Here’s a Derrida quote I just found out about:
“The poet…is the man of metaphor: while the philosopher is interested only in the truth of meaning, beyond even signs and names, and the sophist manipulates empty signs…the poet plays on the multiplicity of signifieds.”
— Jacques Derrida
Here’s my perspicacious response:
Eh, sounds mostly like gobbledygook. Kind of Sokal-esque. 
Yes, the poet is a man (or a woman) of metaphor, but their use of metaphor (among other devices) is not just “playing on the multiplicity of signifieds” as in decuple entendre; it’s a sneaky (and also clever, brilliant, creative, artistic, aesthetic, beautiful, playful, resourceful, articulate, expressive, eloquent, etc. (sigh, I included too many adjectives)) way to funnel meaning and truth of the most transcendental, mystical kinds into the minds of people who can read poetry but might never have accepted such truth if it were conveyed directly or overtly (in such cases where it even could have been conveyed directly or overtly). This makes poetry an even greater pursuit of truth than philosophy.
And as for philosophers, it’s not entirely true to say that they’re interested in truth beyond signs and names. A whole lot of philosophers spend a great deal of energy trying to “figure out” truths solely through formal/analytic manipulations of signs and symbols. And in fact, tell such a philosopher any kind of truth of the most profound order, and he’ll dismiss it and you as either crazy, irrational, purely speculative, baselessly assuming, nonsensical, magical-thinking, woo-woo, unscientific/antiscientific/pseudoscientific, religious, or cognitively biased, depending on the form or nature of the expression and the particular episteme of the philosopher.
And as for the sophist manipulating empty signs, I don’t even know that that means. What makes one sign more empty than another? Well, I can imagine a few things, but if the signs are manipulable at all, they’re no more empty than the signs a lot of philosophers manipulate. Rather, the thing that makes the sophist a sophist is that he manipulates them in a misleading way through cognitive “sleight of hand.” And actually, philosophers regularly do this too, but the real difference is that the sophist does it intentionally.
