages” is the tell. Derrida’s target is the polished vocabulary of states, parties, NGOs, and respectable commentary - the official dialects that define what counts as a crisis, a victim, a threat, a reform. If an event can’t be spoken in those terms, it risks being treated as noise: too local, too messy, too unsanctioned, too hard to monetize, too dangerous to name. The subtext is cynical and structural: censorship doesn’t always arrive as a ban; it arrives as a non-translation, an editorial shrug, a failure of category.

Context matters. Derrida is writing out of late-20th-century Europe’s media-saturated politics, where global conflicts and postcolonial realities are continuously “processed” for Western consumption. His broader deconstructive project distrusts claims of transparency: meaning is never simply delivered; it’s mediated, formatted, and made to fit. The line lands because it reframes media critique as a critique of the conditions of intelligibility. Before we argue about narratives, Derrida asks, who gets the chance to have a narrative at all - and in what language must they pay to be heard?