Thinking Out of Sight: Writings on the Arts of the Visible 9780226590028

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Thin king Out of Sight

the fr ance chicag o collection A series of books translated with the generous support of the University of Chicago’s France Chicago Center

Thinking Out of Sight Writings on the Arts of the Visible

Jac qu e s De r r ida Edited by Ginette Michaud, Joana Masó, and Javier Bassas With new translations by Laurent Milesi

The University of Chicago Press | C h i c a g o a n d L o n d o n

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2021 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637. Published 2021 Printed in the United States of America 30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21

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I SBN-13: 978-0-226-14061-2 (cloth) I SBN-13: 978-0-226-59002-8 (e-book) D OI : https://doi.org/10.7208/ chicago/9780226590028.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Derrida, Jacques, author. | Michaud, Ginette, 1955– editor. | Masó, Joana, editor. | Bassas, Javier, editor. | Milesi, Laurent, translator. Title: Thinking out of sight : writings on the arts of the visible / Jacques Derrida ; edited by Ginette Michaud, Joana Masó, and Javier Bassas ; with new translations by Laurent Milesi. Other titles: Writings on the art of the visible Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020028197 | ISB N 9780226140612 (cloth) | I SBN 9780226590028 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH : Derrida, Jacques—Interviews. | Art— Philosophy. | Arts—Philosophy. | Philosophy, French— 20th century. Classification: LCC N67 .D 4713 2021 | D D C 700.1—dc23 L C record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020028197 This paper meets the requirements of A NSI /NI SO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

List of Illustrations vii Editors’ Foreword ix

Pa rt I. The Traces of the Visible The Spatial Arts: An Interview by Peter Brunette and David Wills 3 Thinking Out of Sight 31 Trace and Archive, Image and Art 49

Pa rt II. Rhetoric of the Line: Painting, Drawing To Illustrate, He Said 89 The Philosopher’s Design: An Interview by Jérôme Coignard 94 Drawing by Design 98 Pregnances 118 To Save the Phenomena: For Salvatore Puglia 129 Four Ways to Drawing 142 Ecstasy, Crisis: An Interview with Valerio Adami and Roger Lesgards 145 Color to the Letter 156 The “Undersides” of Painting, Writing, and Drawing: Support, Substance, Subject, Suppost, and Supplice 175

Pa rt III. Spectralities of the Image: Photography, Video, Cinema, and Theater Aletheia 189 Videor 201 The Ghost Dance: An Interview by Mark Lewis and Andrew Payne 208 Cinema and Its Ghosts: An Interview by Antoine de Baecque and Thierry Jousse 214 The Sacrifice 230 Marx Is (Quite) Somebody 240 The Survivor, the Surcease, the Surge 252 Notes 257 Bibliography on the Arts and Architecture 279 Filmography 293 Notes on Editors and Translators 297 Index 301

Il lust r ations

1

François Loubrieu, Untitled, 1979, ink drawing 90

2

Colette Deblé, Diane découvrant la grossesse de Calixto de Jean Daret, 40 x 30 cm, wash drawing, Paris, private collection 119

3

Salvatore Puglia, Vie d’H. B., 1982–83, 24 x 30 cm, ink and collage on paper 130

4

Valerio Adami, Viaggio in treno, 1991, 198 x 147 cm, Milan, private collection 147

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Jean-Michel Atlan, Untitled, oil on canvas, 195 x 114 cm, private collection, catalogue raisonné nº 299, Paris 157

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Kishin Shinoyama, série Accidents 3, February 1993 191

7

Gary Hill, Disturbance Install 1 and 2, 1998, Museum of Contemporary Art, Montreal 202

E ditor s’ For ewor d

For three decades, the arts have been one of the privileged sites of Derridean deconstruction. From The Truth in Painting (with Valerio Adami and Gérard Titus-Carmel, orig. 1978) to the exhibition “Memoirs of the Blind” (which was curated by Jacques Derrida at the Louvre’s Cabinet des Arts Graphiques in 1990); from the “Reading” of Right of Inspection (with MarieFrançoise Plissart, orig. 1985) to Athens, Still Remains (with Jean-François Bonhomme, orig. 1996); from “Lignées” in Mille e tre, cinq (with Micaëla Henich, orig. 1996) to Atlan grand format (with Jean-Michel Atlan, orig. 2001), La connaissance des textes (with Simon Hantaï and Jean-Luc Nancy, orig. 2001) and Artaud the Moma (orig. 2002), Derrida has elaborated and problematized the philosophical notion of visibility in a close dialogue with predominantly contemporary artistic productions. The visible is for Derrida the site of a fundamental opposition between the sensible and the intelligible, night and day, light and shadow. It builds on all the values of ontological and phenomenological appearing— phenomenon ( phainesthai), theory (theôrein), evidence, clarity or truth, “unveiling”—which institute a strong philosophical hierarchy of the senses. Consequently, the visible is denounced by Derrida whenever this privilege of optics is posed as the question commanding the whole history of Western metaphysics. In the gesture performed by deconstruction, the so-called visual arts play an important role not only in interrogating the history of philosophy proper but also in allowing one to think the visible as articulated by the movement of the trace and différance, both Derridean figures of writing. Such a displacement of the visible toward the written is at the heart of the Derridean interrogation in all the texts gathered here under this title: not the visual arts but arts of the visible. These arts of the visible are, in deconstruction, deeply invested by the very movement of writing since, as Derrida puts it, “even if there is no discourse, the effect of spacing already implies a textualization. For this reason, the expansion of the concept of text is strategically

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decisive here. So the works of art that are the most overwhelmingly silent cannot help but be caught within a network of differences and references that give them a textual structure.”1 Thus, in the margins of the books and catalogues that he has devoted to artists’ works, Derrida has increasingly paid attention to the arts. Alongside this more theoretical work, the philosopher has also collaborated on many occasions with artists, as well as taken part in gatherings, roundtable discussions, and interviews with architects, art historians, aestheticians, and film critics. Derrida’s reflection on drawing, painting, photography, cinema, video installation, and the theater starts taking shape especially from the 1980s onward, in several French and foreign journals (Annali, Beaux Arts Magazine, Cahiers du cinéma, Contretemps, Domus, Diagonal, Public, Rampike, Rue Descartes) as well as in joint publications (Deconstruction and the Visual Arts and Passages de l’image). Many of these texts are often out of print or not easily accessible today, and most of them have been gathered in the present volume. By bringing together in this collection the philosopher’s major texts on the question of the arts, we wish to make the reader aware of some of Derrida’s most inventive propositions and axioms in the domain of art and aesthetics, which for him was never confined to the old delimitation of the fine arts but was indeed always rightfully apprehended as the shifting site of a thought. The texts collected in the present volume are spread over some twentyfive years, from 1979 to 2004, and are grouped in three main parts. The first part introduces texts that testify to the philosophical primacy of the visible in art, which Derrida displaces toward questions of language. The second part gathers, in chronological order, texts and collaborations with different artists (François Loubrieu, Colette Deblé, Salvatore Puglia, Valerio Adami, and Jean-Michel Atlan), in which Derrida brings his reflection to bear on the singularity of drawing and painting. Finally, the third part gathers texts that the philosopher has devoted to photography (Kishin Shinoyama and Frédéric Brenner),2 video (Gary Hill), cinema, and the theater (Daniel Mesguich). The very last text, which appeared in La Quinzaine littéraire 1. Peter Brunette and David Wills, “The Spatial Arts: An Interview with Jacques Derrida,” trans. Laurie Volpe, in Deconstruction and the Visual Arts: Art, Media, Architecture, ed. Brunette and Wills (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 15; republished here, p. 10. 2. Regrettably, the fourteen comments Jacques Derrida wrote as an accompaniment to Frédéric Brenner’s photographs in Diaspora: Homelands in Exile, vol. 2: Voices, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), 17, 19, 21, 35, 51, 63, 65, 67, 81, 83, 91, 101, 103, 110–111, could not be included in the English version, due to copyright issues.

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two months before his death, sheds light on Derrida’s complex relation to his own image. All these texts make it possible to retrace the major Derridean motifs that emerge insistently in the domain of the arts throughout the volume. In his critique of art’s intelligibility, Derrida inscribes arts and the visible at the heart of writing—far from a supposed universality “beyond the barrier of languages”3—and thus he takes the idiomaticity of art to its consequences: he interrogates the status of citation in Colette Deblé’s paintings or the trope of anacoluthon in Jean-Michel Atlan’s; he also wonders in which language one draws—does one always draw in a language and is drawing always independent of language?—prompted by Valerio Adami’s drawings. He also adds that to write about art means to write not about a content—about an object—but rather about a tone: what is at stake is not so much “the content of what I actually say” as the “tone and voice,”4 he states in his interview by Peter Brunette and David Wills, “The Spatial Arts.” Therefore, what must be thought for him is the question of tone, that is, of voice and writing, indissociably linked to the problems of art, as well as those of the film and photography archive, the different ways of citing tradition in painting or the relation to beauty and the other’s desire. An obvious choice had to be made regarding the texts that the reader will find here, whose styles of compositions are obviously very different (monographs, interviews, lectures). Without making any claim to exhaustiveness, we wanted to make available for reading as rich and representative a range of texts as possible, witness for instance the lecture titled “Drawing by Design” given as a follow-up to the exhibition “Memoirs of the Blind” and published in 2013 by Franciscopolis Éditions, and a still unpublished talk given at the Maeght Foundation in 2002 on the notion of subjectile and of “undersides” in Artaud’s work—both deposited at the Jacques Derrida Archives of the Institut Mémoires de l’édition contemporaine (IMEC) and presented here. Moreover, those readily available texts about the arts already published in French by Galilée have not been republished in this collection, to say nothing of Jacques Derrida’s numerous talks dealing with architecture, which could have constituted a whole book by themselves.5 A bibliography and a filmography at the end of the volume give a better idea of the full extent of Derrida’s work relating to the arts. 3. Jacques Derrida, “Thinking Out of Sight,” republished and translated infra, p. 31. 4. Jacques Derrida, “The Spatial Arts,” 22; republished infra, p. 19. 5. A second volume has since been published in French: See Jacques Derrida, Les Arts de l’espace. Écrits et interventions sur l’architecture, ed. Ginette Michaud and Joana Masó, with the collaboration of Cosmin Popovici-Toma (Paris: Éditions de la Différence, 2015).

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The present edition reproduces Jacques Derrida’s texts as they were written and set out by him for the first publication (paragraphs, subtitles, the use of italics, diacritics, and punctuation). All texts have been reread and cleared of typos, and so have citations that, wherever necessary, have been rectified without indicating what seemed to us obvious transcription errors. Bibliographical references, most often clearly indicated in the texts yet sometimes in abridged form, have been specified; we have completed missing references, each time supplying the indication “Ed.” We have added a few words between angle brackets in order to make up for textual gaps, omitted words for the most part. Finally, throughout all these texts, Jacques Derrida makes several cross-references to his many previous works, which are referenced whenever the citation is explicit or the allusion is significantly developed in the argument. Our heartfelt thanks go to Marguerite Derrida for giving this project her full support and trust,6 as well as Colette Lambrichs, literary director at the Éditions de la Différence, for enthusiastically welcoming this project. We would also like to thank the texts’ publishers and the artists for their generous contribution: Valerio Adami and Le Cherche Midi éditeur, Michel Champier, Colette Deblé and the Atelier des Brisants, Galilée, Marc Guillaume and Descartes & Cie, Gary Hill, Georges Meguerditchian, Jean-Paul Michel and William Blake & Co., Colette Olive and Verdier, François Pallud and Imaginativ, Jacques Polieri, Salvatore Puglia, and Jean-Michel Rodes, delegate director for the Collections de l’Institut national de l’audiovisuel (INA). We also wish to express our warmest thanks to Marie-Joëlle SaintLouis Savoie for her transcription of the lecture “Drawing by Design” and her precious assistance at different stages of the manuscript’s preparation, in particular in finalizing the bibliography and the filmography, as well as to Cosmin Popovici-Toma for his assistance in cross-checking some bibliographical references and help in the revision of the French and English editions. Last, we wish to thank Michael Naas, who very generously made available to us his own “bibliography in progress” of Derrida’s works and translations; this proved to be immensely useful in updating the references for the English edition of this book. The present collection first appeared in Brazilian (Jacques Derrida, Pensar em não ver. Escritos sobre as artes do visível [1979–2004], trans. Marcelo 6. We would also like to thank Pierre Alferi and Jean Derrida. We were greatly saddened to hear of Marguerite Derrida’s passing on March 21 amid the COVID-19 pandemic. We will remember her grace, her kindness, and her solicitude. We dedicate this book to her memory.

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Jacques de Moraes, rev. João Camillo Penna [Florianópolis: Editora UFSC, 2012]); in Spanish (Artes de lo visible [1979–2004], trans. Joana Masó and Javier Bassas [Castellón: Ellago Ediciones, 2013]); and in Italian (Pensare al non vedere. Scritti sulle arti del visibile 1979–2004, preface and trans. Alfonso Cariolato [Milan: Jaca Book, 2016]). With this translation into English, the book really lives up to the title of one of Jacques Derrida’s essays, “Par quatre chemins.” Indeed, we must emphasize the importance of the question of translation, always crucial in Derrida’s oeuvre, and particularly in this question of the arts, as is evidenced by the formidable work accomplished by the translators: first and foremost, Laurent Milesi, to whom we express all our gratitude for his preciseness and meticulous attention, but also Pleshette DeArmitt, Peggy Kamuf, Andrew Rothwell, Kas Saghafi, Jean-Luc Svoboda, and Laurie Volpe, who have all contributed to this volume. To each and every one, we extend our sincere gratitude. Ginette Michaud, Joana Masó, and Javier Bassas

The Spatial Arts An Interview by Peter Brunette and David Wills

“The Spatial Arts: An Interview with Jacques Derrida,” trans. Laurie Volpe, in Deconstruction and the Visual Arts: Art, Media, Architecture, ed. Peter Brunette and David Wills (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 9–32. © Cambridge University Press 1994, reproduced with permission. Interview dated “April 28, 1990, Laguna Beach, California.” [“Les arts de l’espace. Entretien avec Peter Brunette et David Wills.” French translation by Cosmin Popovici-Toma based on the English translation since the original French version has been lost.] Other translations: Brazilian, Spanish, Italian. The original transcription was not found in the Jacques Derrida Archives at the Institut Mémoires de l’édition contemporaine (IMEC). David Wills was not able to recover the sound recording that served as a basis for the interview’s transcription and subsequent translation into English before the various multilingual editions were completed.1 The English version has been translated into Spanish by Javier Ariza, Graciela de la Huerga, Luis García-Ochoa, Christine Harris, Juan Iribas, Andrés Muñoz, and Miguel Olmeda. It was published in Acción paralela. Ensayo, teoría y crítica de la cultura y el arte contemporáneo (San Lorenzo del Escorial), vols. 1 and 2 (1995–96), 4–19. The translation was reprinted, in a slightly modified version, by Joana Masó and Javier Bassas, in Jacques Derrida, Artes de lo visible (1979–2004), ed. Ginette Michaud, Joana Masó, and Javier Bassas (Castellón: Ellago Ediciones, 2012), 15–52. The interview has also been translated into Portuguese by João Camillo Penna as “As artes espaciais: uma entrevista com Jacques Derrida, com Peter Brunette e David Wills,” in Jacques Derrida, Pensar em não ver. Escritos sobre as artes do visível (1979–2004), ed. G. Michaud, J. Masó and J. Bassas, trans. Marcelo Jacques de Moraes (Florianópolis (Brazil): Editora UFSC, 2012), 17–61. An Italian translation of the

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interview also exists under the title “Le arti spaziali. Un’intervista con Jacques Derrida,” in Jacques Derrida. Adesso l’architettura, ed. Francesco Vitale (Milan: Libri Scheiwiller, 2008), 31–76. The notes to this interview are from the English translation unless otherwise specified. (Ed.)

dav id wi lls: We shall start with an indiscreet question, a question on competence. You have mentioned more than once what you call your “incompetence” in various areas of your work. For example, in your interview with Christopher Norris on architecture2 you declare yourself “technically incompetent” in that field; in our discussions on cinema you have said the same thing, but none of that has stopped you from writing in a number of areas outside of your training. It is as if you would like to define the limits of what you contribute to each domain without knowing exactly where to place those limits. jac que s de r r i da: I shall try to make my responses as straightforward as possible. In the first place, when I say that I am incompetent I say it frankly, sincerely, because it is true, because I don’t know a lot about architecture, and as far as film goes my knowledge is only of the most average and general kind. I like cinema very much; I have seen many films, but in comparison with those who know the history of cinema and the theory of film, I am, and I say this without being coy, incompetent. The same holds true for painting, and it is even more true for music. With respect to other domains I could say the same thing with as much sincerity. I feel very incompetent also in the literary and philosophical fields, even though the nature of my incompetence is different. My training is in philosophy, so I can’t seriously say that I am incompetent in that domain. However, I feel quite unequipped when confronted by a philosopher’s work, even the work of those philosophers I have studied at length. But that is another order of incompetence. Now, in terms of my competence in philosophy, I have been able to devise a certain program, a certain matrix of inquiry that permits me to begin by asking the question of competence in general terms—that is to say, to inquire into how competence is formed, the process of legitimization, of institutionalization, and so on, in all domains, then to advance in different domains not only by admitting my incompetence very sincerely but also by asking the question of competence, that is to say, what defines the limits of my domain, the limits of a corpus, the legitimacy of the questions, and so on. Each time I confront a domain that is foreign to me, one of my interests or investments concerns precisely the legitimacy of the discourse, with what

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right one speaks, how the object is constituted—questions that are actually philosophical in origin and style. Even if, within the field of philosophy, I have worked to elaborate deconstructive questions concerning it, that deconstruction of philosophy carries with it a certain number of questions that can be asked in different fields. Moreover, each time I was trying to discover what in a determined field liberates it from philosophical authority. That is to say, I have learned from philosophy that it is a hegemonic discourse, structurally hegemonic, considering all discursive regions to be dependent upon it. And by means of a deconstruction of this hegemonic gesture we can begin to see in each field, whether it be what we call psychology, logic, politics, or the arts, the possibility of emancipation from the hegemony and authority of philosophical discourse. So, each time I approach a literary work, or a pictorial or architectural work, what interests me is the same deconstructive force with regard to philosophical hegemony. It’s as if that is what carries my analysis along. As a result, one can always find the same gesture on my part, even though each time I try to respect the singularity of the work. That gesture consists of finding, or in any case looking for, whatever in the work represents its force of resistance to philosophical authority, and to philosophical discourse on it. The same operation can be found or recognized in the different discourses I have developed concerning particular works; yet I have always tried to do it by respecting the individual signature of an Artaud, say, or an Eisenman.3 Obviously, because we are starting an interview on the “visual arts,” the general question of the spatial arts is given prominence, for it is within a certain experience of spacing, of space, that resistance to philosophical authority can be produced. In other words, resistance to logocentrism has a better chance of appearing in these types of art. (Of course, we would need to ask the question of what art is, also.) So much for competence: it is an incompetence that gives or tries to give itself a certain prerogative, that of speaking within the space of its own incompetence. Now, it is also necessary to say—maybe as a sort of general precaution for everything that will follow—that I have never personally taken the initiative to speak about anything in these domains. Each time I do, it is because I have been invited to do so; because of my incompetence, I would never have taken the initiative to write about architecture or drawing unless the occasion or invitation had originated elsewhere. That goes for everything I have done; I don’t think that I would have ever written anything if I hadn’t in some way been provoked to do it. Of course, you may then ask: What is a provocation? Who is the other? So, it’s a mixture, an intersection of chance and necessity.

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pe t e r b ru n e t t e : In relation to that, how do you feel now that your work has begun to move out to the law, to film, to architecture? Do you have any misgivings about the way your thought—deconstruction, whatever— has been changed, molded in different ways? j. d .: It is very difficult to determine; there is feedback, but each time it comes back in a different form. I can’t find a general rule for it; in a certain way it surprises me. I am, for example, a little surprised by the extent to which deconstructive schemas can be put into play or invested in problematics that are foreign to me, whether we are speaking about architecture, cinema, or legal theory. But my surprise is only a half-surprise, because at the same time the program as I perceived or conceived it made that necessary. If someone had asked me twenty years ago whether I thought deconstruction should interest people in domains that were foreign to me, such as architecture and law, as a matter of principle my response would have been yes, it is absolutely indispensable, but at the same time I never would have believed it could happen. Thus, when faced with this I experience a mixture of surprise and nonsurprise. Obviously, I am obliged, up to a certain point, not to transform, but rather to adjust or deform my discourse, in any case to respond, to comprehend what is happening. That isn’t always easy. For example, in the case of legal theory, I read some texts, people tell me things, but at the same time I don’t know it from the inside; I see something of what is happening in “critical legal studies,” I can follow the conceptual outline of what is happening in the field. And when I read your work on film,4 I understand, but at the same time only passively; I can’t reproduce it or write about it in turn. I always feel on the edge of such things, and this frustrates me—it really isn’t possible for me to appropriate such work—but at the same time what gratifies me is that such work is being done by people who are themselves competent and who speak from within a specific field, with its own givens, and its own relations to the nature of the field, to the political-institutional situation. Thus, what you do is determined for the most part by the specific givens of your intellectual field and also by all sorts of things pertaining to the American scene, to your institutional profile, and so on. All of that is foreign to me, and it keeps me on the edge of things, but at the same time it is extremely reassuring and gratifying, for real work is being done. I am a part of that work, but it is being done in other places. d. w. : To extend that still further, let me ask you about one of your texts that I admire the most, La Carte postale (The Post Card),5 and its relation to technology; less the relation between technology and the thought of Heidegger, and more about what you say in “Envois” and elsewhere, for example, about high technology. For example, every time I hear talk

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of a computer virus and read how more and more programs are written to defend against such attacks, it seems to me we have an example of logocentrism in all its obstinacy being confronted by what we might call the unavoidability of a destination. That is a very basic question and one that is central to your work. But although scholars have now seen, for example, the fundamentally “architectural” side to your work, I think there remains this whole area of relations between thought and communication, in the most basic sense, where your ideas have hardly even begun to be taken up. Would you comment on that? j. d.: Yes, you’re right, and paradoxically the question is more intimately connected with my work. I often tell myself, and I must have written it somewhere—I am sure I wrote it somewhere6—that all I have done, to summarize it very reductively, is dominated by the thought of a virus, what could be called a parasitology, a virology, the virus being many things. I have written about this in a recent text on drugs.7 The virus is in part a parasite that destroys, that introduces disorder into communication. Even from the biological standpoint, this is what happens with a virus; it derails a mechanism of the communicational type, its coding and decoding. On the other hand, it is something that is neither living nor nonliving; the virus is not a microbe. And if you follow these two threads, that of a parasite which disrupts destination from the communicative point of view—disrupting writing, inscription, and the coding and decoding of inscription—and which on the other hand is neither alive nor dead, you have the matrix of all that I have done since I began writing. In the text just referred to I allude to the possible intersection between AIDS and the computer virus as two forces capable of disrupting destination. Where they are concerned, one can no longer follow the tracks, neither those of subjects, nor those of desire, nor the sexual, and so on. If we follow the intersection between AIDS and the computer virus as we now know it, we have the means to comprehend, not only from a theoretical point of view but also from the sociohistorical point of view, what amounts to a disruption of absolutely everything on the planet, including police agencies, commerce, the army, questions of strategy. All those things encounter the limits on their control, as well as the extraordinary force of those limits. It is as if all that I have been suggesting for the past twenty-five years is prescribed by the idea of destinerrance  .  .  . the supplement, the pharmakon, all the undecidables— it’s the same thing. It also gets translated, not only technologically but also technologicopoetically. p. b .: Let’s talk about the idea of “thereness” of the visual object, in painting, sculpture, and architecture, what might be called a feeling of presence. In “+R” you refer to a painting “taking the breath away, a stranger

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to all discourse doomed to the presumed mutism of the thing itself, [it] restores in authoritarian silence an order of presence.”8 Is there some kind of phenomenological presence that words don’t have, that has to be dealt with in the visual object? Is film perhaps an intermediate area because it is sort of present like a visual object, yet it has to be read through like words? j. d .: These are profound and difficult questions. Obviously the spatial work of art presents itself as silent, but its mutism, which produces an effect of full presence, can always be interpreted in a contradictory fashion. But first let me distinguish between mutism and, let’s say, taciturnity. Taciturnity is the silence of something that can speak, whereas we call mutism the silence of a thing that can’t speak. Now, the fact that a spatial work of art doesn’t speak can be interpreted in two ways. On the one hand, there is the idea of its absolute mutism, the idea that it is completely foreign or heterogenous to words, and one can see in this a limit on the basis of which resistance is mounted against the authority of discourse, against discursive hegemony. There exists, on the side of such a mute work of art, a place, a real place from the perspective of which, and in which, words find their limit. And thus, by going to this place, we can, in effect, observe at the same time a weakness and a desire for authority or hegemony on the part of the discourse, notably when it comes to classifying the arts—for example, in terms of the hierarchy that makes the visual arts subordinate to the discursive or musical arts. But on the other hand, and this is the other side of the same experience, we can always refer to the experience that we as speaking beings—I don’t say “subjects”—have of these silent works, for we can always receive them, read them, or interpret them as potential discourse. That is to say, these silent works are in fact already talkative, full of virtual discourses, and from that point of view the silent work becomes an even more authoritarian discourse—it becomes the very place of a word that is all the more powerful because it is silent, and that carries within it, as does an aphorism, a discursive virtuality that is infinitely authoritarian, in a sense theologically authoritarian. Thus, it can be said that the greatest logocentric power resides on the side of discourse, a discourse that is going to relativize things, emancipate itself, refuse to kneel in front of the authority represented by sculpture, or architecture. It is that very authority that will try in some way to capitalize on, in the first place, the infinite power of a virtual discourse—there is always more to say, and it is we who make it speak more and more—and, in the second place, the effect of an untouchable, monumental, inaccessible presence—in the case of architecture this presence is almost indestructible, or in any case mimes indestructibility, giv-

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ing the overpowering effect of a speaking presence. Thus, there are two interpretations—one is always between the two, whether it is a question of sculpture, architecture, or painting. Now, film is a very particular case: first, because this effect of presence is complicated by the fact of movement, of mobility, of sequentiality, of temporality; second, because the relation to discourse is very complicated, without even speaking about the difference between silent film and sound film, for even in silent film the relation to the word is very complicated. Obviously, if there is a specificity to the cinematic medium, it is foreign to the word. That is to say that even the most talkative cinema supposes a reinscription of the word within a specific cinematic element not governed by the word. If there is something specific in cinema or in video—without speaking of the differences between video and television—it is the form in which discourse is put into play, inscribed or situated, without in principle governing the work. So from that point of view we can find in film the means to rethink or refound all the relations between the word and silent art, such as they came to be stabilized before the appearance of cinema. Before the advent of cinema there was painting, architecture, sculpture, and within them one could find structures that had institutionalized the relation between discourse and nondiscourse in art. If the advent of cinema allowed for something completely new, it was the possibility of another way of playing with the hierarchies. Now here I am not speaking of cinema in general, for I would say that there are cinematic practices that reconstitute the authority of the discourse, while others try to do things more closely resembling photography or painting—still others that play differently with the relations among discourse, discursivity, and nondiscursivity. I would hesitate to speak of any art, but in particular of cinema, from that point of view. I think that there is probably more difference among different works, different styles of cinematic work, with respect to the point just made about discourse and nondiscourse, than there is between cinema and photography. In that case it is probable that we are dealing with many very different arts within the same technological medium—if we define the cinema on the basis of its technical apparatus—and thus perhaps there is no unity in the cinematic art. I don’t know what you think, but a given cinematic method may be closer to a certain type of literature than to another cinematic method. And thus, we need to ask whether or not identifying an art—presuming we can speak of cinema as though we knew what art was—proceeds from the technical medium, that is to say, whether it proceeds from an apparatus such as a camera that is able to do things that can’t be done by writing or painting. Does that suffice to identify art, or in fact does the specificity of a given film depend in

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the end less on the technical medium and more on its affinity with a given literary work, rather than with another film? I don’t know. These are, for me, questions that have no answers. But at the same time, I feel strongly that one should not reduce the importance of the film apparatus. p. b.: What would you reply to somebody who was recalcitrant about the application of deconstruction to the visual arts, somebody who would say deconstruction is fine for words, the written, because what is there is never what is signified, whereas in painting everything is always there, and thus deconstruction is not applicable? j. d.: For me that is a complete misreading. I would almost take the opposite stance. I would say that the most effective deconstruction is that which is not limited to discursive texts and certainly not to philosophical texts, even though personally—I speak of myself as one agent among others of deconstructive work—and for reasons related to my own history, I feel more at ease with philosophical and literary texts. And it may be that a certain general theoretical formalization of the deconstructive possibility has more affinity with discourse. But the most effective deconstruction, and I have said this often, is one that deals with the nondiscursive, or with discursive institutions that don’t have the form of a written discourse. Deconstructing an institution obviously involves discourse, but it also concerns something quite other than what are called texts, books, someone’s signed discourse, someone’s teachings. And beyond an institution, the academic institution, for example, deconstruction is operating, whether we like it or know it or not, in fields that have nothing to do with what is specifically philosophical or discursive, whether it be politics, the army, the economy, or all the practices said to be artistic and which are, at least in appearance, nondiscursive or foreign to discourse. Now, because there cannot be anything, and in particular any art, that isn’t textualized in the sense I give to the word “text”—which goes beyond the purely discursive—there is text as soon as deconstruction is engaged in fields said to be artistic, visual or spatial. There is text because there is always a little discourse somewhere in the visual arts, and also because even if there is no discourse, the effect of spacing already implies a textualization. For this reason, the expansion of the concept of text is strategically decisive here. So the works of art that are most overwhelmingly silent cannot help but be caught within a network of differences and references that give them a textual structure. And as soon as there is a textual structure, although I wouldn’t go so far as to say that deconstruction is within it, on the other hand, it isn’t outside of it either—it isn’t elsewhere. In any case, to be quite categorical, I would say that the idea that deconstruction should confine

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itself to the analysis of the discursive text—I know that the idea is widespread—is really either a gross misunderstanding or a political strategy designed to limit deconstruction to matters of language. Deconstruction starts with the deconstruction of logocentrism, and thus to want to confine it to linguistic phenomena is the most suspect of operations. p. b .: The effect of presence that always strikes me, and this is perhaps totally idiosyncratic, is the presence of the artist’s body—for example, in the impasto in Van Gogh. When I see a Van Gogh I immediately feel his body somehow in a way that I don’t with writing. In any “trait,” any brushstroke, there is a certain presence of the artist. No? j. d.: I understand what you mean and share your feeling completely. As a matter of fact, for me the body is not absent when I read Plato or Descartes. Having said that, clearly it is there in a different manner, whereas when we look at a painting by Van Gogh, the manner in which the work is, I would say, haunted by the body of Van Gogh is irrefutable, and I think that this reference to what you call the body makes up part of the work, and the experience of the work. But obviously I wouldn’t translate that as you have just done. I would say that there is an undeniable provocation we can identify in what is painted and signed Van Gogh, and that it is all the more violent and undeniable by virtue of not being present. That is to say that the very body of Van Gogh that haunts his paintings is all the more violently implicated and involved in the act of painting to the extent that it was not present during the act, for the body itself is ruptured, or, let’s say, riven by nonpresence, by the impossibility of identifying with itself, of being simply Van Gogh. So, what I would call the body—I am happy to talk about the body from that point of view—isn’t a presence. The body is, how should I say, an experience in the most unstable [voyageur] sense of the term; it is an experience of frames, of dehiscence, of dislocations. So I see a dislocated Van Gogh, one who is dislocated in the process of performing something. I relate to Van Gogh in terms of his signature—I don’t mean signature in the sense of attaching his name, but in the sense that he signs while painting—and my relation to or experience of the signature of Van Gogh is all the more violent both for him and for me because it also involves my own body—I suppose that when you speak of the body you are speaking also of your own—and all the more ineluctable, undeniable, and passionate. I am given over to the body of Van Gogh as he was given over to the experience. Even more so because those bodies are not present. Presence would mean death. If presence were possible, in the full sense of a being that is there where it is, that gathers [se rassemble] there where it is, if that were possible, there would be neither Van Gogh nor the work of

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Van Gogh, nor the experience we can have of the work of Van Gogh. If all these experiences, works, or signatures are possible, it is to the extent that presence hasn’t succeeded in being there and in assembling there. Or, if you wish, the thereness, the being there [l’être-là], only exists on the basis of this work of traces that dislocates itself. Given that the work is defined by his signature, my experience of the signature of Van Gogh is possible only if I myself countersign, that is to say, if in turn my body becomes involved with it. This doesn’t happen in an instant; it is a thing that can last, that can start again; there is the enigma of the remainder, namely, that the work remains, but where? What does it mean to remain in this case? The work is in a museum; it waits for me. What is the relation between the original and the nonoriginal? There is no question that is more topical or more serious, despite appearances. But I can’t take it up here. In any case, the question is different for each “art.” And this structural specificity of the relation original-reproduction could—at least this is the hypothesis I’m advancing—provide the principle of a new classification of the arts. These questions, as you well know, disrupt the category of presence as it is normally understood. We imagine that the body of Van Gogh is present, and that the work is present, but these are only provisional and insecure attempts to stabilize things; they represent an anxiety, an inability to make things cohere. But if you were to ask me the same question regarding cinema, how would you formulate it? In the case of Van Gogh we can say there is a work that is apparently immobile, that hangs in a museum, waiting for me, that the body of Van Gogh was there, et cetera. But in the case of a film, the work is essentially kinetic, cinematic, and thus mobile; the signatory is mediated by a considerable number of persons, machines, and actors (which also sign the work), and it is difficult to know whose body we are dealing with when we look at it. For Van Gogh we can say that he was an individual with his brush, but in the case of film, what is the equivalent, where is the body in that case? p. b.: What would be the equivalent in a painting for the types of signature effect that you explore, say, in terms of Francis Ponge’s poetry in Signéponge?9 j. d .: Obviously, what seems at first glance to distinguish the problematic of the signature for discursive or literary works is that in such works what we currently call the signature is a discursive act, a name in the general sense of the word “signature,” a name belonging to discourse, even though I have shown that in fact the name no longer belongs to language. It does function in the linguistic system as one of its elements, but as a foreign

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body. Nevertheless, it is something that is pronounced, that can be transcribed into phonetic writing, and which thus seems to have privileged relations with elements of discourse. On the other hand, in a pictorial work, for example, or a sculptural or musical one, the signature cannot be both inside and outside the work. Ponge can play with his name inside and outside of a poem, but in a sculpture the signature is foreign to the work, as it is in painting. In music it is more complicated, because one can also play with the signature, one can inscribe it as, for example, Bach did. One can transcribe the equivalent of the name in the work, as when Bach wrote his name with letters representing the notes. So one can sign the musical work from the inside just as Ponge can sign his name within a poem. In the case of painting, it isn’t possible. There are cases in which painters inscribed their names in their work, but not in a place where one normally signs, thus playing with the outside. But one still has the impression that the body is foreign, that it is an element of discursivity or textuality within the work. It is apparently heterogenous; we can’t transpose the problematic of the literary signature into the field of the visual arts. However, for me the effect of the signature can’t be reduced to the effect of the patronym. We can say that there is a signature every time a particular work isn’t limited to its semantic content. Let’s return to the literary work and to the signature as an act of commission. One needs to do more than write one’s name to sign. On an immigration form you write your name and then you sign. Thus the signature is something other than merely writing down one’s name. It is an act, a performative by which one commits to something, by which one confirms in a performative way that one has done something—that it is done, that it is I who have done it. Such a performativity is absolutely heterogenous; it is an exterior remainder to whatever in the work signifies something. There is a work there—I affirm it, I countersign. There is a “thereness” [être-là] to the work which is more or less the set of analyzable semantic elements. An event has taken place. Thus, there will be a signature every time that an event occurs, every time there is the production of a work, whose occurrence is not limited to what can be semantically analyzed. That is its significance: a work which is more than what it signifies, that is there, that remains there. So, from this point of view, the work then has a name. It receives its name. In the same way that the signature of the author isn’t limited to the name of the  author, so the identity of the work isn’t necessarily identified with the title it receives in its catalogue. It is a given name, and that naming takes place once only, and thus there is a signature for every spatial or visual work of art, which is finally nothing other than its own existence, its “thereness,”

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its nonpresent existence, that of the work as remainder. This means that one can repeat it, review it, walk around it: it’s there. It’s there, and even if it doesn’t mean anything, even if it isn’t exhausted by the analysis of its meaning, by its thematics and semantics, it is there in addition to all that it means. And this excess obviously provokes discourse ad infinitum; that is what critical discourse consists of. A work is always inexhaustible from that point of view. So the signature is not to be confused either with the name of the author, with the patronym of the author, or with the type of work, for it is nothing other than the event of the work in itself, inasmuch as it attests in a certain way—here I come back to what I was saying about the body of the author—to the fact that someone did that, and that’s what remains. The author is dead—we don’t even know who she or he is—but it remains. Nevertheless, and here the entire politico-institutional problem is involved, it cannot be countersigned, that is to say, attested to as signature, unless there is an institutional space in which it can be received, legitimized, and so on. There needs to be a social “community” that says this thing has been done—we don’t even know by whom, we don’t know what it means— however, we are going to put it in a museum or in some archive; we are going to consider it as a work of art. Without that political and social countersignature, it would not be a work of art; there wouldn’t be a signature. In my opinion, the signature doesn’t exist before the countersignature, which relies on society, conventions, institutions, processes of legitimization. Thus, there is no signed work before the countersignature. That goes for even the most extraordinary masterpieces, Michelangelo, for example. If there is no countersignature, the signature doesn’t exist. That means that the countersignature precedes the signature. The signature does not exist before the countersignature. d. w. : Are there any nonsigned works, then? j. d .: No. d. w. : The idea of a work represents a type of countersignature? j. d.: Absolutely. There are nonsigned works in the ordinary or conventional sense, that is to say, works produced by anonymous authors. Society recognizes that the patronym of the author is sometimes unknown; it doesn’t know which social subject has produced the work. That is true. But such a work exists only to the extent that it is signed, to the extent that one says there is a work. There is a signature—we don’t know which one, we don’t know the name of the person who produced it—but the work itself is the attestation of a signature. But it is only the attestation of a signature on

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the basis of that countersignature, that is, that people come and say there we have something interesting, there’s a temple, a painting, a film. p. b .: Yes. Medieval and Renaissance art historians spend a lot of time just trying to establish the corpus in terms of authorship, and it has to be countersigned by the institution of art history before one can even establish what it is, what the “oeuvre” of Michelangelo is. j. d.: But that task of attributing a work can start only after the receivers or addressees have identified the work as a work that merits being attributed, and thus it is considered to be already signed. We don’t know by whom, but it is already signed because we have countersigned it. Otherwise, if we don’t recognize it, if we say that it is not interesting, and we toss it—that can happen, that must have happened—at that moment it’s all over, there is no signature. Thus it all starts with the countersignature, with the receiver, with what we call the receiver. The origin of the work ultimately resides with the addressee, who doesn’t yet exist, but that is where the signature starts. In other words, when someone signs a work, we have the impression that the signature is her or his initiative. It is there that it starts; she or he produces this thing and then signs. But that signature is already produced by the future perfect of the countersignature, which will have come to sign that signature. When I sign for the first time, that means that I am writing something that I know will have been signed only if the addressees come to countersign it. Thus the temporality of the signature is always this future perfect that naturally politicizes the work, gives it over to someone else, that is to say, to society, to an institution, to the possibility of the signature. And I think that it is necessary here to say “political” and “institution” and not simply “someone else,” because if there is only a single one, if there is hypothetically only one countersignatory, there is no signature. And with that we move from the private to the public. A work is only public; there is no private work. Supposing I sign something, a letter, for example; it will be received and countersigned by a possible addressee, but it won’t be a work unless a third person, “society” as a whole, will have countersigned it in a virtual sense. It doesn’t work with only two. I don’t know if you would agree with me here, but for me there is no private work of art, and what we have just finished analyzing in terms of signature must occur in a public and thus in a political space. But it is perhaps true that this concept of “publicness” [ publicité ] no longer belongs to a rigorous opposition between the public and the private. d. w.: What you write about photographs, painting, and architecture often relies on the word, or let’s say on a word. For example, at the begin-

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ning of Droit de regards (“Right of Inspection”)10 there is a voice that affirms that “only the words interest me,” and later on, another voice that objects, that you—granted, we don’t know who “you” is—“you only develop a lexicon.”11 We can easily establish this lexicon: There are the plays on “(de)part(ed )”12 in that text, for example; there is “now” [maintenant] in the piece on Bernard Tschumi;13 there is “subjectile” for Artaud.14 So what is the place of the nonverbal in your discourse? I have the impression, in view of what you have said, that it has a lot to do with the idea of mutism, but by the same token you speak in your text on Laporte15 of a musical effect as “a remainder that cannot be assimilated by any discourse.” How does that all fit together? j. d .: It is necessary to respond on two levels. It is true that only words interest me. It is true, for reasons that have to do in part with my own history and archaeology, that my investment in language is stronger, older, and gives me more enjoyment than my investment in the plastic, visual, or spatial arts. You know that I love words. I have the greatest desire to express myself in words. For me it involves desire and the body; in my case the relation of the body to words is as important as it is with painting. That is my story, the history of my investments and drives. I am often reproached: “You only like words, it is only your lexicon that interests you.” What I do with words is make them explode so that the nonverbal appears in the verbal. That is to say that I make the words function in such a way that at a certain moment they no longer belong to discourse, to what regulates discourse— hence the homonyms, the fragmented words, the proper names that do not essentially belong to language. By treating words as proper names, one disrupts the usual order of discourse, the authority of discursivity. And if I love words it is also because of their ability to escape their proper form, whether they interest me as visible things, letters representing the spatial visibility of the word, or as something musical or audible. That is to say, I am also interested in words, paradoxically, to the extent that they are nondiscursive, for that’s how they can be used to explode discourse. That is what happens in the texts to which you allude. Not always, but in most of my texts there is a point at which the word functions in a nondiscursive manner. All of a sudden it disrupts the order and rules, but not thanks to me. I pay attention to the power that words, and sometimes the syntactical possibilities as well, have to disrupt the normal usage of discourse, the lexicon and syntax. So, naturally, all this works through the body of a language. It is obvious that with a word like “subjectile” I can only produce or rather recognize the effects of destabilization within the French language, or at least I give French priority. On the one hand, I really like French and have a great

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investment in it, while on the other hand I mistreat it in a certain manner in order to make it come out of itself. Thus, I explain myself with the bodies of words—here I think that one can truly speak of “the body of a word,” with the reservations mentioned earlier, that it is a body that is not present to itself—and it is the body of a word that interests me to the extent that it doesn’t belong to discourse. So I am very much in love with words, and as someone who is in love with words I treat them as bodies that contain their own perversity—a word I don’t like too much because it is too conventional—let’s say the regulated disorder of words. As soon as that occurs, language is opened to the nonverbal arts. For this reason, it is especially in dealing with painting and photography, for example, that I take risks with such verbal adventures as “subjectile” or with a number of other words in “Right of Inspection.” It is when words start to go crazy in that way and no longer behave properly in regard to discourse that they have more rapport with the other arts, and conversely this reveals how the apparently nondiscursive arts such as photography and painting correspond to a linguistic scene. But such words are related to the matter of their signatory—this is evident in the case of Artaud, even in the case of the photographer Plissart. There are words that work on them whether they know it or not; they are in the process of letting themselves be constructed by words. d. w.: To take the matter a little further, let’s discuss music, which is predominantly nonverbal. I note that you haven’t as yet written anything on music, but I have the impression that the word “come” [viens], discussed in “Of an Apocalyptic Tone,” has a thoroughly musical resonance.16 I can’t think of any other way to describe it and so wonder if there isn’t a musical force [une force de musique] in that word. j. d.: In a certain manner—and here my response will be a little naïve— one can say the same thing about it. The most naïve response is that music is the object of my strongest desire, and yet at the same time it remains completely forbidden. I don’t have the competence, I don’t have any truly presentable musical culture. Thus my desire remains completely paralyzed. I am even more afraid of speaking nonsense in this area than in any other. Having said that, the tension in what I read and what I write, and in the treatment of the words I just spoke about, probably has something to do with a nondiscursive sonority, although I don’t know whether I would call it musical. It has something to do with tone, timbre, voice, something to do with the voice—because contrary to the nonsense that circulates in this regard, nothing interests me more than the voice, more precisely the nondiscursive voice, but the voice all the same.

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So, since you mention the word “come” [viens], it seems to me that I was trying to say that what counted was not the word “come,” the semantics, the concept of “to come,” but that the thought of “to come” or the event itself depended on the uttering [ profération], on the performative call of “come,” and that this is not exhausted by its meaning. Addressing the other, I say the “coming” to the other. I say “come,” but I mean an event that is not to be confused with the word “come” as it is said in language. It is something that cannot be replaced by a sign, by an “Ah,” by a cry, that means “come.” It is not itself a full presence; it is differential, that is to say, it is relayed through the tone and the gradations or gaps of tonality. So, these gaps, this tonal differential, is evidently there, and that is what interests me. To return to the naïveté of my response, when I write, the most difficult thing, what causes me the most anguish, mostly in the beginning, is to find the right tone. Ultimately, my most serious problem is not deciding what I want to say. Each time I begin a text, the anguish, the sense of failure, comes from the fact that I am unable to establish a voice. I ask myself whom I am talking to, how I am going to play with the tone, the tone being precisely that which informs and establishes the relation. It isn’t the content, it’s the tone, and since the tone is never present to itself, it is always written differentially; the question is always this differentiality of tone. Within each note there is a differential, but when one writes a text designed to last, whether it be a discursive text, a cinematic text, or whatever, the question is one of tone, of changes in tone. So I imagine that when I write I settle my problems of tone by looking for an economy—I can’t find another word—an economy that consists in always pluralizing the tone, in writing in many tones, so as not to allow myself to be confined to a single interlocutor or a single moment. I think in the end that what interests me the most in the texts I read and in the texts I write is precisely that. All of this merits further analysis, but that’s it, how it shifts, moves from one phrase to another, from one tone to another. Such analyses are rarely performed—I haven’t read a lot of work on the subject—but it remains an important question. And it would be an analysis of the pragmatic type, one that doesn’t consist of determining what something means, what its thesis, theme, or theorem is, for that is not so interesting nor so essential; what is more important is the tone, and to know to whom it is addressed in order to produce what effect. Obviously, that can change from one sentence to the next or from one page to the next. And since you are asking about my texts, I would say that what they have in the final analysis that is most analogous to spatial, architectural, and theatrical works is their acoustics and their voices. I have written many texts with several voices, and in them the spacing is visible. There are sev-

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eral people speaking, and this necessarily implies a dispersion of voices, of tones that space themselves, that automatically spatialize themselves. But even when it isn’t marked in the text by new paragraphs, by grammatical or grammatically determined shifts from one person to another, such effects are evident in many of my texts. All of a sudden, the person changes, the voice changes, and it all gets spatialized. People’s reactions, their libidinal investments, positive or negative, their rejection or hatred, can probably be best explained in terms of tone and voice more than in terms of the content of what I actually say. They can put up with the fact that I take this or that position, but what really upsets them is this spatialization, the fact that one no longer knows whom one is dealing with, who signs, how it all comes together [se rassemble]; that is what disturbs them, what scares them. And this effect of spatialization—in my texts as well as in others’ texts—sometimes scares them even more than do spatial works themselves, because even spatial works that should produce this effect still give the impression of a kind of gathering [rassemblement]. We can say the work is there, it’s a terrible thing, it’s unbearable, it’s menacing, but in fact it’s within a frame, or it’s made of stone, or it’s in a film that begins and ends; there is a simulacrum of gathering and thus the possibility of mastery, the possibility of protection for spectator or addressee. But there are types of texts which don’t end or begin, or disperse their voices, which say different things, and which as a result hinder this gathering. One can listen but can’t manage to objectify the thing. So, with my work, there are those who like it and those who don’t. But I think that it is always a question of space, of the nonmastery of spacing, and not only of the voice or something in the voices. d. w.: Could the idea of tone be related to something more pertinent to the visual arts, the question of beauty? j. d.: The question of beauty is very difficult. I don’t know. Naturally, we could evoke the canonical discourses on beauty and speak of Kant, and so forth, but that wouldn’t be interesting here. Personally, I can’t treat beauty as a separate effect, although I’m sensitive to it, whether it’s a matter of beauty within art or outside of art. In neither case can I separate it from the experience of the body we spoke of earlier, and thus from the experience of desire; naturally, it is libidinalized. For the reasons I just mentioned, I am probably more sensitive to what works through the voice, the beauty of tonalities. It is for that reason finally that I must say—still in the naïve register—that I am rarely overwhelmed by the beauty of pictorial or architectural works; that is to say, they don’t excite me. I rarely have my breath taken away by a painting. On the other hand, that does sometimes happen with music or when I hear the spoken word or read texts—by listening to

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the voice, that is—and it often happens in the cinema, but only to the extent that it comes from what works through the voice as desire [ ce qui dans le désir travaille la voix]. It can happen with silent film, but only because silent film is never silent. Thus, I would say that for me the experience of beauty, if there is one, is inseparable from the relations to and the desire for the other, to the extent that it works through the voice, through something of a tonal differential—to be more specific, through the voice as something that intensifies desire all the more because it separates it from the body. There is an effect of interruption, of suspension. One can make love with a voice but without making love. The voice separates. And thus it is a matter of whatever there is in the voice that provokes desire; it is a differential vibration that at the same time interrupts, hinders, prevents access, maintains a distance. For me, that is beauty. We speak of beauty in front of something that is at once desirable and inaccessible, something that speaks to me, that calls me, but at the same time tells me it is inaccessible. Then I can say it is beautiful, it exists beyond, has an effect of transcendence, is inaccessible. Thus, I can’t consume it—it isn’t consumable; it’s a work of art. That is the definition of a work of art, that it is not consumable. Beauty is something that awakens my desire by saying “you will not consume.” It is a joyful work of mourning, although neither work nor mourning. On the other hand, if I can consume it, I say it isn’t beautiful. That’s why I would have more trouble saying that a painting or piece of architecture was beautiful. I could say it was, but I wouldn’t be captured by it, I wouldn’t be moved by the same feeling of beauty. However, I can be moved in the case of a finite discourse, where there are beings who speak, or even in the case of texts, a poem for instance, where there are effects of the voice that call and give themselves by refusing themselves. All you can say is that it’s beautiful, and that you are not responsible. It can happen only with you—as is the case with the signature we discussed earlier—and at the same time you have nothing to do with it. Thus you are dead; it does without you [se passe de toi]. There is a voice that says that that can happen only with you [ne peut se passer qu’avec toi], but it happens without you [se passe de toi]. That is beauty; it’s sad, mourning. We could in another context have a more scholarly discussion on beauty, but I am trying to say something else here. p. b .: In the “Fifty-Two Aphorisms”17 you talk a lot about the relation of architecture to thinking or thought, the analogue between discourse and all the spatial arts. What about the relation of line, form, and color to thinking? When you say the “spatial arts” rather than the visual arts, does that change anything? Is the logocentric predominance of the I (eye) in vision denied when you put these works in the realm of the spatial?

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j. d.: There is an element of chance in my use of the word “visual”—I don’t know how to adjust my discourse to your expectations—but if in fact I do say “spatial” more readily than “visual,” I would give the following reason: It is because I am not sure that space is essentially mastered by [livré à] the look. Obviously, when I say spatial arts, that permits me in an economic and strategic fashion to link these arts with a general set of ideas on spacing, in painting, speech, and so on, and also because space is not necessarily that which is seen, as it is for a sculptor or architect, for example. Space isn’t only the visible, and moreover the invisible—this takes us back to the text I mentioned before we got started, on blindness18—the invisible, for me, is not simply the opposite of vision. This is difficult to explain, but in that text, I tried to show that the painter or the drawer is blind, that she or he writes, draws, or paints as a blind person, that the hand that paints and draws is the hand of a blind person—it is an experience of blindness. Thus the visual arts are also arts of the blind. For that reason, I would speak of the spatial arts. It more conveniently allows me to link it with the notions of text, spacing, and so on. Now for the second part of your question. Obviously, the word “thought” doesn’t work for me in that context, except to the extent that I can, as a matter of usage, count on a distinction made elsewhere between thought and philosophy. Thought is not exhausted by philosophy. Philosophy is only a mode of thought, and thus it is the extent to which thought exceeds philosophy that interests us here. This presumes that there are practical arts of space that exceed philosophy, that resist philosophical logocentrism, and that are not simply natural, or, as some would call them, animal activities— are not simply of the order of instant needs. At this point it is necessary to say that there is thought, something that produces sense without belonging to the order of sense, that exceeds philosophical discourse and questions philosophy, that potentially contains a question of philosophy, that goes beyond philosophy. This does not mean that a painter or filmmaker has the means of questioning philosophy, but what she or he creates becomes the bearer of something that cannot be mastered by philosophy. Thus, there is thought there. So, every time there is an advance, an architectural or pictorial event, whether it be a particular work or a new school or architectural style or a new type of artistic event, thought is involved, and not only in the sense I have just described. It involves thought in the sense of the memory of the history and tradition of the work, or of art in general. But that does not mean that artists know history, or that filmmakers must know the history of film, but the fact that they inaugurate something, that they produce a type of work that was not possible, let’s say, twenty years earlier, assumes that in their work the memory of the history of film is nevertheless recorded,

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and therefore that it is interpreted, it is thought. What I call thought is just that; it is interpreted. Hence when I speak of thought at work in architecture, as could also be said with respect to painting or the fine arts, I am making a distinction between thought and philosophy. I am referring to something in excess of the philosophical, something not only of the order of an earthquake, or an animal instinct, as well as to self-interpretation [ autointerprétation], interpretation of one’s own memory. What I call thought is a polemical gesture with respect to current interpretations according to which the production of an architectural or a cinematic work is, if not natural, at least naïve in terms of critical or theoretical discourses, which are always essentially philosophical, as if thought had nothing to do with the work, as if it didn’t think, whereas elsewhere the theoretician or interpreter or philosopher does think. So, the idea is to indicate in a polemical fashion that thinking is going on in the experience of the work, that is to say, that thought is incorporated in it—there is a provocation to think on the part of the work, and this provocation to think is irreducible. Obviously, this is charged with meaning because it assumes a lot of things, such as the Heideggerian distinction between philosophy and thought. It is Heidegger’s words I am using when I say that philosophy is only a mode of thought—it is almost a direct quotation from Heidegger that I have appropriated—but at the same time I use it in a way that is antiHeideggerian. In order to really interpret what I say about architectural thought, it is necessary first to understand the reference to Heidegger, and second to understand that the entire text about architecture is anti-Heideggerian. It is an argument against the Heideggerian notion of habitation, of the work of art as habitation. My objection to Heidegger, in fact, often begins with the spatial arts. That is because I think that the hierarchization of the arts he practices in his discourse on art and painting, or on poetry, repeats a classical philosophical gesture, and that is exactly what I argue against. Thus, it is not only an argument against Heidegger that I then apply to the domain of art; it is in fact on the basis of the spatial arts, or starting with the question of space, that I question Heidegger, in particular in the domain of the architectural and what he says about habitation. d. w. : Can we come back to your text on photography, “Right of Inspection,” with Marie-Françoise Plissart? I am referring to what you told me once concerning the problem of its translation, the fact that the piece was not accepted by an American publisher. j. d.: The question of translation is complicated. First, it is a very difficult book to translate, notably in terms of the problematic we discussed earlier, the way it plays on French words, but more than that, because I try to

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show that the photographs themselves proceed from a kind of implicit play in French that is untranslatable, that it is as if this photographic work could be produced only in the French language—as if not only my text but also the photographs were untranslatable. I am reminded of what happened in the case of the Japanese translation of the text. Because of the differences between the left-to-right linearity of Western writing and the right-to-left, vertical progression of Japanese, and the fact that a similar linearity of gazes occurs both within a photograph and from one photograph to the next, it was not possible to reproduce the photographs in the “correct” order in the Japanese text. In fact, that publisher reversed the original order of the photographs, but that only confused Japanese readers, because the gazes still failed to match from one photograph to the other. What I called the text’s untranslatability therefore became a fact in Japanese. So, first of all, it is very difficult to translate for reasons that are given in the text itself. Having said that, however, if it appeared in English only in Australia, I imagine that was also for other reasons—I don’t know which, I have only hypotheses formed after speaking with various people. It seems that in spite of everything, in the field of American academic publishing the “obscenity” of the photographs became an issue. That is to say that my American publishers, respectable university presses, either did not want to publish it or did not want to associate my name with photographs of lesbian lovemaking, and so forth, and thus said it didn’t interest them. For instance, I was informed by one of them, through the intermediary of an editor who claimed to know something about photography, that the photographs weren’t interesting. I don’t know what his evaluation is worth, if it was sincere or not. I am not able to judge, I don’t know what to think of it. Maybe he was right, but the work consisted of more than just the photographs. In this case there was a reluctance that I can’t explain. I can only conjecture that resistance to this type of image in the field of academic publishing is greater than I thought. I was very naïve, because in my confused evaluation of what is happening in the United States I did not think it was possible that this sort of prudishness would be so prevalent. From that point of view this country remains very enigmatic to me. An almost unfettered sort of freedom coexists closely with the most ridiculous of prohibitive moralities; the proximity of the two is very difficult to comprehend. p. b .: I want now to ask something concerning the so-called negativity of deconstruction. At the end of the “Fifty-Two Aphorisms” you make a call for not destroying things, for finding something affirmative: “The baseless ground [le sans-fond ] of a ‘deconstructive’ and affirmative architecture can cause vertigo, but it is not the void [le vide], it is not the gaping and

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chaotic remainder, the hiatus of destruction.”19 You point to this affirmative place in your work, but you never name it. Can this place be named? j. d.: It’s not a place; it’s not a place that really exists. It’s a “come” [viens]; it is what I call an affirmation that is not positive. It doesn’t exist, it isn’t present. I always distinguish affirmation from the position of a positivity. Thus it is an affirmation that is very risky, uncertain, improbable; it entirely escapes the space of certainty. Before coming back to that, since you quoted that passage, I can say that I insist on this point in the text on architecture for two reasons: first, because in fact people can say that deconstructive architecture is absurd because architecture constructs. So it is necessary to explain what the term means in the text, that “deconstructive architecture” refers precisely to what happens in terms of “gathering,”20 the being together [être ensemble], the assembly, the now [maintenant], the maintaining. Deconstruction does not consist simply in dissociating or disarticulating or destroying, but in affirming a certain “being together,” a certain maintenant; construction is possible only to the extent that the foundations themselves have been deconstructed. Affirmation, decision, invention, the coming about of the constructum is not possible unless the philosophy of architecture, the history of architecture, the foundations themselves have been questioned. If the foundations are assured, there is no construction; neither is there any invention. Invention assumes an undecidability; it assumes that at a given moment there is nothing. We found on the basis of nonfoundation. Thus deconstruction is the condition of construction, of true invention, of a real affirmation that holds something together, that constructs. From this point of view, only deconstruction, only a certain appeal to or call by [appel de] deconstruction, can really invent architecture. So, the passage you cite was meant to respond to those who are frightened by the idea of a deconstructive architecture, those who think it ridiculous, but in the second place it was also meant to respond to discourses within the architectural field that are a little negativist, discourses such as Eisenman’s, for example. A letter I wrote to him on that subject was recently published.21 In his theoretical discussion of his work he often presents a discourse of negativity that is very facile—he speaks of the architecture of absence, the architecture of nothing [du rien], and I am skeptical about discourses of absence and negativity. This also applies to certain other architects like Libeskind.22 I understand what motivates their remarks, but they are not careful enough. In speaking of their own work they are too easily inclined to speak of the void, negativity, absence, with theological overtones also, and sometimes Judeo-theological overtones. No architecture

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can be called Judaic, of course, but they resort to a kind of Judaic discourse, a negative theology on the subject of architecture. Thus, my allusion is to be understood in that sense. Now what is this call? I don’t know. If I knew, nothing would ever happen. The fact is, in order for what we conveniently call deconstruction to get off the ground [se mettre en mouvement], that call is necessary. It says “come,” but come where, I don’t know. Where this call comes from, and from whom, I don’t know. That doesn’t simply mean that I am ignorant; it is heterogeneous to knowledge. In order for that call to exist, the order of knowledge must be breached. If we can identify, objectify, recognize the place, from that moment on there is no call. In order for there to be a call, and for the beauty we spoke of earlier to exist, the orders of determination and of knowledge must be exceeded. It is in relation to nonknowledge that the call is made. Thus, I do not have a response, I can’t tell you “this is it.’ I truly don’t know, but this “I don’t know” doesn’t just result from ignorance, or skepticism, or nihilism or obscurantism. This nonknowledge is the necessary condition for something to happen, for responsibility to be taken, for a decision to be made, for an event to take place. It is necessary that we be unable to respond to that question, and each event—whether it consist of an event in someone’s life or an event such as a work of art—each event takes place there where there was no place, where we didn’t know the place was, takes (the) place where there was no place. It provides the venue and in doing so prescribes that the venue not be known in advance, that it not be programmable. Afterward we can imagine or determine the programs, we can do the analysis. If an art form appears at such and such a moment, it is because the historical, ideological, and technical conditions render it possible, and thus after the fact we can determine the place of waiting, as it were, “the expectation,” the structure of waiting, the structure of reception [structure d’accueil]. If we could do this in an exhaustive fashion, it would mean that nothing had happened. I believe that it is always necessary to take the analysis of the historical, political, economic, and ideological conditions, to take that analysis as far as possible, including the history of the specific art form. But if the analysis of all those conditions is exhaustive, to the point where the work is ultimately only there to fill a hole, then there is no work. If there is a work, it is because, even when all the conditions that could become the object of analysis have been met, something still happens, something we call the signature, the work, if you wish. If all the conditions necessary to produce, let’s say, À la recherche du temps perdu have been met, and we can analyze those conditions in general and in the specific case, and if that analysis in fact no longer needs the work,

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then it is because nothing has happened. If there is a work, it means that the analysis of all the conditions only served to, how shall I say, make room [ laisser la place], in an absolutely undetermined place, for something that is at once useless, supplementary, and finally irreducible to those conditions. p. b.: Let me ask you a question about the future of what might be called an alternative deconstructive critical practice. It seems that if people write in a more conventional deconstructive mode, they say that it’s already been done. But if it’s more autobiographical and self-foregrounding, or relies more on chance and puns, they become hostile. It’s too narcissistic, they say, or it’s okay when Derrida does it or when Barthes used to do it, because they’re Derrida and Barthes, but when others do it, it’s self-indulgent. Given the enormous institutional constraints on discourse, do you think there is any future for that kind of practice? j. d .: If it’s “that kind of practice,” then it won’t have a chance. Its chance is that it will be transformed, that it will be disfigured. It’s obvious that if it were an identifiable and regulated practice, the same thing being recognized each time, then it would not have a chance. It would be stillborn, dead from the start. If it has a chance, it is to the extent that it moves on, that it gets transformed, that it is not immediately recognized, that it is recognized without being recognized. We must be able to recognize it, but it is also necessary that in the process of this recognition, something else happens in the form of a contraband [en contrebande]. People must be able to recognize it and at the same time recognize that they are dealing with something they can’t identify, something they don’t know. So it takes or it doesn’t; there’s no general rule. To put it in rather formalist terms, I would posit the paradox as follows: the chances that X—let’s call it deconstruction, but it could be anything—will proliferate and last are inversely proportional to the fact of its being recognized as X, that is to say, directly proportional to the possibility of its producing effects that cannot be continuously reproduced in deconstruction. Thus, it needs to be transformed, to move elsewhere. p. b.: Do you have any comment on Gregory Ulmer’s attempt, in his recent book Teletheory: Grammatology in the Age of Video,23 to develop an alternative critical practice, what he calls “mystory”? j. d.: With respect to Greg Ulmer, his work seems to me to be very interesting, very necessary; it opens another space that we can evaluate in a different manner. We can evaluate it with regard to deconstruction—I am personally unable to do that—or with regard to what I do, and people may or may not be in agreement about it. But there needs to be discussion about these objects—television, telepedagogy, and so forth—and such questions

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will produce a new discourse that a lot of people, myself included, won’t understand. Already I am not sure that I understand Greg Ulmer very well, or not sure I have worked enough on him to know what he means. I see it from afar, I see it in outline, but it’s already beyond me. That means that the object called deconstruction has moved elsewhere and that under its name something is happening that has no relation to the word. And so it gets displaced and deformed. That is the condition of the future. If there is to be a future, it is on the condition that it not be “that” that it be elsewhere. It is clear that the production of new technological capabilities—in communications, for instance—such as I could never possibly have imagined, will displace things completely. The political situation is changing radically; the same goes for computers, for biology, and all of that will necessarily produce discourses that are not totally translatable in the code or language of the deconstruction of twenty years ago, or ten years ago, or of the present time. That is the future, by definition. If there is a future, we can say nothing about it. In terms of what I can predict from what is close at hand, during the coming years the war over deconstruction will probably continue to rage in the American academy. In my opinion the war reserves are far from depleted. I don’t know how much longer it will go on, but the political argument will continue to fuel the debate. It is not only the affairs of the past, those of Heidegger or de Man, that are raising the stakes. For a certain time, the temperature will remain fairly high, and for political reasons, but that doesn’t only relate to things that are difficult to interpret, such as the case of de Man, but to the whole framework that the detractors of deconstruction operate within. There will be a great deal of uncertainty that will increase the tension, especially because of what is now happening in the geopolitical sphere, notably what we call the democratization process in Eastern countries; all that will make the interpretive machines very restive. And, as always, the polarization will increase the tension, for there definitely is polarization around deconstruction—those who say it is reactionary and those who say it is revolutionary, conservative or not conservative. d. w.: Do you think it works in the same way in France? j. d.: No, in France it is more complicated. There are always similarities, but in France there exist different milieus. In the United States, deconstruction is restricted to the academic milieu, even though that milieu is not a homogenous field. As it happens, these things are starting to overflow the academic field. Someone told me that a colloquium that involved deconstruction recently took place in the army or navy. The other day Hillis Miller told me he had received a call from Phyllis Franklin at the MLA, who had had a request from a senator for information on deconstruc-

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tion. So it is clear they want to know what is going on. In general, though, American intellectual culture is restricted to the academic field. Things are different in France. The university milieu is not the same as the cultural milieu or the literary milieu. p. b .: I was thinking of the university milieu, because when French university professors come here and we tell them we are interested in your work, they have a tendency to say that, yes, deconstruction was something important that happened fifteen or twenty years ago, but they claim not to understand why it still interests us. j. d .: That is both true and false. It is true that deconstruction appeared in a certain form at a certain time in France, and that there was a delay in its transmission. There was a process of assimilation and thus apparently of digestion and evacuation that occurred in France between 1966–67 and 1972–73, and from that point of view it is said to be finished. At the same time, it often amounts to disavowal or resentment in terms of something that, in my opinion, has not yet arrived in France. I can say that in many respects it has not yet arrived in France. So it is true and false, and deserves a detailed analysis. It is also necessary to bear in mind the subject position of French intellectuals who come here, who have their interests, who have a certain background, who want to see things in a certain way. In general, it makes them nervous, for obvious reasons, that deconstruction interests people here. That concerns me a lot, because I’m right in the middle of it, and it often comes home to me that way. p. b .: I have a related question that is a bit more difficult, perhaps because it’s more fundamental, but it’s a question that is very important to me in my own intellectual life. The problem is that I find that I am unable to listen to a lecture on almost any subject, no matter how expert, since I’ve been “ruined” by deconstruction. j. d .: So am I. p. b .: All thinking, at least at present, seems to depend upon the making of distinctions, the ordering of hierarchies. As soon as someone giving a lecture divides his or her topic into three parts, say, I immediately see how number one could really be considered part of number three, or that number two and number one actually overlap. So, given the fact that deconstruction seems to threaten the production of knowledge in such a fundamental way, I wonder if you were not being a little naïve when at the end of the Limited Inc.24 interview you did with Gerald Graff you said that what bothered you the most was that people seem to deliberately misread your work and seem to be so irresponsible when they discuss it. But since your ideas are so threatening to the production of knowledge as it is pres-

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ently constituted, isn’t their response in some ways understandable? And if it is true that deconstruction blocks the production of knowledge, where can we go next? This is perhaps a very naïve question, but I feel I have to ask it: What’s next? The second part of the question is what you think the outlook is, institutionally speaking, for the future of deconstruction in America. Will it continue to exist, and if so, will it begin to take different forms beyond what might be called the “Yale school” undecidability, the finding of aporia in texts? I’m thinking, for example, of Glas, the performative text that tries to “go beyond” logocentrism. Do you think there is any future for that in the American academy? j. d.: There are a lot of questions there. To come back to what we were discussing before we started the interview, it just so happens that yesterday and the day before I was at a colloquium on the Holocaust, and I spoke for two and a half hours on a text by Benjamin, dealing with the 1, 2, 3 distinctions, and so forth. I spent my time demonstrating how this text of Benjamin’s, “Critique of Violence,”25 which produces a series of distinctions like that between “founding violence” and “conserving violence,” itself constantly deconstructs its own conceptual oppositions. So I spent my time delineating Benjamin’s distinctions, then questioning them. For me, a reading is bearable only when it does that work. That said, I don’t believe that deconstruction is essentially or solely that which, as you said, destroys the production of knowledge. No. Or rather, it does and it doesn’t. On the one hand, it can in fact disturb or block a certain type of work; on the other hand, it indirectly produces knowledge—indirectly it provokes work. Those who consider themselves deconstructionists and those who are opposed to it all work in their own manner, and I think this accelerates the production of knowledge. For example, the New Historicism, which presents itself as a producer of knowledge, appears in a field that is all the same marked by deconstruction. While being sensitive to the fact that deconstruction can paralyze the tranquil, positive accumulation of knowledge, on the other hand, it’s also productive. Then you ask what’s next. Frankly, I don’t know. I’m not here to sing the praises of deconstruction; nevertheless, I believe that the fact that deconstruction is not limited to what you call the “Yale school” effect has already been confirmed. In saying that, I am not speaking of my own work. What is happening in architecture, in law schools, and so on, shows that deconstruction has not been limited to that context. Even supposing that at a given moment—though that was never true—it came together in the so-called Yale group, that’s over. And it always was, even at Yale. So it can’t remain

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there. But it is necessary to distinguish between the fate of the word “deconstruction,” or deconstructionist theory, or a so-called school—which never existed—and other things that, without the name or without reference to the theory, are able to develop as deconstruction. For me, deconstruction does not limit itself to a discourse on the theme of deconstruction; for me, deconstruction is to be found at work [il y a la déconstruction à l’œuvre]. It is at work in Plato, it is at work in the American and Soviet military commands [les états-majors], it is at work in the economic crisis. Thus deconstruction does not need deconstruction, it does not need a theory or a word. Now if we restrict the thing, if we limit it to the discursive and institutional effect that has developed throughout the world, but mostly in the United States, and in the academy, and we ask “What’s next?,” then I don’t know. We’re used to changes in fashions and schools and theories and hegemonies. We are not going to use the word indefinitely. One day we will think back that during the sixties, seventies, and eighties there was a thing [un truc] called deconstruction that was represented by . . . I don’t have any illusions about that, no more than about our own longevity. We know that, generally speaking, we live for sixty to seventy years and then we die. In that sense, “deconstruction,” as a word, or a theme, will disappear. What will happen before its disappearance, or what will happen after, I don’t know. I really don’t know. I find that it has already had a rather long life, precisely because it was never a theory able to be contained within a discipline, neither philosophical nor literary, and so forth. It follows a different temporal rhythm and hence takes more time to move into architecture and other fields. And it gets deformed; it is a rather monstrous phenomenon, each time different and thus unidentifiable. Obviously, if certain people want to identify it by the type of literary theory that was developed at Yale, which is a reductive gesture, then it is easier to find its limits. But it is more like a virus; it is a form of virus, of which we will lose the trace. It is inevitable that at a given moment the trace identifiable within the name “deconstruction” will be lost; that is obvious. The word will wear itself out. Beyond the word “deconstruction” or other words associated with it, this process will be a little different; it may take longer. There will continue to be little organisms with their independent lives, whose trajectories we may be able to follow, but that is true for anything that happens in a culture. How does one follow the trace of philosophy through history? I don’t know. Laguna Beach, California 28 April 1990 Translated by Laurie Volpe

Thinking Out of Sight1

This lecture was delivered by Jacques Derrida in Orta (Italy) on 1 July 2002. It was recorded and edited by Simone Regazzoni and appeared under the title “Penser à ne pas voir” in Annali della Fondazione Europea del Disegno (Fondation Adami) vol. 1, ed. Amalia Valtolina (Milan: Bruno Mondadori Editori, 2005), 49–74.

A question about language, before a few words of thanks. I was wondering this morning in what language one draws, that is to say, because we are here to talk about drawing, whether one could conceivably or paradoxically imagine that a drawing, far from being, as is generally believed, immediately universal as music is, as one thinks that drawing and music are immediately universal and intelligible beyond the barrier of languages, I am wondering, I will be wondering again, and will return to this along the way, whether drawing, whether the stroke or line [trait]2 in drawing is wholly independent of a language: whether, for instance, Valerio Adami draws in Italian or in another language. In Adami’s work, as is well known, there are lots of English, French, and German words. But does it make sense to ask whether he draws in Italian? I leave unresolved the question of what links the stroke [trait] in drawing to language. Which is the authority in the final analysis—the authority of the stroke or that of language? But after Maurizio Ferraris’s most rich and serious presentation,3 this will be a mere divertimento, an impromptu. Before taking it up, I’d like to express my gratitude to those who are welcoming us here, to Valerio Adami whose initiative I’d like to pay tribute to, not only for today but also for the future of the institution of drawing4 which he is founding, and of which this is a sort of prefiguration and preliminary design. Therefore, our best wishes go to the institution that he is thus launching and for which we are and will remain with him wholeheartedly.

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At the end of his presentation, Maurizio Ferraris spoke about X-rays,5 which pertain to visibility, to a certain kind of visibility: to the invisible that gives itself to be seen underneath a certain surface, underneath another invisible surface, and, especially while looking at Valeria,6 I am going to raise the question of echography. I am here merely going to pick up echoes, I am going to echo everything that Maurizio Ferraris said this morning and ask myself what status echography could be granted. Before embarking on the most serious topic of “thinking-one-sees” [ penser-voir], I’ll raise a further question. In general, when one says “to see,” one first naturally thinks about eyes, about eyes which are made, so one thinks, to see. But as you know, eyes are made not only for seeing but also for weeping. One may wonder why one cries, why such and such an emotion of sadness, or of laughter in fact, or of a traumatic shock causes tears. It is very mysterious. Why this symptom that consists in shedding water through one’s eyes? And by way of an epigraph in order to give some scope to this question “why eyes, eyes in view of what?,” “are they made only for seeing or first of all for weeping?” (as you know, there is a great iconography of female mourners [ pleureuses]; women are generally the ones who weep and who experience—we’ll come back to what experience is—their eyes, whether they weep out of sadness or out of joy in fact), I’ll quote a text that I happened to quote in an essay I wrote on the blind, a text by Marvell that says, “But only human eyes can weep”: How wisely Nature did decree, With the same eyes to weep and see! That, having viewed the object vain, We might be ready to complain . . . Ope then, mine eyes, your double sluice, And practise so your noblest use; For others too can see, or sleep, But only human eyes can weep. . . . Thus let your streams o’erflow your springs, Till eyes and tears be the same things: And each the other’s difference bears; These weeping eyes, those seeing tears.7

According to him, animals as well as men, what are called “animals,” indeed have eyes for seeing. But according to Marvell, whose quiet certainty I do not share here, only human eyes are made for weeping. Not only does he say that eyes weep but also that tears see. First epigraph.

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I’d like to orient the second epigraph toward somebody who haunts these places, that is, Nietzsche. Nietzsche has often been named this morning, but if I have managed to follow what was said in Italian, which I do not do too easily, no one has mentioned the fact that Nietzsche lived in these places, on this island. His specter haunts these places. Now a specter is somebody or something that one sees without seeing or that one does not see while seeing; the spectral figure is a form that hesitates quite undecidably between the visible and the invisible. The specter is what one thinks one sees [ pense voir], “think” in the sense of “believe” this time. There is a “thinking-onesees” [ penser-voir] here, a “seeing-being-thought” [voir-pensé ]. But one has never seen thinking [vu penser]. In any case, the specter, as in hallucination, is somebody who goes through the experience of haunting fear, mourning, etc., somebody one thinks one sees. Then, here, one thinks one sees Nietzsche. And I’ll recall a text by Nietzsche precisely about seeing and blindness. It is in Ecce Homo: My eye trouble too, though at times dangerously close to blindness [dem Blindwerden zeitweilig sich gefährlich annähernd ], is only a consequence and not a cause: with every increase in vitality [Lebenskraft] my ability to see [Sehkraft] has also increased again. . . . I am a Doppelgänger, I have a “second” sight [Gesicht] in addition to the first. And perhaps also a third.8

Then the contract here, between Valerio Adami, Maurizio Ferraris, and myself, is that I’ll improvise in my reply to Maurizio Ferraris. This is why I spoke of an impromptu. I’ll speak without any preparation. But what is an improvisation? Whether for words or for music—drawing is still something else—what does not to fore-see mean? Improvisation consists in going forward without seeing beforehand, without fore-seeing. For instance—a question that will remain suspended over everything I am going to say now—can one paint without fore-seeing, without design [ dessein]?9 Can one draw [dessiner] without a design? That is to say, without seeing something coming? We are already quite close to what Maurizio Ferraris told us this morning about perception, the concept, fore-seeing [ pré-vision], fore-sight [ pré-voyance], pro-vidence, as well as divine Providence. All this consists in seeing something coming beforehand, in seeing beforehand what’s going to come. Let’s recall something obvious here: not all living beings have what are called “eyes”; there are living creatures, and that is the case with most of them, that are sensitive to light, that need light or sunlight and that react biologically, genetically to light, that need the effects of light yet without being able to see, without having eyes that face something, something that is

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precisely facing them and that we commonly call objects. There are animals that do not have objects in that sense, but we, men, mammals and a few other animals, have eyes. Not only are we sensitive to light but we see, and I must say that one of the functions, I won’t say one of the finalities so as not to sound too telegraphic from the beginning, but in any case one of the vital functions of the eye, of the gaze equipped with eyes, is precisely to see coming, that is to say, to protect us, to protect us against what comes. In order to protect ourselves we anticipate. “To anticipate” means to take beforehand (antecapere), to get hold of beforehand. Anticipation is already something that, most often, with the help of hands, goes ahead and meets the obstacle in order to prevent danger. Together with this vocabulary of anticipation, we have the vocabulary of ap-prehension, the manual vocabulary as it were. Everything I am saying moves between the hand and the eye, like drawing, doesn’t it? Drawing is both the eye and the hand. Somehow even before using our eyes, anticipation uses our hands, to hold danger, the obstacle, the threat at a distance. Many drawings of blind people, I mean that represent blind people—I’ve attempted to show this in my text on the blind—describe the movement of the blind groping with their hands to foresee without seeing what’s there beforehand and what they must take into account with their hands, without eyes. But with our seeing eyes, we anticipate too, and in the vocabulary of anticipation we have the whole semantic spectrum of perception or of the concept; perception is also a manual capture [ prise], a way of grasping, the Begriff, the concept. Begreifen is to grasp, to take in order to master, and thus the concept has this in common with perception. Here I concur with Maurizio Ferraris’s remarks this morning. The concept has at least in common with the percept, with perception, that it commits the taking hand, apprehension. The blind man moves forward apprehensively, that is to say, with a kind of worry that consists in taking in advance the thing he needs or from which he must protect himself. Therefore, eyesight is also apprehension. I am not saying that eyesight is only that. But eyesight, the seeing and not the weeping eyes are there to forewarn [ prévenir], by anticipation, by pre-conceptualization, by perception: in order to see coming [voir venir] what is coming. But, first difficulty, first aporia if you like: if it is to constitute an event, one must not see coming what comes toward us. An event is what comes; the coming of the event as an event is an event worthy of this name, that is to say, an irruptive, inaugural, singular event, only insofar as precisely one does not see it coming. An event that one anticipates, that one sees coming, that one fore-sees, is not an event: in any case it is an event whose eventhood is neutralized, deadened, stopped by anticipation, precisely. The

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experience—and I’ll come back to the ambiguity of this concept of experience, which we spoke about a lot this morning—the experience of the event is a passive experience, toward which, against which, I would say, happens what one does not see coming, and which is first of all wholly unforeseeable, unpredictable; it is part of the concept of the event that the latter should come upon us absolutely by surprise, unexpectedly. If eyes are what they are for us, positioned as they are on our faces, I say our faces, human faces (because not all eyes are or see in front; some animals have eyes that allow them to see sideways and behind, but our eyes see in front and they have what is called consequently a “horizon”), the event always risks being neutralized to some extent: one sees things coming from the far end of the horizon. As soon as or insofar as there is a horizon from whose far end one sees something coming, nothing comes, nothing comes that deserves the name of “event”; what comes horizontally, that is, what faces us and comes toward us by moving forward where one sees it coming, does not happen/arrive. It does not happen/arrive in the strong and strict sense of the advent of what comes, be it something or somebody, what or who, what or who in “it comes.” One must not see it coming and therefore the event has no horizon; there is an event only where there is no horizon. The event, if there is any, that is pure and worthy of this name does not come facing us, it comes vertically: it can come from above, sideways, from behind, from below, where eyes have no grasp [ prise], precisely, where they have no anticipatory, prehensive, or apprehensive grasp. That an event worthy of this name comes from the other, from behind or from above, may open up spaces for theology (the Most High, the Revelation that comes to us from above) but also for the unconscious (it comes from behind, from below, or else simply from the other). The other is somebody who surprises me from behind, from below, or sideways, but as soon as I see him or her coming, the surprise is deadened. Unless, in what comes facing me, looking at me, there are all the resources of the most high, the most low, of what lies beneath, etc. The question we’ve dealt with, “to see and think, to think one sees, to see thinking” [ penser-voir, voir-penser], is therefore first of all the question of the event, of the experience of the event and of what drawing is, the relation between drawing and the event. What can drawing possibly have to do with what arrives? Or with who arrives? What in drawing can account for this unforeseeable irruption of what or who arrives? The draftsman is somebody, and here we have a great witness,10 somebody who sees coming, who pre-draws, who puts much work into the line [trait], who calculates, etc., but the moment when it traces [ ça trace], the moment when the drawing invents, when it invents itself, is a moment when the draftsman is somehow

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blind, when he does not see; he does not see coming, he is surprised by the very stroke that he breaches, by the breaching of the stroke, he is blind. He is a great seer, even [voire] a visionary who, as long as he is drawing, if his drawing is eventful, is blind. I’d like to keep very close both to drawing and to what Maurizio Ferraris told us this morning. As I’ve already spoken a lot about the animal, I’d like to turn to this strange animal that Maurizio Ferraris showed us this morning: the one-eyed animal; one cannot decide whether it is this or that, such an animal or another, this one or that one by turns, never both at the same time. What I noticed in the unstable, undecidable drawing of this animal figure is that it was in profile in both cases. It was a profile, two profiles. The animal was not looking at us. Question: what happens when an animal— and here I am talking about animals as much as men, about those animals that are also men—what happens not only when an animal is seen by me, but also when I see an animal looking at me, its eyes possibly meeting mine, looking at me, as one says, straight in the eyes?11 There is another alternative, another alternation, another turn-taking if you like; when I look somebody in the eyes—I am here calling on the experience of everyone—I must choose between looking at the seen eyes of the other and looking at the seeing eyes of the other. I cannot see the other’s eyes at once as seen and seeing, as visible, as visible and looking. If I see them as visible, I somehow become blind to their seeing [voyance]. I cannot simultaneously see visible and seeing eyes. Naturally—I am once again trying to keep very close to what Maurizio Ferraris told us this morning—we build our exchange of organs through a nonnatural interpretation, we do know that the eyes we look at and that are visible are also seeing eyes. We know full well but we do not see them simultaneously as seeing and visible. This is what’s disturbing about the mirror as well. In one’s experience with the mirror, this indecision surfaces. When we look at ourselves in a mirror, we must choose between looking at the color of our eyes and looking at the flux, the influx of the gaze that looks at itself with all the paradoxes of the self-portrait to which I may return later and with which I have tried to deal elsewhere. In any case, there is here an alternative that is as disturbing as the one about which Maurizio Ferraris spoke this morning. What I am wondering is what becomes of that in a drawing, with the same effects as the ones we saw this morning, in which the animal would look at us facing rather than sidelong or sideways. What one sees—and, I can say that again, I have the drawing before my eyes—what one sees then are seeing eyes. There are animals with visible eyes but not animals with seeing eyes. It is a matter of brisk alternation, or of instantaneous alternative. We have two of them, Maurizio Ferraris’s

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alternative this morning and mine now. It is not the same. But in both cases, these two alternatives are alternatives of what could be called in French, with all the ambiguity of the phrase, a point de vue; that is to say, according to the point of view, I can see or not see such and such an animal, such and such a person, their eyes seeing or visible. The point of view is the perspective, that is to say, the sight of the gaze that selects as it puts in perspective. To speak of perspectivism is to say that one always sees things, one always interprets things from a certain point of view, according to some interest, by carving out an organized, hierarchized pattern of vision, an always selective pattern that therefore owes as much to blindness as to vision. Perspective must make itself blind to whatever is excluded from perspective; in order to see in perspective, one must neglect, one must make oneself blind to all the rest, which happens all the time. A finite being can see only in perspective, therefore in selective, excluding, framed fashion, within a frame or an excluding border. Consequently, one must surround the visible put in perspective with a whole zone of blindness. Perspective is blind as well as seeing. From this “point of view” the organization of the visible field is also conditional upon some blindness. There are a thousand ways, I’ll come back to this, of thinking a blindness that is intrinsically proper to the very seeing of sight [au voir même de la vue]. There is what we were saying a moment ago about Narcissus, the mirror or the two-way gaze [regard croisé ], then about perspective, there is also what’s called the “blind spot,”12 this focus of non-seeing [non-voyance] around which the field of vision is organized (neurologically, physiologically). This goes for all animals that have eyes, a cerebral system capable not only of organizing the field of visibility but of producing a monocular vision where there are at least two eyes. A lot has been said about just how indispensable to any vision and visibility the blind spot is. From there, as far as seeing [le voir] is concerned, we move on to the other term of our program, that is to say, “thinking.” I am much more at a loss, and this is why I began with the question of languages. For to think is one of the most obscure and most enigmatic words. What does one mean by to think? Thinking cannot be reduced either to reason or to knowledge or to consciousness; there is unconscious thinking, there is irrational thinking, there is knowledgeless thinking: Kant distinguishes very rigorously between the order of the thinkable and the order of the knowable. I can think, denken, many things that I cannot know. Kant identified this order of the thinkable with the order of ideas from pure reason, but one need not follow him on this ground. In any case, what is certain is that “to think,” this zone, this blind spot of our vocabulary, cannot a priori be reduced either to knowing,

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or to knowledge, or to consciousness, or to reason. And from one language to the next, what we translate as to think has a different semantic range. In Italian and in French naturally, as in Latin, etymologically, thought [ pensée] refers to weighing [ pesée], to examining, as to the needle of a scale that gives an indication of how much something weighs. Cogitatio is something else again. Denken is something else again. When Heidegger wonders “What Is Called Thinking (Was heißt Denken?),”13 “What Does Thinking Mean?,” one knows in advance that for him thought cannot be reduced to science, or to reason, or to philosophy. I return very quickly to the fact that in all his discourses on reason, Der Satz vom Grund14 and elsewhere, Heidegger relates Vernunft back to vernehmen, to taking, to the grasping of a perception, to the operation of mastery: the animal rationale is an animal that is indeed endowed with reason, Vernunft, in the sense of grasping [ prise], capturing, and the hold [emprise]. Thus Heidegger, according to Was heißt Denken? (one need not follow him but one must read him), if one follows the path he traces around this formidable question, starting at some point from the German “Was heißt Denken?,” which is frequently translated into French as Qu’appelle-t-on penser? (What does one call thinking?), displaces and inflects the syntax of the phrase to make it say “What does thinking call?,” Was heißt Denken?, “What does thinking invite?” Thus, it is a question of inviting, of promising. Thought is thinkable also in a movement through which precisely it calls out to come [appelle à venir], it calls, it calls us, even if we do not know where the call comes from, what the call means; it calls. Hence—and I do not want to embark on this here—a whole meditation on nomination, calling [appellation], on the fact of giving a name, of calling, of greeting, of inviting a guest. The question of hospitality: thought calls, it is hospitable to who comes, precisely. One finds again and again this experience of the event, of what or who comes, etc. How can one think the experience of what or who comes, of the event, of an event that falls upon, that falls on us without warning and without our seeing it coming? In another text,15 Heidegger allows other associations of his own: between denken and danken, gratitude, thanking in relation to the other, to what or who comes; he also says that for the Greeks noeïn, which is usually translated as thought, noêsis, is related to sight, to seeing. Not to the seeing of eyes, the seeing with the help of eyes, but a more originary seeing in the free opening of spacing in which the seeing of thought, in the instant, der Augenblick, in the wink of the eye in which it sees, need not be interpreted from the system of eyesight, from neurology. Elsewhere he says, because we must also speak about music, that one hears not because one has ears, but one has ears because one

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hears.16 No doubt he would likewise say: “One does not see because one has eyes, but one has eyes because one sees.” At this point, still following in Maurizio Ferraris’s footsteps, I’d like to return from a thought that exceeds reason, consciousness, therefore the ego, the person, etc., to a thought that is or is not logos. Still in the direction of what matters [importe]17 to us here, that is to say, the stroke, drawing, space, spacing, visibility, I’d like to extend a little what Maurizio Ferraris reminded us of about “logocentrism” this morning. What at one point I thought I could call “logocentrism” in order to deconstruct it was—I apologize about these details to those to whom those things may be familiar— something that was at once very close to and very different from phonocentrism. Phonocentrism would be, according to me, a universal structure that does not depend on this or that—Greek or European—culture, a universal structure that posits or substantiates the hegemony of the voice, of sound therefore, over the visible, over any other nonsonorous meaning. The privilege of the voice can be found everywhere, not only in the Bible or in Greek culture but also in Chinese, Japanese, etc., culture. This privilege, at least as it is substantiated, would be due to the fact that the voice is closer to the life of the one who speaks; it is more present, both to the one who speaks and to the one who listens; there is here the double privilege of proximity or immediate presence, but also of interiority, proximity to life. In the name of these values (presence, proximity, life, etc.), the voice, the living speech is preferred to writing. This phonocentric structure would be virtually universal. Logocentrism, then, is, I would argue, a Greco-European specification that privileges not only the voice but also the logos in general: in the sense of reason, discourse, proportion, and calculation.18 The logos is all this, it is the account one renders, logon didonai, it is reason, discourse, speech, calculation, proportion, account, like ratio in Latin, account, calculation, and then, or rather before that, and this is what Heidegger most often insists on in general, legein is what precisely gathers, versammelt, holds together. Heidegger insists heavily on the privilege of Versammlung, of legein and of the logos; well, the authority or hegemony of the logos in Greek culture and in particular in Greek philosophical culture is an authority that goes hand in hand with the authority of the phonê. This is the specific form it takes in the West with its Greek filiation, say, or evangelical, since, you know, in the Gospel of Saint John, “In the beginning was the Logos.” This privilege is bound up in Greek culture with alphabetical writing, that is to say, with a phonetic writing, with a system of writing that has a history and was invented by the Phoenicians. Such a system imposed itself on account of

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its technical economy. It allowed one to write by ordering one’s writing according to the simple transcription of the oral signifier. A phonetic writing therefore confirmed the privilege of speech, it was and remains more than others in the service of speech, which is structurally not the case with hieroglyphic or ideogrammatic writings, although, as is well known (but I do not want to go too far into the details of this analysis), there was no purely ideogrammatic or hieroglyphic writing. Even in Chinese, Japanese or other kinds of writing, there are phonetic elements; but basically, the dominant element of an ideogrammatic or hieroglyphic writing is the drawing, precisely in space, and not the transcription of a phoneme. Hence the substantiation of which we have numerous signs throughout the whole Western culture, starting with Plato’s Phaedrus, of a writing that is the signifier of a signifier, that represents a representing element, that represents the sounds that represent inner “thought.” In the text Maurizio Ferraris was speaking of this morning, in Aristotle, phonetic writing is the signifier of a signifier: it signifies or expresses an oral signifier that expresses states of the soul ( pathemata), passions of the soul. Writing is nothing but the signifier of a signifier; it is naturally deposed, secondary, auxiliary, it has the status of a slave with regard to a master; it also has the value of death. Whereas speech is alive, writing is on the side of death, on the side of space, of visibility, a way of making visible what is not visible. From that point of view when one speaks, speech is blind. What we first experience of blindness is speech; you do not see what I am saying. The experience of speech structurally implies blindness, non-seeing [non-voyance]. A certain number of values form an indissociable system here: on the side of living speech, we have the phonê, the logos, presence, the living present, what will eventually culminate in Husserlian phenomenology in the phrase “lebendige Gegenwart,”19 the living present, experience in the ordinary sense of the term; the commonsensical view of experience is what is lived in the present, in the living present, we do not leave the present, we never leave the present; all that happens to us happens to us by definition in the present. Memory, anticipation, the future are all modifications of a living present that is itself originary. The distribution of this thought of the living present throughout the history of metaphysics, ontology, and phenomenology, whose common roots we’ll see in a moment, has been a very complex affair. When Maurizio Ferraris was speaking of ontology in order somehow to name the field of experience, naturally he was referring to what in ontology expresses the logos of the on, the logos of the present entity [étant présent], of the being [être] determined as being present / present entity. This is where Heidegger began to refine and sharpen his own deconstruction, to call into question in the movement

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of temporalization the absolute privilege granted to the now and to the living present. Faced with this historic and historial situation, this extraordinary yet undeniable privilege of the living present, of speech, of proximity, of life, etc., I for one had tried, in the texts Maurizio Ferraris was alluding to this morning, to call this privilege into question and to propose a concept of trace or of text that would not be delimitable as alphabetical writing, as writing on the page, as writing in a book. The trace is experience itself, wherever nothing can be reduced to the living present and where each living present is structured as present through the reference to the other or to something else, as the trace of something other, as reference-to. From that point of view, there is no limit, everything is trace. These propositions have been deemed somewhat provocative by some. I said that everything is trace, that the world is trace, that experience is trace, that this gesture is trace, that the voice is a kind of writing, that the voice is a system of traces, that there is nothing outside the text, and that there is nothing that somehow borders, from the outside, this experience of the trace. Just like thought, this enigmatic word “thought,” the word “experience” is richly and formidably equivocal. In short, there are at least two meanings to “experience,” to what precisely puts us in the presence of the present. Experience is what relates us to the presentation of the present: something presents itself, we experience it. Therefore, from that point of view, the acceptation of the word “experience” is wholly dominated by a metaphysics of the present or of presence, in the sense I have just recalled, by a logocentrism, even by a phonocentrism. But there is another concept of experience, of “Erfahrung.” Which is that in both cases, “Erfahrung” or “experience” in French, experience is precisely not the present relation to what is present but the journey or the crossing, which means to experiment toward, through, or from the coming of the other in its most unforeseeable heterogeneity; it is the nonprogrammable journey, the journey whose mapping cannot be drawn, a journey without design,20 without goal, and without horizon. Experience, according to me, would be exactly that. If experience was only the relation to or the encounter with what is foreseeable and anticipatable, with a present horizon in the background, there would be no experience in this second sense; there would be experience in the first sense, but this one is not an experience of the event, a historic experience, if you like. The journey whose starting point and final port of call are known is not a journey, it is finished beforehand. One has already arrived and nothing happens [n’arrive] any longer. Experience, in the most dangerous sense of the term “journey” (and the word “danger” is not far removed from the

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word “Erfahrung”),21 a journey that would not be threatening, a journey that would not be a journey within sight of the impossible, within sight of what is not in sight, a journey that would not be within sight of what is not in sight, would it still be a journey? Or merely tourism? This experience does not easily let itself be gathered beforehand in an ontology or in any logos: the experience of thought is an unchartered, mapless experience [sans charte et sans carte], an experience exposed to the event in the sense that I clarified a moment ago, that is to say, to the coming of the other, of the radically other, of the non-appropriable other. When one is dealing [a affaire]22 with some other, whether it be a who or a what, when one is dealing with some other whose very trial [épreuve] consists in experiencing that the other is not appropriable, there is experience: I cannot assimilate the other to myself, I cannot make of the other a part of myself, I cannot capture, take [ prendre], learn [apprendre], there is no anticipation. The other is what cannot be anticipated. We are dealing with another concept of experience than the one that remains dominated by the entity as entity [l’étant en tant qu’étant] (entity means present). There is a sight, since one must speak about sight, a vision that relates to the present, to what’s in front of oneself: the present is what’s at once near and in front of oneself like an object. It is often said that sight relates us to the object that is placed, there in front of oneself, but there is an experience without object, in a way an experience that is surpassed by somebody or something, who or which does not become object—or subject for that matter; since the subject is also a present entity (what is called “subject” is a present substance that remains the support of its predicates or of its accidents; in this respect there is no essential difference between subject and object). Experience in another sense is an experience that largely and infinitely exceeds categories of subjectivity and objectivity. The point is to know if sight is an experience of the first kind, that is to say, that deals, as is often believed, with what’s in front, there where I am painting, drawing, I see what is there in front of me, or else if sight deals, precisely, with invisibility, or with an invisibility that is not placed in objectivity or in subjectivity. I was struggling in this situation when I believed—this lasted a very long time, until recent years—that what dominated Western logos, philosophy, Western discourses, Western culture, especially its philosophical form, was indeed sight, the at least metaphorical reference to the visual. I still believe in this up to a point, one could give a thousand examples of it: philosophy is structured by a metaphorless metaphorics of sight, precisely because of this value of presence. The eidos, the determination of being as eidos in Plato, as you know, means precisely the contour of a visible form. It is not sensible

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visibility but the visibility of an intelligible nous, an intelligible visibility. Platonism is an endless adventure in the West. When Plato speaks of the eidos as what is “truly an entity [étant],” really an entity, ontos on, the eidos is more of an entity, it has more being than its sensible copy. It is also for Plato the starting point of a whole pejorative, disparaging discourse regarding mimêsis, imitation, poets, draftsmen, those who are content merely doing zoographies. And writing as well. Zoography is precisely a drawing or the portrait that depicts the living, but this painting of the living is dead. The eidos as ontos on is a nonvisible visibility—in the sensible sense—but it is a visibility that needs a light. This light comes from what Plato therefore calls the “good,” agathon, which he compares to the sun. The sun makes visible but it also causes to grow, causes to be. This light that makes being possible, that is to say, the eidos as true entity, this sun is itself not visible. This is a formal feature that I’d like to underline: what makes visible things visible is not visible; in other words, visibility, the essential possibility of the visible, is not visible. An absolutely unmoveable axiom: what makes visible is not visible; this structure can also be found in Aristotle when he says that transparency, the “diaphanous,” which makes things visible, is itself not visible.23 To transpose this onto drawing, we would therefore be tempted to say that what the drawing shows as visibility is a monstration of the invisible. Draftsmen and painters, especially the great ones, do not give “something” to see; they give visibility to see, which is something else altogether, which is absolutely irreducible to the visible, which remains invisible. When one’s breath is taken away in front of a drawing or in front of a painting, it is because one does not see anything; what one sees essentially is not what one sees, it is all at once visibility. Therefore, the invisible. This paradox is not unrelated to what I was saying about seeing eyes a moment ago. To see seeing eyes is as dangerous as to see the sun. It is to see the invisible. In general, this is what one avoids doing. One knows that to be looked at is what matters, but it is frightening, even being looked at by oneself. One wants to see what’s visible, but one does not want to see what’s looking at us. And which is visible as invisible and seeing [voyant invisible]. It has become a commonplace: it is said that in painting or in drawing, as a result of an irreducible dissymmetry, in front of a picture, one is not looking, one is looked at, even if this picture is not a portrait or a face, even if it is the Montagne Sainte-Victoire: one is looked at by the Montagne SainteVictoire; and this both looks at us and regards us [ ça nous regarde à tous les sens du terme]. So, as I was saying, I believed until a few years ago that this privileging of optics in philosophy was invariable and fundamental, foundational. I took

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eidos as an example, I could have taken many others. What is called an “intuition,” intueri, means to see; intuitionism is a theory of immediate seeing. The value of phenomenon ( phainesthai) is what shines, what can be seen; this is still a privileging of the visible. The value of obviousness, the value of clarity, even the value of truth, aletheia or un-veiling, is non-dissimulation; what shows itself when it was hidden is the unocculted, the unmasked: and still this value of visibility dominated the history of thought. The big question that was being asked, that I tried to ask elsewhere in a number of texts, is the question of metaphoricity. Is the eidos a metaphor? Or is it more serious than that? The history of rhetoric, which allows us to speak of metaphor, metonymy, tropes and turns of phrase, is a history that is itself wholly marked by this metaphorics. And consequently, to say that it is a metaphor is in a way to say nothing at all since the theory of metaphor is itself dominated by this deep “metaphoricity,” in quotation marks. And even the word “theory”: “theôrein” is “to look.” The theory of contemplation, the privilege of the theoretic, is a privilege of sight; therefore, this privilege of optics has been dominant, and if I was naive to think it was so simple, I nonetheless still believe that it has indeed dominated the whole history of metaphysics. I have not invented24 anything on this score. Heidegger says something similar, Blanchot says something similar. Consequently, I felt confirmed in my belief by this solid tradition. Well, recently, a few years ago, while I was writing a book on touch about the works of Jean-Luc Nancy and rereading all these texts, I realized that it is not so simple.25 The privilege of the visible was constantly supported, founded, itself surpassed by the privilege of touch. In all the texts, from Plato to Husserl, the, let’s say, ocular or optical values, the values that elsewhere I call “heliocentric,” that is to say, values transfixed with light, were in the service of what I call a haptocentrism, that is to say, a figurality privileging touch, contact—or tact (a sort of touch without touching (it)). Each time the acme of the experience of truth was expressed in the figure of contact and not in the figure of vision. This is a kind of invariant in Plato, in Kant, in Husserl, in Maine de Biran, in Bergson. I recall all these texts in my book on touch. The theoretical, the agency of the gaze, unlike touch, lets the thing be what it is; it leaves it intact. The theoretical has been privileged in particular as the medium of truth, for the difference between looking and touching is that one looks from a distance and, consequently, one lets the thing be what it is: one does not eat it. Hegel underlines it, the preeminence of the theoretical is that one does not eat the thing; the animal eats it, it wants to assimilate it, it destroys it and takes it into itself, it assimilates it, whereas the theoretician, the man of truth, the philosopher, well, he looks and consequently he

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respects: to respect is to relate to something or to somebody from a distance without touching. This regularly gives rise in aesthetics, let it be said, to classifications of the arts; obviously sculpture ranks very low, above there is architecture and painting, which, precisely like knowledge, consciousness, and science, let the thing be what it is and do not appropriate it, do not eat it, do not distort it, respect it; and then, above, there is music, which is more internal, more respectful too because it is close to the soul. Everything I am speaking of here gives rise not only to a philosophical architectonics but also to a classification of the arts, to a hierarchy that we have signs of just about everywhere, in particular in Hegel’s Aesthetics. Now a deep, often unnoticed or unconfessed haptocentrism nevertheless dominates all these heliocentric discourses, and often even in an absolute intuitionist like Bergson: when he wants to describe intuition, which means “gaze,” when he praises the pure intuition of creative duration, he says that it coincides with the object of intuitive “seeing,” and at the limit, in the order of metaphors, he is almost declaring that in pure intuition the eye touches and one has this kind of grafting of the senses whereby the eye, through light, is in contact with what it sees, touches what it sees. I would distinguish the experience of touch from haptocentrism. Haptocentrism is not merely a homage paid to touch, held to be fundamental: it is a manner of interpreting touch as absolute contact without gap, without tact. Here one finds again the ambiguity of the concept of experience. I would go so far as to say that, just as the experience of sight does not necessarily foresee, the experience of touch does not necessarily touch on the sense of continuism, of the continuist intuitionism for which there is no gap between what touches and what is touched. For there is a gap between the touching and the touched that is the condition of touch and that is what can be called “tact”: to touch without touching: one touches without touching. In phenomenology, in whose vicinity one would have to pause for a long time, there is a whole debate between Husserl and his successors. Husserl has not himself debated with his successors, but the latter have debated with him, to know whether the experience of the touching-touched, which I have when I touch my fingers for instance, was more primordial than the experience of the seeing-seen. One can find in Merleau-Ponty for instance lengthy analyses that I cannot reconstruct here,26 throughout which he hesitates between the seeing-seen and the touching-touched in the experience of the body proper, that is to say, of my relation to myself: what is more fundamental in the experience of the body proper or of the appropriation of the proper body? Is it the experience of the touching-touched or the experience of the seeing-seen, of seeing-oneself-seeing [se voir voir] or of seeing-oneself-seen

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[ se voir vu]? In each case, without our being able and having the right to establish hierarchies between the visible and the tangible, there is a gap, an interval, a spacing, that makes both the touching-touched and the seeingseen possible. At the same time, this blurs any idea of a hierarchy between seeing and touch. Obviously, when long ago I had generalized the concept of trace, writing, arche-writing, text, one could be under the impression that, since I was paying attention to the trace, to the differential stroke, I was somehow choosing space against time: speech [ parole] is time, speech unfolds in nonvisible temporality; and thus, since I was challenging the temporal privilege of speech, one could be under the impression that I was opting for the privilege of spacing and therefore of the differential stroke, as visible and spatial, in opposition to the musical, vocal, or temporal stroke. But in fact, what was at stake in that displacement was not the replacement of one hierarchy by another; it was the radical questioning, with unlimited consequences, of all the oppositional couples, of any binary logic that would precisely oppose the sensible and the intelligible, passivity and activity—since, from Plato to Kant, one has regularly placed the sensible on the side of passivity and the intelligible on the side of activity. When Kant defines his concept of experience, which indeed he deems to be homogenous to science, he opposes perception to experience. Experience engages the concept, but from a sensible receptivity: Kant explains to us that a finite being, man, for example, is finite insofar as he does not create his own objects, that is to say, insofar as he receives them (this is intuition in the Kantian sense); he does not create them. This is what he calls “intuitus derivativus,” that is to say, intuition derived from somebody who, because he is finite, receives these objects passively; whereas God, on the noumenal side, is intuitus originarius, which means that God produces the objects he sees: as an infinite being, he creates the world. Intuitus derivativus, which is man’s finite intuition, consists in being exposed in its passivity to what is there and forms the sensible content of experience. This passivity/activity opposition structures the whole history of philosophy, and what we are speaking of is precisely an experience that is, as is said by a number of thinkers to whom I feel very close today, Levinas or Blanchot, more passive than passivity itself: for example, in my relation to the Other, what Levinas calls the “Face,” where precisely the other speaks to me, looks at me, is infinitely more other than me and in front of whom I feel responsible. I am hostage to the other in a situation that is more passive than passivity, because the concept of passivity is not sufficient to express this extreme passivity, this patience, this passion that gives me over to what I receive and makes me responsible for it.

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Once this sensible/intelligible, passivity/activity opposition finds itself, if not disqualified (nothing is disqualified in all that), but in any case limited in its relevance, one should speak otherwise, think otherwise, write otherwise. When I say stroke or spacing, I do not merely designate some visible or some space but another experience of difference. Let us return to drawing, since it is our theme. I speak of drawing rather than color because in drawing, the experience of drawing (where it is marked even in the apparently most homogenous color), at stake is the experience of the stroke, the differential trace. It is the experience of that which posits a limit between spaces, times, figures, colors, tones, but a limit that is at the same time a condition of visibility and invisible. Naturally, there are thick strokes, as the phrase goes, strokes that have a thickness of visibility, a thick black stroke, but what makes this thick black stroke a stroke is not the black thickness, it is differentiality, the limit that, as a limit, as a stroke, is not visible. The drawing operation has nothing to do with anything intelligible or anything sensible, and this is why it is somehow blind. This blindness is not a disability. One must see in the common sense of the term in order to deploy these powers [ puissances] of blindness. But the experience of the stroke is in itself an experience of the blind: ab-ocular (the etymology for aveugle, French for “blind”), without eyes. The question about deaf or blind musicians has been asked; one must also think about blind draftsmen or painters. There are some, there have even been exhibitions of their works. This may mean that, in the purity of the drawing gesture [ geste dessinant], differential visibility, the visibility of what is differential, of what marks the marks, of what leaves a trace, is not merely the eye’s thing or business. It is not merely the difference between day and night. There is here therefore an experience of the secret, that is to say, of what stands in retreat [se tient en retrait] in relation to visibility, in relation to light and enlightenment [lumières], in relation to public space itself. Basically, if one insists on the equation between public space, space period, and appearing in the light (the phainesthai, the phenomenality of the phenomenon, phenomenology), then what I’ve just said about the tracing-traced stroke [trait tracé-traçant], of the trace of the stroke, does not belong through and through to public space, to the space of Enlightenment, therefore to the space of reason, in a way. This does not mean that it belongs to some obscurity, or generates some obscurantism, or belongs to night. But it does not come into the light of day any better. In any drawing worthy of the name, in what makes the tracing [tracement] of a drawing, a movement remains absolutely secret, that is to say, separated (se cernere, secretum), irreducible to daytime visibility.

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The political consequences of this are serious. Wherever there is the tracing of difference, and this also goes for the stroke in writing and in music, everywhere there is a stroke as subtracted [ soustrait] or in retreat [ en retrait] in relation to visibility, something resists political publicity, the phainesthai of public space. “Something,” which is neither a thing nor a cause, presents itself in public space but subtracts itself at the same time, resists it. We are dealing here with a peculiar principle of resistance to the political as it has been determined since Plato, from the Greek concept of democracy to the Enlightenment. “Something” here resists by itself without anyone having to organize a resistance with political parties. This resists politicization, but like any resistance to politicization, it is also naturally a force of repoliticization, a displacement of the political. (I would like in conclusion, as a note or in parentheses, to allude at least to a few texts that testify not only to the fact that there can be great artists, great writers who are blind, Homer, Milton, or almost blind, Borges, Nietzsche, and Joyce at a moment in their lives, Hélène Cixous in her own, slightly more complicated way,27 but also books on the societies and the sociality of the blind. I take the liberty of referring to all the texts I quote at length in Mémoires d’aveugle (Memoirs of the Blind ): “The Blind Man” by Chénier, “The Blind” by Baudelaire, “Die Blinde” by Rilke, Sábato’s “Report on the Blind” in Alejandra,28 etc.).

Trace and Archive, Image and Art

This exchange between Jacques Derrida and Patrick Charaudeau, Gérald Cohen, Gérard Hubert, Michèle Katz, Marie-José Mondzain, Jean-Michel Rodes, François Soulages, and Serge Tisseron took place in Paris, at the Collège iconique de l’Institut national de l’audiovisuel (INA), on 25 June 2002, on the occasion of an evening gathering organized in order to commemorate the ten-year anniversary of the legal deposit of radio and television broadcasts. The meeting was filmed, then transcribed in 2002 in the Cahiers du Collège iconique: Communications et débats 15 (Paris: Éditions de l’Institut national de l’audiovisuel, 2003), 97–140. Marie-Françoise Boudet oversaw the transcription, which was checked by Jacques Derrida and the participants. We are republishing here, with a few minor modifications made necessary by the improvised nature of these comments, the text previously made available online on the website of the Institut national de l’audiovisuel at: http:// www.institut -national -audiovisuel .fr/ sites/ ina/ medias/ upload/ actes-et-paroles/colleges/2002/25–06–02_derrida.pdf; last accessed on 16 June 2013. [The text was published a year later as an opuscule titled Trace et archive, image et art, followed by Pour Jacques Derrida by Daniel Bougnoux and Bernard Stiegler, with a foreword by François Soulages (Paris: INA Éditions, 2014).]

jean- michel rodes: We are most honored to welcome Jacques Derrida tonight. I would like to recall that this evening, like a whole series of such evenings these past two weeks, marks the ten-year anniversary of the legal deposit of radio and television broadcasts. A celebration was held about that yesterday and other events will be staged. I don’t know whether Jacques Derrida remembers this but in 1993 he signed a text, together with a number of other intellectuals (Pierre Bourdieu, Régis Debray, Pierre Nora, and

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others I forget), which made it possible for this legal deposit to exist and for us now to have a real archival trace of radio and television. Thus, we are doubly honored to receive him tonight. To give a brief reminder of how we usually proceed [la règle du jeu], we’ll begin by watching a documentary film, then we’ll have a break for drinks and we’ll be back for a Q and A session. françois soulages: Jacques Derrida needs no introduction. Jacques Derrida, I am infinitely grateful, in the name of the INA, in the name of the Collège iconique, and in the name of all the people who are here. Thank you for agreeing to come and work with us tonight. As Jean-Michel was saying, there will be four different rhythms during this evening: to begin with, in a first part, we’ll watch together a film lasting a little over one hour, called D’ailleurs, Derrida (Derrida’s Elsewhere)1 and made by Safaa Fathy.2 I am also very grateful to her for granting us the right to watch this film, which is a very beautiful film, as you’ll see. Then, there will be a quick snack. From 8 pm onward at the latest, we’re going to set up a philosophical dialogue, as agreed with Jacques Derrida. And from 10:30 pm or 11 pm onward, there will be a free and easy discussion, with a small celebration where we’ll drink some champagne. As Jean-Michel recalled, we’re doing two things tonight: first, we’re closing the Collège iconique for this year 2001–2, and I wish to thank all the people who took part in this College this year. As in other years, it was dedicated to the image. The second thing is that we’re celebrating the tenth year of the Inathèque in our own way, the tenth anniversary of the law of 20 June 1992, which extends legal deposit to radio and television from the perspective of heritage [ perspective patrimoniale] and research. “Heritage,” “research,” we’ll come back to these words perhaps. You’ve agreed to come and work with us tonight not in order to give a lecture, which would perhaps be easier, if I may say so, because with a lecture one knows what takes place, one writes it up and gives it, but to think about problems we’re going to submit to you. Problems related to film, the image, photography, the archive, art. Problems we’ve been working on after a fashion for a number of years, each month. Tonight’s session could be titled “From the trace to the traced line [tracé ], and back,” with the subtitle “The work of time.” For we’d like today to wonder about the work done on time, about the work done by time, about the work performed with time. Whether it’s art, the archive, photography, the image, and the film, I think that one is always sent back to the same things: what are these realities but specific dialogues with time, with its rhythms? And perhaps we could turn the question round and say to ourselves: what is philosophy but a dialogue on time, on traces, on what is traced [les tracés]? Indeed, as you know, it takes time to think. During the previous session, a digital film director was

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explaining to us that in a film like Gladiator, which is a hit film for children, teenagers, adults, etc., the duration of shots never exceeds five seconds, that is to say, the spectator never has time to start thinking, already another image comes along, another kind of image comes along. What would be good, I think, is precisely that we should give ourselves time to do things. And we’d like therefore to offer you time, not because we could give you time— who owns time? you as much as us, we as little as you—but because we’d like to offer you this space so that, within a particular time frame, six hours, it may be a space of offered time; insofar as we would follow our agreement, what could be pompously called our “contract,” we would try to give you problems and not ask you questions so that you may work through these problems in front of us. And in this specific way of posing problems, I believe we could hope that this way of proceeding will be perhaps for us an indispensable condition for offering you, for offering us this time for reflection. Therefore, the interrogation setup is the necessary condition of the possibility of time for reflection. Let things happen without urgency, without “zapping,” without interruption, with respect (I insist a lot on the ethics of research), with rhythm, and while also knowing that in the end we’ll be barely at the beginning. Perhaps you want to say a few words about the film we’re going to show. jac que s de r r i da: First, a few words of thanks for welcoming me here, giving me all this time, giving me the chance to be used by you as some thinking material, more or less, and for sharing the risk of reflection with you. It is a formidable chance you’re giving me here, because I’m going to be at once exposed to the image, under conditions in which my invincible and irreducible narcissism is likely to suffer, I’m going to be exposed to the image and exposed to the necessity of speaking about these images in front of and with people who, like you, are well-versed in this problematic. I, in my own way, had to become interested in the image, but I’ve never done so as you do; you’re all here experts of the image in general and of the film [ filmique, cinématographique] image, of the archive. So, in fact, I have more to learn from you here by exposing myself. So this is a word of thanks coming from somebody who is a little worried about what’s going to happen to him, this is the thanks I wish to express to you. It so happens that when you were speaking about given time, I said to myself, after thinking, still narcissistically (with me, as everybody knows, narcissism has always been the driving force behind thought), that I’d written a small book called Mal d’Archive (Archive Fever),3 in which I analyzed the suffering of the archive drive, the power, the political dimension of the archive, and I’m saying this with reference to the anniversary you’re celebrating today, the tenth anniversary of

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the legal deposit for heritage, that the question archives is a political question . . . Therefore, the incorrigible narcissism that reminded me that I had authored a small book called Archive Fever also reminded me that I had written a book called Donner le temps (Given Time),4 in which, among other things, I suggested that the only thing—which is not a thing—that might be given is time. There you are, you’re giving me the invaluable, that is to say, time, a long time for the image and for reflection. You’re asking me to say a word about the film. I think that the film, which was made by Safaa Fathy, whom I greet here, on my right, “speaks for itself,”5 as one says in English. But, from its title onward, despite all the problems of temporality that it raises through its very style of composition [ facture], as a work—we shall return to this—the problems of time, of the time of the film and of the time calculated by the filmmaker, outside of these problems of time which I also raise in passing in the film, it so happens that, from its title onward, it displaces time toward space since it is called D’ailleurs. And the untranslatable “d’ailleurs” of the title marks that we’re dealing with space, with a temporal walk within a space that displaces. Safaa Fathy’s intention was to show me in a space or from a place that are not those in which one usually expects to find me. You’ll see that, in the film, no place is named or identifiable. One can believe that one is in Algeria whereas one is in Spain or in America. So the question of time is constantly reinscribed in a, after all, very perverse and in any case very surprising topology, which plays on the surprise of space. Basically, it is the question of spacing, of the becoming space of time, of the becoming time of space, which this film puts into effect. I too salute your institution and those that run it, and I am delighted that one can celebrate today or yesterday an event that has legally, statutorily entrusted to this institution the legal deposit of heritage and research works. This raises the question, which you touched on in passing, of heritage [ patrimoine], that is to say, of family, the father, filiation. And you’ll see that the question of filiation is not wholly absent from the film. I’m stopping here not to be too long. In any case, I wanted above all to thank you all here. [After the film’s screening, François Soulages takes the floor. (Ed.)] f. s.: I will recall what we agreed with Jacques Derrida, the contract we entered into. He said to me: “Not a lecture but to try and set up a dialogue.” And then I added: “A philosophical dialogue.” So not at all an interview (an interview is very fine but there are other places for that), or even a discussion, even less, if I dare say so, a polemic, because polemic, in my opinion, seems rather hysterical, futile, and vain, but rather a dialogue, that is to say, an ability to listen, a silence, just as we kept silent in front of an image a

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moment ago. Therefore, with time. It’s not the time of urgency, but it’s the time of rhythm. I think that this is a luxury that we can afford. The time of rhythm, the time of the event, the time of the “there is,” there is thought. Therefore, the time of a dialogue around the problematic “From the trace to the traced line, and back,” or “The work of time.” So we’re going to do this in five acts. The first will turn on the film, after half an hour we’ll move on to the image, then photography. The fourth act will be on the archive, of course, and the fifth on art. The whole thing will be followed, around 10:30 pm, by an informal discussion. We’re therefore going to try to implement a dialogue, not to ask questions, but to raise problems. To ask questions is to want answers, whereas to raise problems is to try and sketch a problematic. To ask questions, to want answers, is to put oneself in technical knowledge, which is very useful, whereas to raise problems is to put oneself in what I will hastily call “philosophical” reflection. The outcome of technical knowledge would be a fusion, whereas the outcome of philosophical reflection, I think, would be solitude. Fusion would allow us to say: “We know,” but this is not what I would like, what we would like tonight. Whereas solitude would urge us to say: “I’m wondering.” The outcome of “we know” would be something we are well aware of, that exists, which is for example televisual emotion or knowledge, and there we would be in meditation rather. So, we’re going to work on these five levels [ plans]:6 film, image, photography, archives, art. I will raise an inaugural problem in the beginning and I will thank Jacques Derrida, not for replying to it but for speaking from this point onward. Then other people will speak and the whole thing will attempt to revolve on the image. First track: the film. First of all, I think we’ve all been struck by how remarkable the film is, by the relation between the images and the speeches [ prises de parole]. We wanted to have this break so as not to react to the film on the spot. We could recall that writing, for a writer, whether he is a being of literature, philosophy, or psychoanalysis, etc.—this “etc.” being in fact rather unclear, being something indefinite and not infinite, because any being that writes is not necessarily “in writing” the way a writer is “in writing” . . . For example, the theorist is not necessarily in writing, or the wish-to-demonstrate is not necessarily in writing; he or she is sometimes in exposition, rather, in the wish-to-demonstrate. Although one could also reverse things and come back to the question of writing and of the trace, and say that a theorist, for example, of a formal system in axiomatics is also a man or a woman of writing. At least let’s say that writing for the writer is first of all a writing about writing, even if of course it can be a writing about something else. This is what I will call a “writing to the second power.”

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Similarly, the manufacture and the montage of images are, for the creator of images, whether they are fixed images or images in motion, therefore for the real producer [réalisateur] of images . . . Let’s hear and understand this word, réalisateur, as the one who makes something real [réalise]: what? We might ask the question: Is it an image? The image of an image? Or perhaps a passage? The réalisateur is perhaps the one who enables the image to pass from the real to reality, from the unconscious to consciousness, from the desire for an image to its incarnation. In short, the one who works, who manufactures, who mounts images works on the image as well. So, here as well, we could say “image to the second power.” That is to say, we’re facing two routes [trajets], two trajectories, two apparently parallel setups: writing would be the writing of writing and the image would be the image of an image. But things are more complicated. They’re bound in a triple knot because any image calls for words, any combination of images even more so. And even if we’re speechless, there’s a call when faced with images. Then, any word is pregnant with images and any combination of words even more so. Last, the subject looking at the image or the writing is the subject of images and words, of image-words and word-images. Faced with this apparent impossibility of a discussion, of a relation between the image and the word, I think that two questions impose themselves. First, a general, very general problem: what problems does the written word [ l’écrit] pose to the image, precisely from what we saw earlier? What remains of the latter after the written word? Does the written word kill the image? A specific question, more existential than personal, which is addressed not to you as a private, intimate person but rather to you as a filmed person, in a film: what happens when one is filmed, when one sees oneself in a film, when one sees oneself again? Is there a reactivation of things when the film has been made about oneself or occasioned by oneself? I would say a private film, that is, that deprives the public of its reception, or a public, commercial film, and in any case in public space, and public space is something on which we could insist. Why put a private story in a public space? What becomes public in this passage through the film? In short, whether it is a private film, a public film, a film seen in public like tonight, this is where the problem is, I think: you can’t answer this film here, in this moment, at once; you can’t answer it with a film, whereas you can answer writing with writing, speech with speech, sometimes we can answer images with images. But here, you’re going to answer with a speech or with a silence, with a living presence of yourself, body and mind. In short, can one respond to a film, such is the fundamental problem for me; can one respond to a film with something other than a film, a film of a film, a film to the second power, a culture, a history?

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j. d.: First of all, thank you for everything you’ve said, that is to say, a lot. The contract you reminded us of was, may I remind you myself, in order to protect me; all of it is given over to improvisation, for me in any case, to complete improvisation. How to respond to a film? When you say that now I must respond to or answer the film—not answer for the film, that’s for the filmmaker, I myself don’t have to answer for the film—therefore, that I must respond to the film, at least the viewing, the experience I’ve just had of it, some of you, probably most of you, saw the film for the first time, whereas I’ve seen it several times already. How to answer for this singular experience of viewing the same film for the nth time? You supposed that I should respond to it either with silence, a temptation I find it hard not to resist, or with speech, given that, your words, this speech wouldn’t be filmed. Look! We’re being filmed and archived. Therefore, I know that, as was the case when Safaa Fathy was filming me, I’m already on camera, with the problems of time and space that this raises, ready once more to protest against the camera, as I do in the film, like the fish. The difficulty is no less. The fact that I have to respond with words in front of a camera, this is what repeats the situation of the shooting whose result we’ve just seen right now. Then the question of writing and of the image. It so happens, and this is what I eventually not only accepted but admired in Safaa Fathy’s work, after opposing if not an interminable, at least a lasting resistance, as she knows, what I accepted and eventually admired is the art with which she submitted speech to the image without violence, that is to say, did so in such a way that everything I could say—we’ll have to distinguish a little later, remind me if I forget to do so, between improvised speech in the film, and more often than not speech was wholly improvised, and read speech, because some texts were read in the film, read by Safaa Fathy or even by me; I’d like to come back to this question a bit later; it’s very difficult. In any case, Safaa Fathy managed it so that, without being wounded, violated, or subjected, speech nevertheless was or remained under the law of the image. Words [ paroles] were there like images, made to be as if carried along by the necessity of rhythm, of concatenation, of iconic consequence, and this is why this is a film and this is not a class. There’s a bit of a class that is filmed, there are not only texts read by her or by me, there’s a bit of a class that is filmed. But all this, improvised, calculated, or read words, all this is wholly iconic. “Iconic” means structured according to the necessity and law of the visual or musical image. The Arabo-Andalusian music that gave the film its general tonality was also the law to which discursive speech, the speech that is basically my usual speech, that is the speech of a philosophy teacher, of somebody who gives lectures, who in general speaks in very specific institu-

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tional situations, this speech was deported. And the deportation of speech subjected to the iconic law was somehow not only put into effect by the film, but it was the film’s theme. Deportation, all deportations, all displacements, exile, the “elsewhere,” the “from elsewhere,” the elsewhere of the “from elsewhere,” digression, the “in addition,” the from elsewhere, come from elsewhere, the other side, the other side of myself, all that was at once the thematics and the act, the film’s putting into effect. And I must say that Safaa Fathy, who is here, can testify to this: I entered into this experience reluctantly, with a lot of anxiety, resistance, and tension. It’s not during the experience of the shooting but after the encounter with the montage, with the finished work, in which I had no part, it’s in front of the finished work that I understood what I didn’t understand during the shooting, what I’m trying to explain, that is to say, this authority of the iconic over the verbal, or over the written word. Then, naturally, if I say that I loved and admired this, her own work, after the fact, it’s because speech, while being thus subjected to the image, to the iconic, was nevertheless not violated. And what I mean by that is that, because of the tempo, because of the art of interruption, the art of metonymy, that is to say, of weaving [ faufilage], I suppose everybody saw it, there’s a very organized thematics that is woven from one end to the other, one could name this “circumcision,” “living on” [ survivance], “spectrality,” “Marranism,” “the sublime,” this whole braid of themes is woven in the film, very discreetly but very securely, and if there has been no violence toward speech, it is because the reserve of speech was given to hear or to sense. What I mean by that—tell me if what I’m saying concurs with the sense and experience of each of you—is that one could sense that speech was withheld, at the very time when it was disarmed, given over to absolute improvisation; it was withheld, reserved, there were other things to say that remained there potentially [en puissance], but in any case not repressed, not oppressed or not forbidden. I’m going to take one or two examples, because I’d still like to say things that I may be the only one able to say here and that could cursorily, furtively, go very quickly or unnoticed. For example, at one point, a shot showed, in what used to be the house of my childhood, since Safaa Fathy—I’m saying that as well in passing for you to know—went to film on her own in Algeria, because I couldn’t go, in places that I indicated to her, places of my childhood: my lycée, the cemetery, the house where I lived until I was nineteen without leaving, without coming to France, well, there’s a shot at one point which shows a tiled floor very furtively, which is the tiled floor of the house where I lived. I don’t know if people noticed but this tiled floor contains an irregularity. These are geometrically positioned flowers and the mason must have made a mis-

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take; he put a tile askew, something that has arrested me all my life. Whenever I entered this hallway, I could see this tile that was not as it should have been. In the book we published together after the film, I explain all the memory, interrupted speech, metonymy that this tile held in reserve for me. And here, in the image, there was an infinite reserve of speech of which I can give but a small idea in Tourner les mots.7 The phrase “tourner les mots” answers your question. It’s all about turning words, that is to say, avoiding the authority of the discursive, an ascendancy that is catastrophic for a film, while filming words. She filmed words. Well, by showing this disjointed or misaligned tile, she filmed a discourse that, in my mind, is interminable. Same thing for music: at some point, my mother’s piano can be seen, in the same house, and there’s here as well the reserve of an interminable discourse for all that regards circumcision, etc. And at one point, speaking about the interminable, there is in the small discourse I improvise at the end on the undecidable, on the aporia of the undecidable, which is the condition for decision, which must be traversed, not like a moment but like an interminable moment, there’s a discourse on time, on this strange experience of time according to which, when a moment stops, when I need to pass from the undecidable to decision, the undecidable remains nonetheless, therefore the time of the undecidable continues indefinitely even though it has been interrupted. And this speech [ parole] on time, since you spoke a lot and very well about time earlier, is a reserve of the film. During the time of the film, one hour, 1 hr 8 min, there are intrusions of discourse on time that are interminable and that are respected as interminable. For example, in the scene with the fish, I say that when I am with fish, the question that comes to my mind is: the fish and I are living in the same instant, but they have an experience of time that is incommensurable with mine, and I ask myself all the time how they endure the time they’re made to live behind this glass, which looks like the glass of a camera. I compare my temporality to theirs, at the point where they are untranslatable into each other and incommensurable with each other. So, this discourse on time, if I had time now (we’re in the same situation: we are filmed and I mustn’t speak for too long), I’d say to you that there is in this remark about fish and time, about their time and mine, a remark that was interrupted at one point for reasons having to do with the film’s makeup [ facture], there are in reserve not only many other things but in my mind, very precisely, the potential reading of a remark by Heidegger in Sein und Zeit, who, at one point, wonders whether animals have time, whether there is a temporalization of the animal. He seems to think there is not, no animal Dasein, and yet he asks himself the question. If I’d had the time, I would have, in front of the camera, in my

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manner as a professional philosopher who just won’t stop talking, deployed and developed a long discourse on the temporalization of the living, of the living animal, of the living human, etc. But this I don’t do and don’t want to do, but, in any case for me, when I watch the film, I have the impression that this interruption was not doing violence to me, that it remained just like that, that there were the fish, the image of the fish, and that it was very fine like that, and that speech was not done violence to by the image, that speech was deflected or turned [ tournée]. Then obviously, with the same words, the same speech, one could make other films, other images. Here, there’s the choice, the filmmaker’s signature, which is not mine, and who has, through a multifaceted understanding—which is at once the comprehension of who I am or of what I write, but also the comprehension of the film to be made, of what she wanted to do, because this film is at once a portrait of myself and a self-portrait of the filmmaker—who chose her themes, who chose them when she questioned me and who then, in the considerable material of which this represents only ten percent, well a small percentage of the original material, chose her themes. That’s what I told her in the beginning: “You’re going to select, you’re going to write your text, you’re going to sign it, and it is a self-portrait of Safaa Fathy in a way, indissociably.” And here, there was, if not a contract—I for one don’t believe in contracts, in general—but there was, in the dissymmetry of which I also speak (at one point I speak of dissymmetry for circumcision, one is subjected dissymmetrically to a law), in mutual dissymmetry as it were, an agreement [ accord ] for which she kept the initiative and the secret, and which gave rise to this film. There was an accord both in the sense of alliance and in a musical sense. I don’t know whether I’ve answered the first question, but to keep some time, to keep some time for you and keep some time for us,8 I move on very quickly to the second question on the private and the public. First point: what Safaa Fathy wanted to do, it seems to me, but she will tell you this better than me and she will put me right if I am mistaken, was to displace— this is where the word “d’ailleurs” finds one of its extended meanings— the public image that, insofar as I am public, is widespread about me: a philosopher, professor, Parisian, etc. There, she showed that I came from elsewhere, and the whole non-French, nonacademic history was obviously the place of emphasis,9 of insistence. Although there was a teaching scene, the insistence is above all on things that are very foreign to my public image. But at the same time, the border between the private and the public was not respected. It is as if one wanted, through a film—this is one of the possible meanings, one of the possible interpretations among many others—to give

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some substance to this question that is for all of us a fundamental question, that has always been a fundamental question, and today more than ever: where does the private/public distinction come from, what is its history, what is its legitimacy, how does one cross the border? It is known that this border today shifts more than ever, and obviously in a film like that one, the border between the public and the private is constantly undecidable. If I had the time, if we had the means to do so, one could show that such and such a theme—I actually say so from the beginning, in the image she chose as the initial one—say, in my philosophical discourse, or accredited as philosophical, has a private, singular, secret origin, that one cannot think what is called “deconstruction” without thinking the circumcision of a small Jewish boy from Algeria, etc. Consequently, the private memory of the public is constantly reactivated here. I think that this private/public distinction is a distinction that has a history, a relatively recent history. Not only does the film ask the philosophical question, that is to say, one could imagine that this film is shown to philosophy students as an introduction to the question: “What does ‘private’ mean, what does ‘public’ mean?” What in this film was private or public? What is the criterion? It could work like this. Naturally, in all that is said, all I say as I improvise about the “we,” about the addressee, about forgiveness, hospitality, when each time I attempt to ask the question of a limit between for example an unconditional, pure, absolute hospitality that cannot be political, that cannot be regulated by law, by political laws, by political rules, between this unconditional hospitality and conditional hospitality, that is to say, immigration, welcome, passports, legislation, there’s a question on the distinction between the private and the public. Absolute, unconditional hospitality is not public; it cannot be public. It is secret. This doesn’t mean that it is private, but it is secret. Same thing for forgiveness, which is neither amnesty, nor prescription, nor excuse. Pure, unconditional forgiveness cannot be a public thing; it must remain secret. This is what is said in this lesson on forgiveness. And therefore, the private/public question is one of the film’s essential questions, and obviously it’s not simply the film’s contents; it’s the act of the film itself, the film thing which is public by essence, because the film is marketed, it is aired on a public channel, it’s a television film, coproduced by ARTE, therefore the film is public, just as any published writing is public. But what happens when one publishes, with the maximum status of publicity which today is that of television or of cinema, when one publishes something that says to you: “This is private, this is absolutely private, this is secret,” when basically one shows you a door that closes on a secret that must be kept, since in the film there’s also a political motif that consists in accusing the political, not

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only totalitarianism but the political in general, of being a violence against the secret and therefore against the private? The film says so. What happens when one shows publicly a film on a public channel where it is said: “exhibition or demonstration, the act that consists in extorting a secret (police or politics) is unacceptable,” and one shows this, one shows the secret? This film is a way of showing—in any case this is how I felt it, but naturally this is my experience, I don’t know if it is yours, but I had the feeling that this film showed a secret that had remained secret, showed a secret without violating it. How can one show a secret, phenomenalize it, without making it lose its separation as a secret? Because that’s what secret means: separation. I think that if this film is a success, as I dare hope it is, but I’m saying this not because of my acting role in it, since I was also an actor in it, but because of the filmmaker; if this film is a success, it is insofar as it was able to show a secret without doing violence to it, without exhibiting it as such. Is it possible to exhibit a secret as a secret? Then, in order to answer the last stage of your question, naturally, to quote you again, I think that not only in our discussions, and this is my case, we are beyond or on this side of, in any case outside knowledge, of technical competence, we are beyond knowledge, but precisely what I’m talking about is the discretion of this film that basically doesn’t give away anything to know from the secret in question. You’re asking me what happens when one sees oneself [se revoit]. I’ve seen myself a lot since I’ve seen that film several times. What happens? To be quite frank, it’s very difficult to describe. It’s very difficult to describe because, naturally, one asks for forgiveness, as is said in the film, especially in the current situation: not only do we show ourselves but we’re here in this cinema with those to whom this spectacle is imposed; so, really, and I’m saying that without any false modesty, we feel very guilty, while hoping that those who watch the film won’t resent the film or the actor, the character who speaks all the time and who speaks about himself more often than not, and that they also won’t resent the one who here is watching himself with you. I’m telling you straightaway, to reassure myself at least if not to reassure you, that all this seems to me to be totally nonreappropriable. Which is to say that, basically, what allows me to endure experiences like these without too much suffering and without too much gratification, to see myself again in this film, is that it’s not me. Well it’s me, undeniably, but at the same time what this film shows is the point where it’s not me; it’s not a point from elsewhere, it’s the implacable verdict that prevents me from reappropriating anything whatsoever from this film and, consequently, from watching it, if I dare say so, as if it were another, precisely because of the reserve of which I was speaking when I began. That

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is to say, I have been authorized through what this film is, through what it does (this won’t necessarily be the case for any film about me), through the film’s reserve that basically allows me, without my having to disown anything whatsoever of what I’m saying here, not to feel really committed to what is most proper to me through the film. And that too—and I will stop here because I don’t want to keep speaking for too long—that too is said by the film, not only through what I say in it, but by what the film itself says and shows, that is to say, circumcision, the trace, the cut [ coupure] as the interruption of reappropriation. The cut with oneself that is the condition of this experience, not only thanks to circumcision in the literal sense, but to what is at some point about a circumcision that is not only proper to Jewish culture or to such and such a culture or Jewish, Abrahamic, or Muslim religion, but proper to a universal experience that supposes this cut, this nonreappropriability of the idiom. What is absolutely singular in each of us, what is absolutely idiomatic, say, the signature, is paradoxically what I can’t reappropriate. It is absolutely proper to me, but I can’t reappropriate it, that’s the paradox, and this is what a film gives us to think. The film says to me: you can’t reappropriate that thing. The idiom, your absolute idiom, what you are, what you think, what you’ve been saying since the first circumcision, all that which is your idiom, which is absolutely proper to you, well, it is a proper that appears only to the other and therefore that is not reappropriable; you can’t reappropriate what is proper to you, what is proper to you belongs to the other. And the film, the experience of the film, is that; that’s not mine, not only this is not me but that’s not mine and I can’t possess that, I don’t want it and I must not. And I think that has to do with what is said about the cut, circumcision, the sublime, etc., which is that what is most proper doesn’t let itself be reappropriated. This is what I call somewhere “exappropriation,”10 that is, appropriation is an exappropriation. Well, I won’t say about the film only that it shows that. It shows it, it’s iconic, it’s an image that gives something to see or an image that, iconic and musical, gives itself to be heard. The film doesn’t only give that to see and hear, but that’s what it is and what it does; it cuts, it is an art of the cut. The film is an art of the cut. And as is well known, it all comes down to the art of montage, to the art of editing.11 In the beginning, I alluded to cutting and pasting, edit, as it is called in English. I think it’s the mark of art in such a film; it’s first of all an art of the splice and cut [ de la couture et de la coupure], to know how to link, interrupt, pick up such and such a development begun here and then interrupted, a shot or image change, a change in the rhythm, and then a moment later (it could be demonstrated if we saw the film again) the thread that had been cut is seen reappearing and splicing as it were, splicing

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itself and weaving its way in. It’s an art of the cut, of the interruption that, however, lets live. Like circumcision: it’s a cut that doesn’t cut. You’ve noticed that on several occasions—if I may, what I’m doing is most indecent, I’m insisting on the film and on what I say in the film—but on several occasions there is talk not only about male circumcision but also about female circumcision, a sexual difference that is very present throughout the film, with some insistence, which obviously responds to Safaa Fathy’s insistence. But if I allude to female as often as to male circumcision, it is because me there’s a major difference between the two, a difference that is not taken enough into account and whose historical and cultural scale hasn’t been sufficiently taken into account. The violence is that male circumcision cuts yet without mutilating, whereas female circumcision mutilates. I’m cutting short a development here that could be very long. This film is of the order of male, not female circumcision, and that makes a big difference. Well, I’m going to stop here because I think I’m speaking too much. f. s.: We’re running fifteen minutes behind the schedule we’ve set ourselves; therefore I suggest we take up the image and then perhaps other questions will come. You said “cut, splice, articulation of the two.” Isn’t the image precisely the articulation of quasi-contradictory things? Aren’t there, proper to any image, antinomies? That is to say, doesn’t an image force us, for example, to posit at once that the real can’t be given by the image, yet that the problem of the real, the relation we may have to it, whether through the image or not, in fact, can’t be obscured? The second antinomy, we might say, is that the image has its own autonomy (this is what you said earlier), a sort of break [ échappée] from the film, and yet it’s always received by an imaging consciousness, yours not being the same as ours because we haven’t lived the same thing in this film. And, third antinomy or contradiction, or things to hold together: how to understand that the image can at once be on the side of what might be called, if one takes most simple categories, “reproductive imagination,” and on the other side, of the creative imaginary? In short, can one reflect these antinomies when faced with an image, what I will call these “at once’s”? Will one be able to give answers just like that, by some kind of clever trick? Or shouldn’t one on the contrary try to tense these antinomies, to transform them into problems in order to bring out a problematic, a horizon, but at the same time a horizon of thought (and I’m thinking of Safaa Fathy’s work on the production of this film) and a horizon of action? In other words, doesn’t an image force us to put ourselves in a reflexive as well as artistic and perhaps even technical tension, all of it under cover—but we’ll find that again later—of creation? Therefore, isn’t there in the image itself, especially for the one who thinks,

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who thinks with words but perhaps also with images, this confrontation with something that, to cut it short, I describe as antinomic? j. d.: I obviously need to reply briefly, because I’ve been going on for too long. It’s difficult to answer huge questions quickly without clever tricks, all these major questions, which are all the questions about the image that occupy us all: what is an image? The question of mimêsis, the question of the reproductive image? To bring back these complex questions without too many clever tricks to what we’re talking about, the example of the film, it is obvious (but this is a way of continuing the antinomy) that each image is its own value, in any case this is what a film should do. Basically, the image has a properly filmic or iconic value only where it does away with what it’s supposed to represent, with its referent, as one might hastily say. And I’m trying to imagine—to imagine, precisely—what this film or the experience of this film might be for people who basically know nothing about me. Let’s try to imagine that this film is shown to people who know nothing about me—still there are quite a few! Who is speaking, who is this character? Would this film retain some interest? This means that, in fact, this film could be produced, financed, shown, etc., only insofar as it was supposed that a certain number of people, a limited yet sufficiently high number, would on the other hand be curious to see on screen [ à l’image] somebody about whom this or that, more or less, is known, a public figure. But let’s imagine by way of fiction that this film is shown to somebody who knows nothing about me, say, and that he watches that; he must first understand the language (I’ll come back to the question of language). I for one think that the properly iconic and filmic value of this work, which is classified as a document by ARTE, it’s a document, but we hastened to say: “This is not a document, this is not a documentary, it’s also a fiction.” There is a fiction, we could show that there is a fiction. Therefore, people watch a fiction. This is not a documentary since the film doesn’t introduce the person; it doesn’t say: “This is a professor, etc.” Even my name is not pronounced. Neither my name, nor my position, nor my occupation. Therefore, one watches this like a fiction. Somebody flicks through the channels and comes across this film on television, he watches that, he doesn’t recognize, is that a documentary or a fiction? For the film to have an iconic value, we must start from the hypothesis that somebody may watch it precisely in this situation, without knowing anything, either about the film’s genre, or especially about what the character is, in other words, about what the image is supposed to represent. This image represents nothing but itself, it presents itself, there are words, there are images, and that’s it. Then, it so happens that this question of mimêsis, this huge question of mimêsis, is one on which, with others

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here, I spent years and years meditating, on the paradoxes and aporias of mimêsis, precisely; I’m not going to lecture on that now, I’d be absolutely unable to do so, or impose that on you. But it’s obvious that it’s the question of mimêsis in cinema, which doesn’t arise in the same way as in painting, literature, or music, even though all these elements are summoned in the film: there is music, there is painting (there is The Burial of the Count of Orgaz), there is literature of course. So the question still remains. But if this is a film, beyond the genre and the distinction of genres between documentary and fiction, the image must be its own value, without guarantee of a reference, without reference. An image without reference. And that’s what provides the guiding thread basically, I suppose this is what guided Safaa Fathy. She did not ask herself: “Am I going to make a faithful portrait that people will recognize?” No. Is it going to be beautiful and good, or interesting, or I don’t know what, or fascinating to watch without knowing anything else? Can the film be watched like a visual or acoustic image without anything else? I myself think this is the criterion. I’m not saying this is always how people watch the film, but there’s in us, even for those who know me, who have references in this regard, somebody who watches the film while ignoring any reference and who watches the film for the image, the image for the image’s sake, the iconic, visual, or musical image, and the image within the image since paintings were filmed. I remember— this is what I wanted to say about literature and citation, because there are citations: not only paintings can be seen on screen, but some texts are cited on one or two occasions—I remember, since I said that the condition for somebody to have access to this film without knowing anything else, the minimal condition, is not only not to be blind or deaf, but also to know the French language, and I remember a discussion that took place on ARTE’s initiative, when this film was released, and somebody in charge at ARTE (I don’t remember his name, it wasn’t Thierry Garrel, who precisely held an opposite view), who, despite the fact that the film hadn’t been broadcast yet, was worried that this film, so bound up with the French language, not only because French was spoken in it, but because some very distinctly French and idiomatic texts were cited, that this film, because of the length of some quotations, ran the risk of being poorly received, for example in Germany, because it was ARTE and the first country where it was broadcast was Germany. So quite a few of us tried to convince him that not only it shouldn’t be an obstacle, but that it was the interesting thing worth trying, to make words, the most idiomatic, even the most untranslatable words, work as images thanks to subtitling. That is to say, the words themselves, in their untranslatable character, precisely because they were untranslatable, had to

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function as it were like images. They were going to hear words, whether they understood them or not. And besides, even in French, not everybody understands, nobody understands everything, not everybody understands all that is said, even among cultured spectators, not everybody understands everything. And when you don’t understand everything from a language, which happens all the time, even when you’re very intelligent and very cultured, you never understand everything, this means that the word functions like an image. It keeps its discursive reservation, its theoretical, philosophical reservation, its thought in reserve, whatever you like, but it’s first of all there as an image and this is what makes the work [ fait œuvre]. So that’s what I say to myself when I see myself [revois]. f. s.: Do you have any questions, both about the image and about the film? gé r ald c ahe n : A very quick question: you were speaking about a cut. I’m wondering whether the first cut isn’t the one that passes between speech and image. Because very often you can be heard speaking but there’s a still image of you at rest. Here, you’re speaking and at the same time you’re completely engrossed in what you’re saying, even if one can imagine an interiority, something else. In the film, one can hear you speak, one follows your speech, one gets interested in your speech, and at the same time one can see an image of you that is completely other because you’re under the gaze of the camera and one senses that you can feel this gaze and that you respond to this gaze while sometimes saying to yourself: “How long is it going to last? Is it going to end soon?” One can sense that a bit. Then, it can be at once an embarrassment, one can say that the image lies, and at the same time one can say that it’s perhaps more true than true since it reconstitutes a sort of hiatus and you always speak at once about a narcissism and a quest for identity, and there one does sense that there’s a split personality that is interesting and that somehow leads us to the idea of the secret that you were speaking of. j. d.: You’re absolutely right and you’ve put it very well. This cut between image and speech, for example, is achieved in a thousand ways, not only because sometimes I can be seen at rest, as you put it, without speaking, without opening my mouth, and you hear me speaking in voiceover; sometimes there are texts that are read while I’m doing something else; sometimes it looks like I’m speaking and I can’t be heard. Therefore, there’s not one cut, there are a thousand ways of playing with the cut. And indeed, this gives the feeling, which you described very well, of a discrepancy between gesture and speech, or between body and speech, and this discrepancy, which is one of the film’s motifs after all, says something about the secret. I

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am not where I am speaking, where it is speaking, I am somewhere else and there’s a speech older than me. I can’t quite recall at which moments, but there are moments when I walk, I can’t be seen speaking but my voice can be heard. There’s a speech more ancient than me, older than that moment, that carries on speaking, that precedes me, and it is this body that is running after its speech or speech that is running after this body that indeed gives the feeling of a secret, of the interruption that forbids [interdit], that in short speaks in between [“entredit”]. pat r i c k c h ar au de au : I’d first like to say that what astonishes me is that there’s at once a call to dialogue and a sort of press-ganging of the debate that has been deliberately sequenced into a certain number of moments, times, and themes. It’s as if the two of you had entered into a contract, which you challenge at the same time since you don’t really believe in contracts. And then there’s also something that has to do with protection. It’s a pity. Why protect yourself? Your word is already an authority. So I feel like making a few remarks without knowing whether they have been inspired by the film, by your thinking, by you as an actor, by you here. A couple of remarks just like that. First, on d’ailleurs. Strangely enough, when you said d’ailleurs at the beginning in your presentation of the film, I thought more of time than space. I said to myself: “Now that really fits in with Derrida’s thought, which does not admit of closure in time. Because d’ailleurs is a linguistic mark which means that one always has something to add, just as, in front of The Burial of the Count of Orgaz, in the Santo Tomé church, you feel like adding something else to the text you’ve read. And you feel like adding something all the time. I felt like making a connection precisely between this and space and the fact that, as I said very quickly a moment ago, when you are in the synagogue of Santa María la Blanca in Toledo, you don’t name it. Now, precisely, this synagogue is no longer a place of worship; therefore it escapes time, therefore it may not be nameable as a place in space. And I was wondering whether after all the most important was not identification with time rather than with space. It seems to me that one always clings more to space than to time, perhaps because one has visual landmarks in it and one has the possibility of naming it more easily than time. And yet perhaps one can’t name space if one can’t “adscribe” it, as Ricoeur would say, in time, if one can’t find a type of relation that identifies space with time. This is the first remark I made to myself. And I wondered whether, after all, this time that obsesses you so much, after which you run constantly, is not what is most important. The second remark—and I’ll keep to these two only (I had a third one,

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perhaps it will come as I keep going because, as I told you, I don’t want to structure my remarks)—turns around the problematic of identity that you had set up: ego fantasy, identity loss, perhaps we’re nothing but sums of differences . . . But still, don’t we need if only the illusion of an “essentialization”? Can one live without it? j. d.: The illusion of . . . ? p. c .: Of an essentialization, of the essentialization of the ego, or of the essentialization of the self. Besides, would this be a “quest for the inessential,” as Lacan would say? Can one still, even if one knows that one is heterogeneous and plural, even if one knows that one changes according to the gaze of the other, in a word the whole phenomenological problematic of the constitution of the self, is your quest at the end of the day really that of the deconstruction of identity, and wouldn’t it lie on the contrary in trying to ask ourselves whether there wouldn’t be something essential, an essence, behind, somewhere? Is that your image of the ego? Don’t you need at this moment an objectalization via this film, to objectalize yourself through the representation of a me-the other [ moi-l’autre] in this film? And when you say “it’s not me,” Barthes also said so while looking at a photo of himself as a child; perhaps it’s a part of you and perhaps it’s a part of this essentialization of you that you need, in any case that I myself feel that way. Being in this problematic of the plurality of identity through my contact with many foreign cultures, I say to myself: but can one nevertheless live with plurality only? Don’t we need the construction, illusory as it may be, of this essentialization? I’ll end, because it is related to what you said about the fact that, when I write, I erase the addressee’s singularity. But also when one takes the floor. When one speaks, one does nothing but construct the other, and therefore the other doesn’t exist as such or exists only through its construction. And so what is one doing in this case: is it a betrayal of the other and of oneself, or on the contrary is one helping the other to exist, or in the end aren’t we helping ourselves to exist through our construction of the other, which perhaps comes down to this essentialization? My apologies for sharing with you these very disjointed remarks. j. d.: We’re always constructing the other, that’s for sure, and sometimes for their own good, sometimes not. But first, I’d like to reassure you. There hasn’t been any contract between M. Soulages and myself, none at all. Supposing that some order were introduced in the discussion, it wasn’t meant to press-gang anybody whatsoever. I didn’t come here with an agenda, I didn’t prepare a thing. But the question is whether, when one tries to structure a discussion a little, there is some press-ganging. The limit

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is hard to pin down, but one can’t choose chaos and absolute improvisation either, you have to get the thing going. Then, each fends for themselves. In any case, I myself turned up here without any kind of plan or prior design. Now, sensitive to your questions, I’ll say this to you. First, about d’ailleurs, which you felt was not simply a question of space but means, in rhetoric, that “one is going to add something,” you know, the person who chose this film’s title was fully aware of this. It’s even the main meaning, as you may imagine. Then afterward I insisted on d’ailleurs in space, come from elsewhere, etc., but the interest of this untranslatable idiom (if there is something untranslatable, it’s the title, untranslatable into any language) is that it plays on d’ailleurs in the sense of “come from elsewhere” and then this rhetorical clause that announces either a digression or an addition. “Give me a bit more time; besides [d’ailleurs], I still have something to tell you.” The person, that is, the filmmaker, who chose this title hadn’t missed that. As regards the synagogue, which I didn’t name, I must confess that there are lots of things I didn’t name in this film, often out of an inability to name, sometimes by choice. In that case, if I didn’t name it, it’s because, basically, at the moment when I was speaking, it didn’t feel necessary to do so, perhaps I wasn’t even capable of doing so at that moment. And that this synagogue was no longer a place of worship, I’m learning it from you. Obviously you know Toledo much better than I do, I surrender, you know Toledo and this synagogue much better than I do. You know, I was just a passerby in this synagogue. I didn’t choose it either; Safaa Fathy chose this place, I was put there and I spoke. So I was quite incapable of saying anything certain whatsoever about this place, except that, whether disused or not, it was a place of worship. I didn’t know what was still done in it, but one isn’t in such a place without noticing that it was a place of worship, which nobody missed either. You can’t deny that it is a place of worship, even if no divine office is held in it any longer now. Then I agree with you to say that one can’t live without “the illusion of the essentialization of the ego” or “of the self.” Of course, this is even a bit like what I was saying: one clings to this, one looks for identity, one needs it. But between not to be able to live without the illusion of the essentialization of the ego and to say “there is an essential ego,” there’s a considerable difference. As soon as I say “illusion of the essentialization of the ego,” I admit, as the character says in the film, that the ego doesn’t exist, nobody has come across it anywhere. It is because there is no given, secure, stable, constituted ego that there is essentialization, which is a movement. “Essentialization”—the word is well chosen—is a movement to make essential that which isn’t so. And therefore, what was sketched in the film is something about the fact that the ego is always the theme of an

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attempt at essentialization, no doubt vital, but which is an attempt at essentialization where there’s no essence of the ego. Then of course, once this has been said, this means that the ego is not a given. To avail myself once more of your word, which is not mine, there’s an insatiable, interminable “quest” for an identity of the ego. p. c .: An “inessential quest” is what I’d said. j. d.: Inessential, in any case a quest, a quest for the ego, an essentializing quest for the ego where there’s no essential ego. Once this has been said, and on which we would easily agree, I admit that in my rather common, rather banal movement to constitute an identity to myself, without too many illusions, but with some illusion, of course, obviously, this film and a certain number of other things are a part of me. These are parts of me, both because they are bits of me, but when one says “a part of me,” this means that this part is only a part, that there is a partitioning. When one says that there’s no ego, that one must seek to essentialize it, this means that one seeks to totalize it; this is what’s not possible. There’s no totality, there’s an effort to totalize, an interminable effort to totalize an ego that is never totalizable. Then there are parts, one has parts. But without taking too much liberty with language, I’d say that what this films says, in French and in English, is naturally a part of me, undeniably, of this idiom that I can’t reappropriate and that the film shows to me, reflects to me, but also that this departs from me. This departs from me, that is to say, it proceeds from me, and proceeding from me, it separates from me. This is why it leaves a trace. I can die at any moment, but the trace remains there. The cut is there. It’s a part of me that is cut from me and that therefore departs from me in both senses of the term: it proceeds, it emanates from me but at the same time while separating, cutting, detaching itself from me. And therefore, this part of me, I gain it, I find it again narcissistically, but I lose it at the same time. This is what I wanted to say earlier: the loser takes it all [ qui perd gagne]. I gain it because, well, the little Narcissus may be happy to see himself there, etc., and at the same time I know that it’s not me, that it has departed from me and does without me. As I said somewhere in the film, I like things that don’t need me, the traces that depart from me. And—this is the definition of the trace—since the trace is one of the themes you chose to “press-gang” us all . . . The trace—it is the definition of its structure—is something that departs from an origin but that immediately separates from the origin and that remains as a trace insofar as it is separated from the tracing, from the tracing origin. This is where there is trace and where there’s the beginning of an archive. Not any trace is an archive, but there’s no archive without trace. Therefore, the trace always departs from me and separates. When I

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say “remains” [reste], the trace departs from its origin, myself for example, and remains as a trace, this doesn’t mean that it is so substantially, essentially, or existentially. In texts about which I can’t speak here and now, I attempt to subtract the semantics of the word “reste” from ontology, that is to say, the remainder is not a modification of “being” in the sense of essence, substance, existence. The trace remains, but this doesn’t mean that it is, substantially, or that it is essential, but it is the question of remaindering [restance] that interests me, remaindering of the trace beyond any ontology. But that would probably take us too far. p. c.: Wouldn’t the remainder be an objectalization, precisely? j. d .: No, objectalization is already a determination of the remainder that supposes the notion of object. You see, here, if we had the time, we have a lot of time but still we don’t have an inordinate amount of time, we’d have to see that not every remainder has the form of an object. First, the object is a determination of being; there is being as object, being as subject, and objectalization is one of the forms of the remainder, object as something that is at once in front of me, thrown in front of me, substantially, etc. But not every being, every entity [étant] is an object, and not every trace is objectivizing or objectalizing. So when I speak of a trace that departs from me, it’s not necessarily in the form of the object. And besides, even in what we’re speaking of here, that is to say, the iconic, the image, visual or other, I wouldn’t hasten to say of an image that it is an object. I can see very well why it’s tempting to say of an image that it is an object, but there’s perhaps in the sense of the word “image,” in the heritage of the thought about the image, something that resists objectivization and objectalization, and here I admit that I can’t deal with that problem very quickly. But I myself wouldn’t use this word “objectalization” in any case without caution. Besides, if you seek to analyze what my pleasure or my desire may be as I’m watching these images that depart from me, these traces that depart from me, if it was really objectality, I would derive no pleasure from them, it wouldn’t interest me that much. This means therefore that in these remainders or traces of myself that are there on the image there’s something else than an object. Even objects, what we call the “objects,” even the tiled floor, the tiled floor of which I spoke earlier, I spoke of my mother’s piano, and a thousand other objects, there are plenty of objects, these are not objects. It’s obvious that the investment is such that their objectivization is very limited; it is overflowed by some . . . what should I call it?, by some sense, by something desirable, by some intentionality, intentional poles that can’t be reduced to objectalization if the word “object” is taken seriously, rigorously. Now, “object” can be made to say a lot of things. One can say if one wants, it’s a question of terminology,

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that traces are types of objects. I myself would rather say the opposite, that objects are types of traces. mic hè le kat z : 12 My impression is that you’re putting yourself in danger, in a way, and I admire this because it’s very difficult to put oneself in danger. I know your film, I’ve even recorded it, I worked on you, you know that, since I wrote a book, and therefore it was with you that I worked on your texts in “Circumfession,” the audiotape,13 the film, etc. It’s my impression tonight that you’re putting yourself in danger, here, whereas when one reads your books, one doesn’t have this impression. And that you’re manufacturing some future. So I’d like to remind people of this book, Archive Fever, which is made up of an exergue, a preamble, a foreword, then one hundred and fifty pages of text, and which ends with a postscript on the Gradiva. This is the point I’d like to make tonight, for it seems to me that this film is something about which I’m going to try and say in very few words what I’m convinced of, which is that you don’t resemble Hanold in Jensen’s Gradiva (I suppose everybody has read Jensen’s Gradiva). He’s absolutely convinced that, retracing the steps of this woman, of whom sculptures are known, she puts her sandal back on, etc., well, there’s a whole aesthetic of the Gradiva in art and obviously in Freud’s text. He understands everything; Hanold is an archaeologist, he’s going to turn it into archaeology, he’s going to retrace the steps of somebody from whom he’s absolutely sure to retrieve everything, including the trace of the steps of Jensen’s Gradiva in the sand, on earth. Then, the trace; I’ll take the opportunity of recalling an important German translation: “abdrückt” means that the trace has been “drawn far from.” For me, by definition, the trace is not an object, because precisely it says something about the absence of the person who has been here before and is no longer here. It is therefore the very object of disappearance. As you know, I’ve already worked on that here. Therefore, putting Jacques Derrida in danger would be to make an audience believe that precisely he is like Hanold and that he’s going to believe in his character so much that he’ll end up doing like Hanold, he’ll have some sort of delirium and he’ll feel at one [ faire corps] with his desire to make footsteps, his footsteps, appear. So, there you are, this is just a way of picking up on the question about the object, the trace, and the subject Derrida who looks at himself looking, speaking, seeing, etc., in a film. I still have questions: what is a portrait? Perhaps this is what we’re doing here, I wonder . . . For this film, since we’re speaking about the film, I had the feeling that the clothes, the figure that you were introducing, is a figure that very often plays this danger of identification for the spectator, and especially if one knows you. One can very well see the criticism, which is of no interest. And why it is

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of no interest? Because in fact the whole question of archiving (a film is an archiving, after all) is related precisely to the cut, but to the cut of what? It’s not the cut between the image and sound, of course, I don’t think so; it’s the cut between the impression and the imprint [empreinte]. This is what you say in Archive Fever and what I found extremely structuring for my own work as a painter. Precisely that one is always in danger, when one works on the imprint, of becoming mad, of doing like Hanold. And in a film, especially if one plays in it, one still also takes this risk. Then, in that film, how to separate . . . I know I’m not capable of answering this, and it is related to the question: is it possible to exhibit a secret insofar as it remains a secret? I myself am not a filmmaker, so I’m not capable of speaking about it, since a film is an imprint too. It is made of film [ pellicule], film is an imprinted object, etc. But I keep this question that seems to me to be fundamental for this whole conversation about the archive, because it was somehow the archive that also brought us together tonight. I’ll stop here, I have the impression of having merely swept over some little . . . j. d .: I believe, like you, that everything can be brought back to—but we can’t just do it like that very quickly tonight—the cut between the impression and the imprint, or the imprinted, the first cut. And this also goes for the film, this goes for the Gradiva. The first cut between the imprint, the singular instant of the supposedly singular presence of impression, and, almost glued to impression, the imprint that is left and is yet already no longer the impression. The first cut is there, and all the others follow from it. Then, having said that, agreed, I’m not sure that I’m putting myself in danger merely there or that I’m putting myself in danger there more than in books, as you said. First, of course, there is danger, that’s why I resisted. I said earlier that I found it very hard to do it, because I felt that as dangerous. But at the same time, as is said in the film, I was protecting myself as I was exposing myself. I did both at the same time: I exposed myself while putting myself in danger, to use your expression again, but as I was putting myself in danger, I constructed or attempted to construct an immunity against danger. I wrote a lot about the auto-immune, this movement whereby at once one exposes oneself to danger while protecting oneself against danger and one destroys one’s own protections. On the one hand, one destroys one’s own protections, but at the same time one constructs others. And the passage, the sequence on resistance in which it is said somewhere: “At the very moment of transgression, that is to say, of dangerous transgression, I do something dangerous, I already construct a resistance, I already construct a barrier [digue],” well, in this film, there’s the movement of exposition to danger and then protection mechanisms. I don’t believe that this is

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more the case in the film and that it’s less the case in books. One could show that in writing, differently of course, there are also processes of resistance at once in vulnerability, in the vulnerable exposition to danger, and that in protection itself there is auto-immunity, that is to say, some secretion of selfdestruction, both at the same time. While exposing myself to danger, I protect myself, and while protecting I destroy my protections. This is, according to me, an irreducible, invincible, and insuperable law, and this goes for books as well as for films, as well as for life and for existence in general. As for Archive Fever, what most generous words you said about it (although I’m not sure whether the gesture that consists in distinguishing me from Hanold can be called “generous”), in any case I remembered an anecdote as you were citing the preamble. Once, in the United States, I was invited to speak about this book that had just appeared and the American colleague said to me: “But what is this book that begins with a foreword, goes on with an introduction, then with a preface, then with preliminaries, and in the end with a thesis and a postscript?” He said to me that it was constructed very badly; you mustn’t do that in academe. Well, this interminable preliminary, in a book (and I could take other examples of books by me that proceed in the same way) is also a defense through which, precisely—to come back to the previous question of the essentialization of the ego—I at once protect myself and expose myself, which means that where I try to constitute an identity in order to protect myself against scattering, chaos, ruin, precariousness, etc., I know that I survive, that I protect myself in doing that, that is to say, in not constituting this ego, in indefinitely postponing reaching the goal, which would be to constitute the ego. Because, as is said in the film, when the ego is threatened, it’s not good, it is in danger, but if I arrived at a stable, solid ego, at an essential ego, at a reassuring identity, that would be death. Or delirium. So, naturally, I protect myself against dislocation by projecting some ego, but by projecting indefinitely, because I know that if one day I manage to do so, it will be the end. Nothing is deadlier than identity or the ego. The movement here is still of the auto-immune kind, with a protection of the self that is hard to distinguish from the destruction of the self. gé r ard hub e rt : I’d just like to put questions about the film’s political aspect. We spoke about manufacturing of the future. You speak about Mandela, Tutu, about your own political experience too at some point, confinement, etc. My question is: doesn’t one get the last word on the political at some point? What I mean is that one has the feeling that you bet on the after-effect [après-coup], on the fact that there will be a deferred effect after this speech, and that in fact if there is writing, it’s in the project . . . one can’t

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really speak of a project, but in any case in the inscription of a trace, of a kind of “arche-writing,” of a history that would preserve the secret (this is what you said ) at a time when precisely it’s being written today not only by showing the secret but actually by violating it. One could cite many examples, many notions that you mentioned at one point or another, that are currently most present in political debate—I mean, fundamental political debate—at world level. And so one has the feeling there that if there is writing, because personally I have a reading of your work, which I published, in which it seems to me there’s more a reading of a fundamental reading, but if there’s really writing, in the sense of arche-writing this time, then it seems to me that it’s on that bet that it’s indeed possible to write a history that preserves this secret. But precisely, on the fringes of this history that we’re living today in which this secret is systematically pointed at, violated, nonexistent as such. j. d.: A couple of remarks in the face of what are huge questions, obviously. Of course, between what was said earlier about the cut and secret, there’s an obvious relation. “Secret” means “cut,” se cernere means “to separate.” Then I’m not a “partisan” of the cut or the secret as separation. The word “secret” itself, in French, that is to say, in Latin, is related to the semantics of the cut, of interruption, but there are languages in which the secret is not said in the same way. In Greek, it has to do with “crypt,” for example; there the secret has no connection with the cut. Same thing in German: Geheimnis. Therefore, the link between secret and cut also belongs to an etymological, linguistic filiation that doesn’t hold true everywhere in the same way. But on the other hand, there’s certainly in the text—one could pick up a thousand signs of it—a political thematics, let’s say, whether of hospitality, of the secret, of the responsibility of the political which lies in practicing self-analysis, whether of sexual difference. At a push, one could say that the film is political, politicized through and through. But to limit ourselves, as you seemingly wish to do, to the time strictly allocated to us on this topic, it’s true that never has the question of the secret intersected the political question as much as today. It has always intersected it, but it does so today in a most singular way. And not at all in the guise of the violation of the secret by citizenship, by totalitarianism, etc., but in the guise of the violation of the secret by technology, computing, all that in the most democratic societies jeopardizes the secret, not in the usual policing or torturing guises, but in soft, technical guises. This is one of today’s political stakes and I believe that, naturally, all those who are responsible for archiving, as is the case in this place, experience this thing. Where must the public archive stop? Where must the gathering, the ordering and public availability of

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the archive stop? There where formerly the public and national archive used to occupy an extremely limited territory, nowadays everything can be archived. I remember a symposium we’d organized at the Collège international de philosophie with archivists from the Archives nationales14 who explained to us not only what their problems were, but what problems were posed by their new power to record anything and everything; they didn’t know where to stop. One can duplicate the nation’s life, place cameras and tape-recorders everywhere, and therefore record a country’s life in its entirety—to speak about national archives, but there are also international archives. I know that you’re interested in psychoanalysis, and more than that. The question of the secret isn’t necessarily a question of professional confidentiality [secret]. Between the doctor’s and the lawyer’s professional confidentiality, the classical secret, and the psychoanalyst’s professional confidentiality, there’s an abyss; it’s another secret. Where is archiving going to stop? It’s a political problem, the problem of knowing what psychoanalytical institutions will become in a democracy; it’s a major political problem, and this is again a question of secret, of cut, of archiving, of accountability, of civic responsibility. Well, to come back to the film, since the film often deals with psychoanalysis, self-analysis, consciousness and the unconscious, all that is said in it in the political code of different topics, to which I won’t come back, also concerns, since psychoanalysis is everywhere in this film, the question of the politics of psychoanalysis, of the secret, not only of psychoanalysis as institution, but of all that concerns the unconscious, what’s called the “unconscious,” and the history of psychoanalysis. I don’t know if I’ve answered your question. There are also time constraints; one could speak a long time . . . j.- m. r.: I would have liked you to enlarge on the question of the trace and of the archive; the trace isn’t yet some archive? j. d.: The concept of trace is so general that I can’t see its limits, actually. Very hastily put, a very long time ago, I’d tried to elaborate a concept of the trace that would precisely be without limits, that is to say, well beyond what’s called “writing” or inscription on a known support. For me, there’s a trace as soon as there’s experience, that is to say, reference to some other, difference, reference to something else, etc. So wherever there is experience, there is some trace, and there’s no experience without trace. So everything is trace, not only what I write on paper or what I record on a machine, but when I do that, such and such a gesture, there is trace. There’s a wake [ du sillage], retention, protention, and therefore some relation to some other, to the other, or to another moment, another place, some reference to the other, there is some trace. The concept of trace, I say this in a word because

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this would call for long developments, has no limits; it’s coextensive with the experience of the living in general. Not only of the living human but of the living in general. Animals trace, every living being traces. Against this general, limitless backdrop, what is called “the archive” should this word have a strict, delimitable meaning, naturally supposes some trace; there’s no archive without trace, but not every trace is an archive insofar as the archive supposes not only a trace, but that the trace be appropriated, controlled, organized, politically under control. There are no archives without a power of capitalization or of monopoly, of quasi-monopoly, of gathering of statutory traces recognized as traces. In other words, there are no archives without political power. j.- m. r .: It’s a gesture of power. j. d .: It’s a gesture of power. This is what I tried to recall at the beginning of Archive Fever by referring to the arkheion in Greece, the place where those who had the power to deposit and have at their disposal accounts or documents that had a political interest for the city, or a national interest, one could say nowadays. And this power had a statutory authority not only to choose what had to be kept or not, but also to localize it in a place, to classify it, interpret it, hierarchize it. All of that supposes a certain amount of operations of power, supposes hierarchy, hegemony. And I would say that this is still the case nowadays. The management, the constitution of an archive doesn’t necessarily have the face of totalitarian violence, of censorship, but even in so-called democratic countries, obviously, as soon as there’s an institution, there are appointed persons who have a recognized competence to control the archive, that is to say, to choose what’s kept and what’s not kept, that to which access is given, to whom access is given, when and how, etc. There are no archives without this quasi-state-controlled, in any case legitimate and political organization of the material thus informed, that is to say, to which one gives form precisely through interpretation and classification, hierarchization, selection. There are no archives without destruction; one chooses, one can’t keep everything. Where everything would be kept, there would be no archives. The archive begins with selection, and this selection is a violence. There’s no archive without violence. This violence is not simply political in the sense of waiting for a State to designate officials with a recognized competence. No, this archivation already takes place in the unconscious. In a single person, there’s what memory, the economy of memory, keeps or doesn’t keep, destroys or doesn’t destroy, represses in one way or another. There’s therefore constitution of mnemonic archives where there’s economy, selection of traces, interpretation, recollection, etc. Therefore, the archive begins where the trace is organized, is selected, which supposes that

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the trace is always finite. This is what is said at the beginning of the film; finitude, finiteness. I come back to this level of arche-writing, absolutely fundamental to the trace. The trace is finite. What does this mean? This means that a trace can always be erased. I posit in De la grammatologie (Of Grammatology)15 that a trace that couldn’t be erased, that might never be erased, wouldn’t be a trace. Therefore, a trace can be erased. This belongs to its structure. It can be lost. Besides, this is why one wants to keep them, because they can be lost. It is a property of the trace that it can be erased, lost, forgotten, destroyed. That’s its finitude. And it is because it’s a property of the trace to be finite that there is some archive, that is to say, one makes efforts to select, to keep, to destroy certain archives or allow certain traces to die, to allow some traces to disappear and keep others, because one knows that traces are finite. And an archive is always finite, always destructible, as you know very well. No matter what progress can be made in the storage and the preservation of archives, we know that it’s the property of any archive to be able to be destroyed. There are no indestructible archives, this doesn’t exist, it can’t exist. And so archiving is a work done in order to organize the relative survival, as long as possible, in given political or legal conditions, of certain purposely chosen traces. There’s always a purpose, there’s always some evaluation. In other words, the best-intentioned, most liberal, or the most generous archivists evaluate what deserves being kept. Whether they make mistakes or not hardly matters, they always evaluate. It is this evaluation of traces, with authority and competence, with a supposed authority and competence, that distinguishes the archive from the trace. f. s.: How do you articulate this work of the archive and what you otherwise call the archive “drive”? j. d.: The archive drive is an irresistible movement not only to keep traces, but to master traces, to interpret them. As soon as I have an experience, I have an experience of the trace. As soon as I have an experience of the trace, I can’t repress the movement to interpret the traces, select them, keep them or not, therefore to constitute the traces into archives and to choose what I want to choose. Active and selective interpretation. It is interpretation itself. As Nietzsche used to say, an interpretation is always active and selective. When one interprets, one doesn’t find a meaning that is there, given, and that one would only have to elucidate or unveil; one imposes meaning, one constitutes meaning. The archive drive is an irresistible drive in order to interpret traces, to give them meaning, and to prefer this or that trace to another. Therefore, to prefer to forget is not only to prefer to keep. The archive, as I say somewhere, is not a matter of the past, it’s a matter of the future [avenir].16 The archive doesn’t deal with the past, it deals with the

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future. I violently select what I consider has to be repeated, kept, repeated in the future. It’s a gesture of great violence. The archivist is not somebody who keeps, he’s somebody who destroys. He keeps a lot, but if he didn’t destroy, he would keep nothing. He’s somebody who claims to know what must be destroyed, or let’s say what must be scrapped. The archive drive is what one does all the time in life: what is one going to scrap and what is one going to repeat? Forgive me for citing myself once more, for citing the character in the film, but it’s to save time. When in the end the character says “eternal return,” a well-known Nietzschean motif, he says: “I’d like to keep everything, begin everything again.” And then, at some point, a small difference appears, it’s the future. “I want to keep everything, repeat everything, the good and the bad, except what, even if it was good, keeps something bad in store for the future, can produce something bad in the future. I don’t curse it but I don’t bless it.” This means that I’d like to destroy it, obviously. When discreetly he says, “I don’t curse but I don’t bless,” this means “If I could make sure it didn’t happen,” it’s obvious. I don’t like that, so I’d like not to keep it. The archivist’s job is a terrible job. The archive drive is a terrible drive. It’s a destructive drive, unlike the conservative image one has of it. Archivists are fierce conservatives who claim to know what must be destroyed and who, in general, are rather good at it. And one will never know, by definition, what they were right to destroy, because they destroy so well that it leaves no trace! But one knows that they will have destroyed, that they will have destroyed God knows what. It could be artworks. This filtering of the archive is a terrifying thing because it doesn’t merely concern public documents, television and radio archives or official documents; it concerns artworks, for example. There are artworks that survive, others that don’t survive. There are some that go to museums, and there are others that are forgotten, that are destroyed. There are literary works lacking genius that remain, and one suspects that there might have been literary, artistic, pictorial, cinematographic works of genius perhaps that haven’t been archived, whose archive, for one reason or another, has not been or has even been destroyed. And, by definition, one will never know since it has been destroyed. In my profession I question canonical corpuses, there’s Plato, Descartes, Kant . . . And I say to myself that there are lots of little ones around them who were perhaps greater geniuses than that, and then God knows what happened, which led society to “suicide” them, which is to say that that disappeared. Naturally one can’t fail to factor in, ignore, or forget this possibility, which is the condition. It’s an evil but at the same time it’s not necessarily an evil because, without this selectivity, there would remain nothing at all. In order for some masterpieces to sur-

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vive, God knows how many other works had to be put to death. Then, this selective archiving, which is always at once beneficial and monstrous, both at once, is a chance and a threat; this doesn’t only hold true in social and political institutions, this holds true in the unconscious, this is what happens in the unconscious, this is what happens within us. One keeps loads of things, one selects and one destroys. In order to keep, precisely, one destroys, one allows many things to be destroyed; this is the condition of a finite psyche, which runs on life and death, which runs on killing as much as on securing survival. In order to secure survival, one must kill. That’s what the archive, archive fever, is about. serge tisseron: A question worries me that your sensitivity to the unconscious makes me pluck up the courage to ask you. I’d like to return to the tiled floor, because it seems to me that you did us a great honor in talking to us about this tile that somehow caught your gaze or your thought during those nineteen years you spent in that house. I was thinking about this tile business when Patrick Charaudeau mentioned the fact that you were protecting yourself a little. Immediately, obviously, I thought of the expression se tenir à carreau (to lie low). I begin with a bad pun, but I couldn’t help thinking about it. What seemed to me more interesting, rather than se tenir à carreau, was to reflect on what you evoked for us in the way not so much of lying low but of keeping close to the tile [vous tenir au carreau]. This seems to me to be extremely interesting because, in the end, you evoked an image, the image of what you saw, a visual image of this tiled floor, of this tile that wasn’t straight among the others. This introduces my first question: the place of the visual in your thought. There are texts of yours that struck me through the importance of the way in which you go out visually to meet something. I have especially two texts in mind, the preface17 to L’Écorce et le noyau (The Shell and the Kernel) by Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, in which you make visible the most complicated concept of crypt in Nicolas Abraham. And then this text on the fort/da game as narrated by Freud, I think it’s in “Le facteur de la vérité,”18 where again, starting with the words used by Freud, you show that the way in which one sees the text in general while reading isn’t the only way it can be seen. I had found that text most enlightening, like an invitation to visualize Freud’s text otherwise as I was reading it. But at other times, when I read texts by you, I don’t see anything anymore. So there you are, my question was to kind of know what place you yourself give to visualization in your thought. This is something that grabs you at some point, that you follow for some time, that you’re wary of, that you locate? And once again, since you were speaking about the way you focused on the tile, I feel authorized to ask you this. My second question,

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which follows from it, is that I was struck by the fact that when you spoke about that tile, you made the gesture of setting it straight. This is no small thing . . . All the more so since you work on deconstruction. So for nineteen years, if one may say so, you’ve made the mental gesture of setting something straight, therefore in order, constructed, and then one knows how much you worked on deconstruction. But there’s still this prelude, or these prolegomena or this preface, depending on the word one chooses, where you set things straight mentally. Then, my second question bears on the place, now no longer of the image in your thought, but of the gesture: what place do you grant to gestures and movements, to kinesis, to use a somewhat specialized word, not in your theory but in the organization of your thought? j. d .: In order to both save time and still behave somewhat indecently, since I won’t really be able to reply as well as I should and as I’d like to, I’m going to direct you toward other texts of mine. On the question of seeing and not seeing, I wrote what you said, but I also wrote a very long text on the blind, Memoirs of the Blind. What fascinates me is not only seeing [ le voir], but “not seeing.” Blindness [cécité ] as a condition of visibility, painting, and drawing. I’ve always been interested in the question of sight, in philosophy too, not only in visual arts. But I’m not in favor of seeing [ le voir] against blindness [aveuglement], it’s more complicated. Blindness is the condition of seeing in a whole tradition that I try to analyze in Memoirs of the Blind among other places. So now, the tiled floor and the tiles. Here as well, forgive me, I explained myself better than I could do now in the small book Tourner les mots, in which I say a bit more about it. An anecdote concerning the story of this film: it so happens that, at some point, I asked Safaa Fathy to film that. She went to Algeria alone, I indicated a certain number of places to her and I told her: “I’d really like to have an image of this tiled floor, which I’ve often thought about a lot.” Besides, I remember that before Safaa Fathy’s film there had been a film project with Nurith Aviv19 and an American friend, Samuel Weber, in which there was some talk about making a film, which never got made, during which I would have returned to Algeria, with both these friends, and during which, in “sites of memory”20 of my childhood, as they say, I would have improvised political considerations on Algeria. In anticipation of this experience, which for various reasons we never carried through to its completion, I’d improvised in front of a tape recorder, for them, a meditation on this tile. So that was already on my mind. And I said to Safaa Fathy that it was necessary to go and film this tile. Then, when the film was being edited, Safaa Fathy said to me: “We need a text, it would be good if you came to the studio and recorded something about the tile.” This is the only time, I think, when I

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went to the studio. So I went to the studio, she’s here and can testify to this, and I improvised on this tile for twenty minutes. They kept nothing from it. That’s the cruelty of archiving! They destroyed ninety-nine percent of what they filmed! So all of that is lost. But to return to your question, among the things I recall in the little text I wrote about the tile in the book Tourner les mots, I say exactly what you want to make me say, namely, that I spent my time putting it right. I even quote Hamlet in the famous tirade where he says: “Why was I born here?” When he speaks about “time out of joint,”21 he says: “I was born to set it right,”22 that is to say, to put right, to repair the injustice done to my father. So the idea of repairing something that was twisted. And in the passage in the book, I said that I had the impression that something wasn’t going well in this house and I wanted to put it right, to put it back in its place. There was something twisted. But this isn’t only a question of visibility. It was that whenever I walked, I could feel the edge in my body. It wasn’t merely due to seeing the tile so badly out of place, badly laid; it was that, to come back to kinesis, my step was as if caught by that tile. “It doesn’t work [ ça ne marche pas], I can’t walk well [ je ne marche pas bien], one should . . . not only with the hands, but also with the feet, put it right.” So it is in the gesture, not only in speech but in the body’s gesture, that I felt this . . . what shall I call it? this dislocation, this “disjointure,” and that I felt like putting it back in order. Then, obviously, one can consider that deconstruction consists precisely in putting tiles the wrong way, well, in disturbing an order. But it also consists in asking oneself what is not going right in order, what in order is a disorder, what disorder is hidden in order. Deconstruction doesn’t merely consist in putting back in order, but it is interested in disorder. Hence the interest, the painful, fascinated, etc., interest I took in this badly laid tile, and the interest of a deconstructive style in badly adjusted things, where they are solidified. You know, my parents bought this house that they finished paying for on the eve of Independence, and they left when my father had just finished paying the last installment. I don’t know whether these tiles were there before they bought this house in 1933, but I suppose that my parents are not the ones who had these tiles laid; anyway it doesn’t matter. In any case, this disorder . . . I’m looking for the word . . . what wasn’t right there was stabilized for ever, and I’m sure that it’s still there. I went back to this house in 1971, in 1984; the tile was still there like that. And I suppose that the successors who live in this house, whom I know in fact, aren’t going to move it. Therefore, there’s a disorder that has been stabilized for ever.23 Well, deconstruction is interested in those things that don’t work and are sealed in order. As you know, these are not only questions of politics, law, etc.; these are questions related to

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the unconscious, disorders that are sealed. Tiles aren’t stones, they’re not in nature. Masons were given those geometrically designed tiles, and one day, in what was a history, they laid the tile badly. This is a history. Therefore, deconstruction is interested in what, historically, has instituted an order in which a disorder sealed itself in a way and was fixed. I was told—a hypothesis, I don’t know what to think of it but it is interesting—that in fact, among some Algerian craftsmen, it’s done on purpose, that is to say, it’s a signature, they must leave a little thingy, a sign of something that isn’t right in order to keep the memory. And there would be no memory without that. If really there was no disorder, no scar in memory, the scar that the film is about, the mark of a wound, of something that isn’t right, one wouldn’t remember. One knows full well that the condition of memory is something that isn’t right. mari e - jos é m o n dz ai n : This tradition came from the art of weavers and of carpets where some defect always had to be worked into geometrical patterns. These tiles on the floor, I know them well, were kinds of mazes and tracery, where a defect [malfaçon], a nonadjustment could be seen straightaway. It was deliberate, out of submission to the hadith that says that the craftsman mustn’t make a perfect, completely unified object because there’s a pride of totalization in the work that threatens not only transcendence but in fact life also. The work’s life comes precisely from the fact that there’s this defect. It’s not used as a signature, it’s the sign of life. j. d .: This ties in with what I was saying earlier: where there’s totalization and perfection, this is death. If I really arrive at a total ego without a crack, without a break, and without disorder, without “malplacement,” this is death. m.- j . m.: This is death. Therefore, deconstruction and putting back in place are constantly played out between asphyxia and breathing. At some point, you said: “iconic or sound image,” as if there were a sound image and an iconic image, and that basically the film’s object gave an image that was an iconic image and a sound image. I wanted to ask if still there wasn’t a big difference between the iconic image, that is to say, the field of the visible, and the sound image, which is related to the order of the voice . . . it’s your voice. Can you say that you don’t recognize yourself in the film’s sound line? Isn’t there something of the order of an identification? This film is a fragment, it resembles you; it resembles you precisely because you, the theorist of the fragment, recognize yourself in something that resembles you as not being you since, as it doesn’t resemble you, it resembles you! But the order of the voice is much more difficult to take apart in the register of

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non-identification. How can one say: “I’m not the one who’s speaking.” I heard you, I can still hear you, it’s always you . . . j. d.: For you, yes. m.- j. m.: But to whom is this addressed? This circulation is such that the voice subtends or supports something that is perhaps close to what you were trying to locate earlier as an identificatory landmark, and that has to do with the voice. Something is established that is more enigmatic in the order of identity, namely, that you answer all the same, you’re obliged to answer for what you say in this film. All of that is very present in Voice and Phenomenon. I’ll add one more thing. There’s a moment at the end of the film that disturbed me, that we spoke about earlier as well: it’s this address and this betrayal; in the end, one misses one’s destination, one betrays the addressee. And here, obviously, I can just see this whole way the world has of cracking under your pen and in your voice, in order to make sense. However, I can also hear another voice, that of Jean-Luc Godard. Godard made a short film, called Changer d’images, in which he speaks about images and in which he lets himself be filmed, including in his nakedness. He even lets himself be flogged . . . The film is 9 minutes and 30 seconds long. There’s a very beautiful, very strange moment. There’s a moment when he says: “The image is something that resists change. People ask me if they can change images and show images that would show change. The image resists change. What changes is between images. And the history of images is the history of texts.” One can hear his voice saying: “Every text is a sending, an address; every text is a letter, a letter to the beloved. When Marx and Engels write Capital, it’s a text to the beloved. When Saint Teresa of Ávila writes, it’s a text to the beloved,” etc. He’s interrogating the amorous character of the writing of texts and of the commitment of the image. A little further, he wonders about the executioner and the victim, the political question: “If I made a film that truly narrates what happens between an executioner and a victim, I would take a love letter by the executioner to his fiancée and a love letter by the victim to his fiancée, and I would intertwine the letters and all of a sudden it would make a film, it would make images.” Does the sending always miss its addressee? j. d.: I didn’t say that. m.- j. m .: There’s this betrayal, this betrayal in the address that is a little bit like our destiny nonetheless. There are two really very different positions here. j . d . : Thank you, first of all, for all these remarks and then for the difficult questions. I’ll begin with the end. If there’s one thing, among all the

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things that Godard has done and that I would be incapable of doing, it is to let myself be filmed, flogged naked for ten minutes . . . I draw the line here. I may well be living dangerously, but I’ll never do that! And not only out of a sense of modesty, not only because I would be ashamed (this would be the case), but not only for this reason, but because I would be afraid of the sin of exhibition, of exhibitionist self-complacency rather than of the immodesty of showing myself. So here, really, an absolute resistance in this respect. As to the other aspect of Godard’s film and what is said in it, I like him am persuaded that Capital is a love letter. Obviously, there are few of us, there are not many of us who think that. I do believe, like him, that every text is in a way a love letter, but I didn’t say for all that that every sending missed its destination. Whenever I could explain myself at greater length on this topic, in particular in a discussion of Lacan, the “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter,’” I took great care to insist on the difference between “a letter doesn’t arrive at its destination, misses its destination,” and “a letter may always not arrive at its destination, it may not arrive.”24 And there would be no letter without this possibility of not arriving. Which doesn’t mean that it doesn’t arrive. It may not arrive, that’s its structure as a letter or as a sending. And since it may not arrive, since I let a letter be able not to arrive, there’s a possible betrayal here. Not necessarily a betrayal—a possible perjury and a possible betrayal. Now, let every letter be a demand for love or a declaration of love, an amorous sending, there is betrayal because of such and such an amorous sending, there’s always a possible betrayal, interminably, as an interminable possible; there is betrayal because the male or female addressee of this letter not only is not absolutely determinable beforehand, and as soon as there is trace, it can fall into anybody’s hands, but also because I imply, when I write, that this letter will constitute or institute the addressee. Only the one, male or female, who will receive this letter, who will understand this letter, and who therefore doesn’t yet exist, in a way, will be the male or female addressee of my love gesture, of my offer of or demand for love, will be the male or female addressee of this love. I write not only because I write to somebody I know or whom I’m supposed to know, but I try to institute, through the inscription of a new trace, which must be an event, the male or female addressee, in other words, the other. This may be somebody I know, but this somebody whom I know will be the male or female addressee of this letter only by receiving it, by accepting it, by countersigning it, as it were. So this means that at the moment when I write, the other doesn’t exist, in a way, not yet. And here, there’s betrayal because it’s as if I was saying: “there, I set a condition for

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my demand for love, my offer of love, to reach the other; it is that the other be able to receive, read, decipher, and therefore countersign this sending.” And that’s a violence, what we cannot but feel as a violence. And it’s for this violence that I ask for forgiveness, this is where there’s always a possible betrayal. Having said this, I come back to the first question on the voice and on “recognizing one’s voice or answering for what one says.” I agree with you: probably, the voice is what is most identifying or identifiable for others, that it’s in the voice that one recognizes me best probably, more than in the image and in what I say. But not for me, because, as you no doubt know, you must have experienced it, like me and like everybody, if there’s one thing that one can’t reappropriate, even less than the image, it is one’s own voice. One’s voice is something that one can’t recognize, that one can’t reappropriate. Then, I’m persuaded that people recognize me better by my voice than by other signs or other features, in particular visual, gestural, or kinetic, but I myself can’t recognize my own voice. In any case, this is the least reappropriable of all. The violence of expropriation has more to do with the voice than with the rest. And not only in the film. Although in this film my voice wasn’t unbearable to me. But my voice is often nonrecognizable and unbearable to me when, unlike in the film, in fact, I listen to recordings in which I speak in a lecturing situation, in a teaching situation, in which I speak with authority. Not only do I not recognize my voice, but I’m horrified by the pied-noir accent, by authority, etc. In this film, it’s toned down, fortunately. Nevertheless, I can’t say that I recognize myself in my voice. Now, to recognize or not to recognize oneself in one’s voice is one thing, and I say that one doesn’t recognize oneself in one’s voice, but to answer for what one says is another thing. I can, without recognizing myself in my voice, answer for what I say, that is to say, all in all, feel not only responsible for the improvisations, but capable virtually of explaining and justifying what I say. But here, to answer for the contents of what one says isn’t the same thing as to recognize one’s voice. So, here, for everything that I’ve said, if I was given the time to do so, I could answer for it and say: “That’s what I meant.” I could explain more, justify more. I said nothing in this film about which I could say that I don’t answer for it, that I disapprove of it, that I disclaim it, not at all. But that’s the contents, the philosophical, discursive contents, it’s not the voice. The voice is indeed what’s most intimate, most private; this is why probably the most intrusive penetration of one’s intimacy goes through the voice more than through what I say or through the image, of course. But this intimacy, the other has access to it, I don’t. I don’t recognize myself in there.

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f. s.: I’m getting a signal that our time is up. First of all, thank you very much. Second, there are still a thousand things, a thousand questions, so see you soon, I hope. We’ll gather round and raise a glass and have a bite to eat. Thank you very much for bringing this year to a close. j. d .: Thank you for your helpful and generous patience.

To Illustrate, He Said

Originally published as “To Illustrate, He Said . . . ,” trans. Peggy Kamuf, in Psyche: Inventions of the Other, 2 vols., ed. Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth  G. Rottenberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), 1:90–93. Copyright © 1987, 2003 by Éditions Galilée. English translation © 2007 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. Used with the permission of Stanford University Press, www.sup.org. [“Illustrer, dit-il . . . ,” first published in 1979 by the GeorgesPompidou Center (Paris: Musée national d’art moderne) to accompany an exhibition about Éperons. Les styles de Nietzsche; reprinted in Psyché. Inventions de l’autre (Paris: Galilée, 1987), 105–8, and in Psyché. Inventions de l’autre, vol. 1 (Paris: Galilée, 1998), 105–8.] Other translations: Brazilian, Spanish, Italian. “This text,” writes Jacques Derrida, “was published in 1979 by the Centre Georges-Pompidou (Musée national d’art moderne) to accompany a joint exhibition in Ateliers Aujourd’hui of some manuscripts of my book Éperons: Les styles de Nietzsche and pen-and-ink drawings by François Loubrieu, meant, as he says, to ‘illustrate’ the book.” Born in 1948, François Loubrieu is a French illustrator, painter, and costume designer. He is best known for his contributions to the abovementioned exhibition on Éperons.

In the beginning, that is the fiction, there was writing. That is to say, a fable, some writing. The other reads and, therefore, writes in his turn, according to his turn. À partir you understand, that is, beginning from / departing from his/her reading: by letting it also become distant or lost, by going elsewhere. In the best of cases, there will always be more to say, objections [ à redire], the

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Figure 1: François Loubrieu, Untitled, 1979, ink drawing.

process of the two inscriptions will be interminable. It will always call up its supplement, some added discourse, for I was speaking of verbal texts, I mean to say, words. Now imagine, another fable, that a read text is rewritten, and altogether otherwise; imagine it transfigured by drawing or color. Transformed, changed in its lines or its forms, but also transported into another element to the point of losing something like its place and its self-relation. It can then happen (sometimes) that it appears preceded by what seconds it, as if doubled, overtaken by its consequence—and a kind of peace comes to immobilize in a single stroke the two bodies, the body of words and the body of space, the one fascinated by the other. Both of them outside themselves, a kind of ecstasy. You have the feeling—singular ecstasy—that the verbal organism has been X-rayed according to space in spite of space, at that instant traversed by the traits of the painter or draftsman, I mean to say filmed, fixed, submitted to the developer [révélateur] even before the time of its production, on the eve of the beginning before the letter.

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François Loubrieu, so be it, wants to keep the word “illustration” for these his rays. Yes, on the condition that its use be changed somewhat and it be submitted again to the same process. That one pass it through the developer and insist, in fact, on the inseparable, the undetachable of an illustration. Of one that would be one and that would be valid only once, for a single corpus. Even though this indestructible alliance gets all its energy from an interruption, from an impassable abyss, and from an absolute dissymmetry between the visible and the readable. And yet: concerning this partition between the visible and the readable, I am not sure of it, I believe neither in the rigor of its limits nor above all that it passes between painting and words. First of all, it crosses no doubt through each of the bodies, the pictural and the lexical, according to the— each time unique but labyrinthine—line of an idiom.

Spurs: in the first place donned for the stage, sharpened for the crypt of a theater. I was playing on the effects of a public reading, one summer in 1972, at the Château of Cerisy-la-Salle. And already in view of a certain tableau vivant covered with hieroglyphics. What was then offered to conceal itself on stage, within the folds of a simulacrum—a certain “umbrella” of Nietzsche’s—was already a multiplicity of objects, a whole catalogue. I set them in view like silent enigmas; I put them forward through the twists and turns of a slow argumentation, which was cautious but also discontinuous, with leaps and blanks—and some could believe that these objects were awaiting their representation because they naturally lent themselves to it: quill pens, styluses, stilettos, sailboats and sails/veils of every kind and gender, daggers or stingers, spiders, cranes, butterflies, bulls, flame and iron, rocks, ears, a labyrinth, the pregnancy or not of all Nietzsche’s women, an enormous matrix, virgins’ bellies, the eye and teeth, even a dentist who was waiting for Wagner at Basel—or a secret envelope [ pli], a little package confided to the post one day by the signatory of the sentence “I forgot my umbrella.”1 In short, a salvo of postcards in the rhetoric of an umbrella at Cerisy-la-Salle, not far from a “resewing machine on a castration table.”2 And yet, with the aim of a demonstration suspended at the end, without object, exhibiting only its secret, everything rejected the image. Nothing was supposed to let itself be arrested by the icon, submitted to the pres-

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ence of a spectacle, the fixed contours of a painting or, finally situatable, the position of a theme. Especially not woman, the impossible subject of the discourse (“But—woman will be my subject”3 is at the beginning and later, starting from there, “Woman will not have been my subject”).4 Heidegger even comes under the suspicion of having neglected her, woman, in one of Nietzsche’s writings, and of treating her like an image, “a little as one might skip over a sensory image in a philosophy book, or as one might also rip out an illustrated page or an allegorical representation in a serious book. Which allows one to see without reading or to read without seeing.”5 François Loubrieu has not sought to restitute. His gesture crisscrosses in all directions a space foreign to the debt: nothing to be rendered, given back of these spurs, of these traces or wakes (Spuren) that are given so as to annul exchange, circulation, the market, the exhibition. This is what he calls, with a word that is finally rather new, “illustration.” The gentle relentlessness of the graft, the harried incision of the drawing, the telescopings in expansion have not worked on present objects, on the past anterior of a writing that would have offered them to the engraver, draftsman, or painter. Loubrieu has turned all this with a discreet violence; he has put to work / put into a work [mis en œuvre] all these possible objects; he has maneuvered them as instruments rather than as images: instruments, which are henceforth his, for clearing a new space and for laying down with them—unforeseeable switchpoints. Completely other forms and yet a good resemblance line for line, the portrait of a book, a good resemblance like a dream, the dream of the dreamed writing that comes back to me from elsewhere. Through the invention of the other. Loubrieu “attacked,” that’s his word. He attacked what he calls a “material” (but this is not a passive support, as is sometimes believed, any more than it is preferably figured in the feminine [i.e., as une matière]). He did it with bodies that are hermaphroditic, perhaps, according to the “third sex” of which Nietzsche speaks and precisely in this place: pens, spurs, an umbrella. If you want to know how one draws, engraves, or paints with an umbrella, with this umbrella and no other, follow Loubrieu in his studio. You

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would see there something other, something altogether other than Hegel’s Holidays, Magritte’s umbrella suspended under its glass of water from the virtuosity of a discourse. And you would know that, armed with this thing, he crosses through all the words that I was taken with, by which I let myself be taken, impressed right on the body for having first loved them, the two spurs, for example. But slipping through the words, he also lets them slip and does without them, and that is good. Where this had just happened to me, he knew already. And here it’s happening to me again, like the first time when I was transfixed [médusé ]. It was a few years ago; he had just shown me the sketches, the drypoints and the etchings, the plans for a Venetian edition in four languages, a cooperative work with Stefano Agosti. Since then, around several different focal points, the space of Loubrieu will have added other ellipses and continued expanding—see. Translated by Peggy Kamuf

The Philosopher’s Design An Interview by Jérôme Coignard

Jacques Derrida, “Le dessein du philosophe,” interview by Jérôme Coignard, Beaux Arts Magazine no. 85 (December 1990): 88–91 (Paris: Publications Nuit et Jour). The exhibition “Mémoires d’aveugle: l’autoportrait et autres ruines” (Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins) was presented in the Hall Napoléon of the Louvre from 26 October 1990 to 21 January 1991. The interview was illustrated with six photographs of paintings: three self-portraits by Fantin-Latour (charcoal, pen and black ink, 1860–1871, Louvre, Graphic Arts Department, Musée d’Orsay Collection), captioned “The draftsman’s eye, frozen in the quest for its own gaze reflected by the mirror, resembles a blind man’s eye. It blinds itself, seeing nothing but an eye that sees nothing. The self-portrait is thus the place of the artist’s blindness par excellence”; a detail from Christian Allegory (1520) by Jan Provost (1470–1529, oil on wood, 50 x 40 cm, Louvre) and a detail from Elymas Struck Blind (1527–38) by Giulio Clovio (1498– 1578, gouache, 33 x 23 cm, Louvre), captioned “The blind man who holds out his hands in front in order to get his bearings, in order not to fall, is also a metaphor for the artist, whose hand gropes along in the invisible from where the drawing will suddenly emerge. An exhibition of eyes, ‘Memoirs of the Blind’ is therefore also an exhibition of hands”; and finally Self-Portrait in Trompe-l’œil (c. 1866) by Jean-Marie Faverjon (pastel, 56 x 46 cm, Musée d’Orsay), captioned “The Louvre exhibition analyzes the complex structures of self-portraiture, which can be identified as such only thanks to a note outside the drawing.” The text was preceded by this preamble: “The draftsman and the blind man have this in common: they apprehend or represent the visible with their hand, gropingly. Their respective blindness becomes the condition for another manner of ‘seeing’ the world. Such is the main postulate that philosopher Jacques Derrida proposes to the spectator with the

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exhibition ‘Memoirs of the Blind’ at the Louvre. The self-portrait, this figure of style in which the artist ‘never manages to catch his own gaze by surprise,’ takes center-stage.”

jé rôme c oi gnar d: The drawing is blind, if not the draftsman himself; you chose this paradoxical, even provocative theme for the exhibition the Louvre has asked you to organize. In what ways is the drawing “blind”? jac que s de r r i da: As the title of the exhibition indicates, it’s not about directly presenting the draftsman as a blind man but about taking an interest in what could have led the draftsman to get interested in the blind. That is to say, in sight, this goes without saying, but also in hands. It’s an exhibition about the eye exposed to being wounded, infirmity, to all sorts of threats, but it’s also an exhibition of hands, the blind man being somebody who gets his bearings and gropes along with his hands. A lot of hands are therefore on view, those of the blind themselves, but also those of Christ healing the blind by the laying on of hands. Taking an interest in the eye and the hand, the draftsman is already in a position of specular reflection. He apprehends for himself the possibility of being blind, as someone who walks by hand [marche à la main], as it were, who works by hand. From this point of view, “memoirs of the blind” in our culture means everything that has represented the great blind men of the Bible and of Greek antiquity. A certain number of legendary blind figures will therefore be on view. The draftsman’s interest in the gaze leads to the question of the self-portrait, the draftsman who attempts to catch himself by surprise as he is drawing. Very beautiful self-portraits by Fantin-Latour or Chardin can be seen in the exhibition. With the theoretical question of knowing what a self-portrait is, whether a self-portrait is possible and whether, in the experience of the self-portrait, the draftsman doesn’t blind himself, unable as he is to catch his own gaze by surprise. And also in the structural fact whereby a self-portrait can never be identified by a simple internal reading of the work. It’s not enough to look at a self-portrait to know that it is a self-portrait. There must be a note outside the drawing to allow us to identify it as such. j. c .: Still the direction of the gaze and the position of the face give us clues that allow us to infer the presence of a mirror. j. d.: It’s always a hypothesis. This is what I call the “hypothesis of sight,” everything that, in drawing and in our experience of drawing, suspends the immediacy of sight and always forces us to resort to discourse or memory. One speaks of a self-portrait, one names a self-portrait, but one never sees a self-portrait as such. And one doesn’t know in what’s called a

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self-portrait—this is the case with Fantin-Latour or with Chardin—if the signatory is looking at himself in a mirror, is looking at himself looking at himself in a mirror, is looking at himself seeing something else, is looking at himself drawing or not drawing, is drawing himself or drawing something else. All of that is left to the realm of hypothesis, this is an area of blindness for the spectator. The latter is, like the self-portraitist, in a sort of essential blindness, being like the condition of a certain visibility. In the self-portrait the draftsman allocates to the spectator the mirror’s place; he blinds himself, masks his mirror while handing himself over to the other’s gaze and while installing the other in the mirror’s place. It is this most disconcerting structure of the self-portrait that I’m trying to demonstrate. But the exhibition doesn’t only show the glass without the tain of the mirror. It also shows optical glass, the pane [ vitre] and the vitrine. It’s a sort of glass exhibition. j. c.: You reveal fragments of autobiography in the introduction to the catalogue. j. d.: What could be called a family romance runs through the whole exhibition. In the Bible stories featuring blind people are always genealogical stories of father/son, father/grandson, etc. Remember the story of Jacob taking the place of his brother Esau in order to receive the blind father’s blessing . . . The text is twice an impossible self-portrait, since I’m saying that the self-portrait is impossible in a way. It’s the chronicle of the exhibition itself, in which I tell how it all happened. j. c.: A short while before you had suffered from a facial paralysis that had seriously impaired your left eye. Had the theme of the eye, of the gaze then become an obsession for you? j. d .: Indeed, I chose the theme of the exhibition immediately after my recovery. But there’s also my long-standing interest in optical metaphor in the history of philosophy—Plato’s eidos, the idea, is a visible contour. The story is autobiographical in another way. I describe my crippled relation to drawing. My older brother used to draw and still draws very well. I was jealous of him and I unsuccessfully tried to imitate him. There is an inhibition in me concerning drawing and perhaps also concerning sight and perception. I present myself as a blind man in a way. It’s the self-portrait of a blind man who gropingly lets himself be guided by experts, by curators, in the collections of the Louvre. j. c.: You say that the draftsman blinds himself as he paints his selfportrait. But isn’t this blindness what is proper to artistic creation? j. d .: This blindness is not merely opposed or cannot simply be opposed to vision. It is lodged at the heart of lucidity and sight. It can be apprehended from several angles. The moment he’s drawing, even from life, the

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artist advances into the night. The clearing of a path for drawing [ le frayage du dessin] advances in invisibility. On the other hand, the stroke—and this is why this applies more to drawing than to painting—is itself invisible. For the thickness of color one sees is not the stroke properly speaking. The stroke is what separates and differentiates, it is the interval, and as such it’s not visible. It exceeds philosophy’s traditional opposition between the sensible and the intelligible. Contrary to what is often said, the draftsman being frequently presented as the one who sees, the experience of drawing is above all a test of this invisibility. j. c .: What can be expected from an experience like this exhibition, which upsets certain habits? j. d.: The ambition is obviously to provoke spectators of all kinds, including experts, professionals and theorists, into thinking differently about the question of seeing. Of course my gesture is “rather philosophical.” It is my hope that the question of seeing and saying, of the invisibility at the heart of the visible, may be approached otherwise, and that the visit (the event of coming to see) may be a little affected by all that in this exhibition speaks and “shows” what “to see” may mean. And what “to say” gives us to see. It is an exhibition exposing sight to sight, whose theme is the exhibition and exposition itself. I wouldn’t dare to say that our ambition or desire was to “restore sight” in the sense in which Christ or the surgeon can do so, or in the sense in which one could give back, restore, and represent sight itself. But what would drawing be without this desire? I don’t know how the Louvre’s regular visitors will experience it. It certainly won’t be straightforward.

Drawing by Design

This lecture was delivered by Jacques Derrida at the École supérieure d’art in Le Havre on 16 May 1991, at the invitation of artist and art professor François Martin, in his seminar on drawing. It subsequently appeared as a small publication in 2013 (Le Havre: Franciscopolis Éditions), together with a downloadable audio document and a postface by Ginette Michaud. The lecture’s transcription, from François Martin’s tapes (recorded by Bruno Affagard ), was done by Marie-Joëlle Saint-Louis Savoie, and revised and, unless otherwise indicated, annotated by Ginette Michaud. A slightly different transcription, showing minor stylistic variations mainly related to punctuation, was deposited in the Jacques Derrida Archives of the Institut Mémoires de l’édition contemporaine (IMEC) at the Abbaye d’Ardenne, box 01, new shelfmark DRR162, 46 pp. This transcription had not been revised by Jacques Derrida. We have added some words within angle brackets to compensate for gaps—mostly skipped words—in the transcription. According to a detail provided by François Martin (email to Ginette Michaud, dated 8 July 2012), the original title “À dessein, le dessin” (which appears on the transcription deposited at the IMEC) was given by him to the cycle of five lectures that he organized and in which Jacques Derrida took part, as well as to an exhibition curated by François Martin at the École supérieure d’art in Le Havre, from 13 May to 7 June 1991. We decided to keep this title for this lecture by Jacques Derrida.

je an- loup r i c u r : 1 [The beginning of the tape is inaudible] . . . to talk to us about this way of approaching drawing and of his exhibition, his drawing exhibition called “Mémoires d’aveugle. L’autoportrait et autres ruines.”2 It would be very difficult for me to develop any further, so I think we’re now

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going to get this performance underway straightaway. Anyway, we’re going to . . . We’re very honored and at the same time I’m very intimidated . . . jac que s de r r i da: And so am I. All right, thank you. I’m very happy and honored to be here, and intimidated too because, as you’re going to see, my incompetence is real, and I’m not stating so at the beginning out of mere politeness or modesty. And basically, what I would like—and it’s first of all for that reason that I was both happy and rash enough to accept this invitation—I would like to hear your side of the story as somebody who draws [ du côté du dessin], whereas I am on the side where no one sees or draws. So, if you don’t mind, I will begin by talking about my own inexperienced experience of drawing, telling a few stories, that is to say, I will expose myself or expose in a most helpless way my few experiences in that direction, on your side. And then, from a few questions, stories, narratives, we can move on to a discussion, if you like. Basically, my point of departure, if you like, will be the rien à voir—both in the sense of blindness (“nothing to see”) and in the sense of the lack of relation (“nothing to do with”). When one says “il n’y a rien à voir,” it means “this has no relation to that,” and it’s also a way of drawing the field of incompetence. Over the last fifteen years, say, I’ve occasionally been provoked as it were from the outside—because I would never have done so spontaneously—into writing on drawing. I did so—well, forgive me these somewhat self-referential recalls, but after all, I’m here in order to expose myself and my relationship to drawing—I did so while both exposing myself and protecting myself, that is to say that I have the impression that whenever I spoke about drawing, it was in order to avoid speaking about painting. In one of the texts gathered in a work called La Vérité en peinture (The Truth in Painting),3 one notices very quickly that indeed I never speak about painting, that is to say, about color, the spot of color, but about what is around: drawing, but also borders, the frame; that which, being outside the drawing, somehow fills in or determines the inside; that which inscribes the drawing on a surface, which overflows it, or on the market of painting and drawing, that which inscribes it within speculations that are those of the market for drawing as much as theoretical speculations and discourses. I myself am on the side of discourse, that is to say, when I go toward words in order to speak about drawing or painting, it’s also a way of fleeing from what I know I can’t say about drawing itself. Because basically, since the question being asked all the speakers here is “what is drawing?,” my reply is: “I don’t know what drawing is.” And I am constantly tempted to bring drawing back, insofar as it draws something and identifies a figure, insofar as it is oriented by a design [dessein],4 that is to say, by a meaning or a final-

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ity that allows for its interpretation, I am always tempted to pull drawing toward the insignificant, that is to say, toward the stroke. And this is how, in my concern for drawing, I have constantly been led back to my older, more general concern for the stroke in writing, for the line of writing insofar as it consists in a network or system of differential strokes. The differential stroke—we’ll come back to this again a bit later, I think—is, naturally, the apparently visible stroke that separates two solid areas, two surfaces or two colors, but is what, as a differential stroke, allows any identification and any perception. Then, metaphorically, the differential stroke can equally designate what, within any system, graphic or not, graphic in the common sense or not, institutes differences, for instance in a word or in a sentence (this is Saussurean linguistics); the differential stroke, the diacritical feature [trait], is what makes it possible to oppose the same to the other, the other to the other, and to make distinctions. But the stroke as such, itself as differential stroke, doesn’t exist, is not solid. If you like, the whole thought or theory of the trace that I had tried to elaborate without essential reference to drawing—although, in Of Grammatology,5 the question of drawing in Rousseau also came up—nevertheless, beyond drawing properly speaking, the trace, or the stroke, would designate (this is at least what I tried to show) pure difference, diacriticity, what makes it possible for something to determine itself as opposed to something else: the interval, spacing, what separates. And so, what separates—the interval, spacing—is nothing in itself, is neither intelligible nor sensible, and insofar as it is nothing, it is not present, it always refers to something else, and consequently, not being present, it does not give itself to be seen. Basically, the greatest generality of the definition of the stroke, such as it has interested me for a long time, is that it allows everything to be seen but cannot be seen. It allows something to see without allowing itself to be seen. And therefore the relation to the stroke itself—to the stroke without thickness, to the absolutely pure stroke—the relation to the stroke itself is a relation, an experience of blindness. Then, against this very general backdrop, I’ve been brought, invited on several occasions—and I would say that having been invited very often on account of or instead of my incompetence is a feature [ trait] of my public existence—to speak about drawing, painting, cinema, architecture, precisely where I was lacking in competence. Therefore, I’ve been brought, on the occasion of exhibitions—I have the exhibitions of drawings by Titus-Carmel6 and of drawings by Adami 7 in mind—to write things on the stroke, on what I blindly perceived of the stroke. I’ve been brought to do so too on the occasion of the publication of Antonin Artaud’s portraits

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and drawings8—that some of François Martin’s drawings that I saw a little while ago reminded me of—and, quite recently therefore, to take on the formidable responsibility for an exhibition of drawings in the Louvre. So, if you don’t mind, I’ll tell you a bit about what this experience was for me. I know that some of you, no doubt not all of you, saw the exhibition, and those who did will forgive me for being a little repetitive in relation to what they already know. But in telling what this experience was, which is about the most recent for me, perhaps I’ll be able to ask some questions, to ask you some questions, because the truth is that I’d like to hear you speaking from the place where you have both the practice and experience of drawing, saying to me things about what drawing means to you, so that we can, in the second part of this session, exchange experience and inexperience, your experience and my inexperience. I said that it was more or less my most recent experience because, as I was saying a little while ago to François Martin, the most recent experience, which is underway or practically underway, is as follows: it’s a draftswoman called Micaëla Henich,9 of Romanian origin, who’s already had several exhibitions and who embarked in the venture of producing one thousand and three drawings—the number “one thousand and three” of course recalling Don Juan—one thousand and three utterly nonfigurative, nonanthropomorphic drawings in Indian ink, no figure, if you like, no human feature [trait], only hatching, usually oblique, angular, without round shapes, and sketching structures that make one wonder whether they’re human or not, terrestrial or extraterrestrial. So, one thousand and three drawings for which she asked five people, including myself, to write, each one of them, two hundred short texts or captions that would be published alongside these drawings in a book. And therefore, I’ve just written two hundred short texts, each from two to twenty lines, in which I both give myself over to hallucinations or projections, projective interpretations of these drawings, while reflecting on the meaning of this experience of projection or very brief hallucination on drawing, as if I knew nothing. In fact, I know a little about the signatory, whom I met only twice but who told me a bit about her story or, in any case, about her personal drama: a story about family, generations, a lost name, filiation, etc. And from this small stock of knowledge and from the simple hallucinated perception of drawing, I tried to write these little texts while explaining to myself what was taking place between these absolutely ahuman drawings, in which no human story could be read, and then my projections, my hallucinations, and then especially my . . . how shall I put it?, the verbal device, the net of words and sentences through which I tried without trying to get hold of these draw-

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ings, the question of the name, of the verb and the word, which somehow besieged the drawings or allowed themselves to be besieged by them. This is also, in a way, an experience of blindness, the word itself being blind, the experience of the word that one never sees—the word is heard, even when it is read, its written form, it is a word only insofar as it is heard without being seen—the experience of the word, therefore, at work in drawing or about drawing being an experience of blindness. Therefore, it’s still a sort of experience of blindness. As if, moreover, the drawing was there— precisely because it says nothing, because it seems to keep quiet—only to trigger discourse, to make one speak and bring to the surface of the drawing the words or the names, the proper names sometimes, that it itself keeps unsaid [tait], or holed up [ terre], or buried [enterré ], or in reserve. That’s still the most recent, practically unfinished experience.10 Then, to return to the experience at the Louvre, I’ll tell the story that happened to me, as it were, and the questions that I tried either to ask or to solve along the way. It all seems to begin—but in fact must have begun earlier since it is probably not by chance that I was invited to take the initiative for this exhibition—it all started one day with my meeting one of the curators at the Louvre, at the Graphic Arts Cabinet, Régis Michel, who, on his as well as Mme. Françoise Viatte’s behalf, the chief curator of the Graphic Arts Cabinet, proposed that I inaugurate a series of exhibitions of drawings from the Louvre—of drawings selected from the Louvre collections that as you know stop with the twentieth century, on the cusp of the twentieth century—a series of exhibitions of a new kind. Already, the status of this series is, I think, interesting from the point of view of the history of exhibitions, and this didn’t go without problems. It was the first time that a major museum—in France in any case—that a major public national museum gave this freedom to somebody who isn’t trained as a curator, who is not, let’s say, legitimized by the institution and who isn’t necessarily competent. And I know that the initiative thus taken by Françoise Viatte and Régis Michel didn’t receive unanimous support, in any case at the beginning, from the Louvre curators and all those who have to manage this great institution, because as you know, in general, commissioners [ commissaires], as they’re called, appointed as they are to the care [ commis à la garde] and exhibition of the Louvre treasures, who know things well, the history of drawing, who know the drawings well, who have all the necessary expertise and who in general are careful [ se gardent] not to commit any nonhistorical, nonhistorically founded interpretation, are wary of any speculation, any fantasy, any liberty in their choice of drawings and in the presentation and implementation of the exhibition. So then Françoise Viatte and Régis Michel took the

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risk of inaugurating a series of “Bias” [ Parti pris]—that’s the title and what this series is called—in which, every other year, somebody from outside the museological, museographical institution could choose drawings from the Louvre collections with complete freedom, choose them according to a topic, a theme, a demonstration in mind [ en vue], and would write a text on the occasion of this choice of drawings. Then, I had the privilege of opening this exhibition, and I must say that I hesitated a lot before accepting, for reasons I mentioned when I came here, that is, I feel particularly helpless and incompetent. Nevertheless, well, out of . . . how shall I put it?, a casualness that matches an awareness of my own incompetence, I agreed. The first appointment was made. I tell this story in the book that appeared on the occasion of this exhibition and that is called “Memoirs of the Blind,” I tell this story and the whole story of this exhibition, from beginning to end, so that the French title Mémoires d’aveugle already has the first meaning that these are the memoirs, that is, the chronicle of an exhibition. I tell what happened and it’s Memoirs of the Blind in the sense that the blind man is me. Memoirs of the Blind are first of all the memoirs or the diary, if you want, the log book of a blind man invited to organize an exhibition at the Louvre. Other meanings will come to be superimposed on, implicated by, or wrapped into this title, Memoirs of the Blind, and I’ll return to this later. In any case, the first meaning of Memoirs of the Blind is: “Here are the memoirs of the blind man that I am and have been throughout this exhibition of drawings.” So a first appointment is made with Françoise Viatte, whom I didn’t know yet, in order to talk a little about what this exhibition could be, about the conditions in which it would take place and in which it would be prepared. On the day of the appointment, I wasn’t able to go there because, some five or six days before, I was struck with a sort of facial paralysis, of viral origin, not serious but frightening in the sense that, all of a sudden, all my left side became almost paralyzed, I could no longer close my eye or wink, and seeing myself in the mirror was a horrible spectacle for me, and especially a real traumatism as far as blindness is concerned, this time possible in the physical sense. So I cancel the appointment, and during eight or ten days I undergo all sorts of tests—scanner, X-rays, electromyographic tests of the optical nerves, etc.—anyway, a fairly terrifying experience of the eye, at the end of which, well, I could be reassured and, after eight or ten days, this so-called a frigore paralysis, which can sometimes last three or four months, disappeared, and eight or ten days later, I could go to the appointment that had been canceled the first time. And so I meet Françoise Viatte and the other curators. They explain to me in which conditions we were going to work and say: “Well, now, what

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you have to do is choose a set of themes that will guide you, that will guide us in the Louvre collection in order to select a number of drawings from it, and then, well, we have one year to prepare this exhibition.” I go back home and, straightaway, at the wheel—as it happens, I often write without seeing, and this is something I have sort of recorded in that text, to write without seeing, that is to say, for example, to write in the night in order to jot down a dream (what does “to write without seeing” mean?), or else at the wheel, I often happen to write while driving, that is to say, I have a small notepad on the side of the wheel and I write without seeing, and then I have to decipher the drawing of what I have obviously written almost illegibly, without seeing—and what I write straightaway without seeing is the theme of the exhibition that absolutely imposed itself on me at that moment, which was L’ouvre11 où ne pas voir. Obviously, if one wanted to analyze the reasons and motivations that imposed that theme on me, one could go back a long way both in my own history, that is to say, in the interest I’ve taken in sight and blindness in texts that were not directly devoted to drawing, in the major question of optics or of optical metaphor that is dominant in the history of philosophy, we can return to this if you like. As it happens, I had taken an interest before, rather insistently, in the authority of the gaze, the authority of sight and light, in the history of philosophy, in philosophical discourse since Plato, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, etc., the idea—what is called the idea, Plato’s eidos—being first a drawing, first a form, visible (eidos means “form that is seen”). And the authority of the idea, of the interpretation of being as idea, first meant a certain reference to the authority of the gaze, “to know” meaning “to see” or “to look.” So that that was an old story for me, a very old concern that was brought up to date on that occasion, but that was brought up to date by intersecting with the motif of blindness that I had just experienced in a most worrying fashion. Therefore, I already decided that it would be an exhibition on the blind, on blindness. We went and looked among the Louvre drawings for whatever refers to the blind, therefore to the figure of the blind, what represents the blind, as well as, to a larger extent, whatever refers to sight and the eye—and obviously this is not a nonessential or accidental choice to speak of the drawing and of eyesight is about the same thing, but to speak of the eye and of blindness, insofar as the drawing would be not merely an experience of “seeing” but an experience of “not seeing,” a crossing through blindness. Then, from that point on, to continue with my story, I took some notes on my computer—this experience of the computer is also part of the thing—some notes, some references, essentially literary or philosophical references, I must say, since the text I wrote on the occa-

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sion of this exhibition addresses blindness in drawing as much as blindness in culture in general, in literature and in philosophy. Hence the rather massive presence, in the texts I wrote at that time, of references to blind writers (Homer, Milton, Borges) or writers who nearly became blind (like Nietzsche and Joyce) and to what they said about it as well. And obviously, as it happened, everything these blind writers, poets, or philosophers had to say was about memory, hence the link between blindness and memory. Mémoires d’aveugle—then, the title’s second dimension, if you like—is not only the memoirs of the blind man I am, therefore the self-portrait—since the subtitle is L’Autoportrait . . .—the self-portrait of the blind man I am in this experience, but the theme of memory as the theme of predilection of all these blind poets or writers. But obviously the point was also for me, as regards memory, to demonstrate that, given that the stroke—in the pure meaning I indicated a moment ago—cannot be seen, the draftsman always draws memory or always draws from memory in the opposition between actual, present perception and memory. Therefore, what was at stake was an exhibition on the eye and memory. I’m first going to say a word about the work that went into preparing this exhibition, and then I’ll speak about the themes that I attempted to demonstrate both in act in the exhibition—that is to say, through the drawings that were settled on, selected and shown—and then in the accompanying text. After that, then, I handed in these few notes to the curators, who began sort of rummaging in the Louvre collection and operated a first selection of a hundred drawings or so, all of which in fact, most in any case, were related to . . . how shall I put it?, the expositio, the exhibition or exposition of the gaze. I want to say a word about the word “expositio.” It wasn’t only about exhibiting or exposing drawings that represented the eye or the blind or represented eyes when closed but about exposing the expositio of the gaze, exposing the gaze, well, the eye as it is itself exposed, exposed to the wound. Then, there were all sorts of blind people there, some of whom were born blind in a way; others were struck with blindness by divine punishment, for instance; others had their eyes gouged out (Samson’s case); others whose sight was weakened and needed optical prostheses, glasses to be worn, in Chardin’s self-portraits for example. Therefore, about showing the eye as it is exposed and sometimes the eye of the draftsman himself—in the case of Chardin or Fantin-Latour—as it is exposed to the wound and to blindness, as it is virtually or actually nonseeing, blindness not being always—and this is where, naturally, all that is essential takes place in my eyes—this congenital or accidental disability that consists in the deprivation of sight in the strict sense, but blindness being the possibility of

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the very experience of sight. There comes a point where, between the visible and the invisible, between blindness and seeing or lucidity, there’s no longer any opposition, where the maximum of light or of visibility can no longer be distinguished from invisibility or obscurity. So a first set of drawings were selected. I realized very quickly that the exhibition could be built around several focal points, the first of which— the easiest and most massively obvious—could be the representation of the blind in our culture. Our culture, that is to say, on the one hand, the Holy Scripture, the Bible—the Old Testament and the New Testament—full of blind people and of accounts concerning the history of becoming blind or of the healing of the blind, a history to be interpreted. Greek mythology: I decided very quickly, both because there were no drawings bearing on it and because the theme is a little hackneyed, to leave aside—that was somehow the provocative nature of the exhibition—Oedipus, who was too . . . too obvious. Then, Oedipus was not absent from my discourse, but there’s no drawing showing Oedipus. So then the idea was to exhibit the history of blindness in Western culture and in this archive made up of drawings of the blind [ dessins d’aveugles], drawings representing the blind (the French syntax dessins d’aveugles being able to accommodate, let’s say, objective genitive, drawings of the blind, drawings showing blind people (and one sees a lot of them), as well as drawings by the blind, drawings produced by blind draftsmen), the thesis or hypothesis being that any draftsman, insofar as he draws, has an experience of blindness, hence the fascination. My hypothesis, if you like, or my thesis, if you prefer, was that a draftsman who works with his eyes and with his hands cannot but be fascinated by the spectacle of the blind. A draftsman, when he sees a blind person, sees what can happen to himself, the worst that can happen to the eye, apparently, not to see. He also sees somebody who, not being able to see, orients himself, reconnoitres and traces a path with the help of his hands, and it all takes place between the eye and the hand, so that the general structure of this situation of the drawing of the blind is that the draftsman, when he draws a blind man, no matter how varied and complex that scene is, is always drawing himself, drawing what can happen to him, and therefore he’s already in the self-portrait’s hallucinated dimension. One can always calculate, speculate on the fact that when he allows himself to be fascinated by a blind person, when he feels like drawing a blind person, the draftsman is representing himself, representing what can happen to him and therefore staging himself in, precisely, a specular mirror scene [ se mettre lui-même en scène dans une scène] that reflects back to him his own image. Then, I’ll try to make it clear a bit later, hopefully a little more subtly, why the draftsman

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is apprehensive about his own blindness. It’s not only because, having invested so powerfully in the eye and in the hand, when he sees someone who gropes his way without seeing, you know, like Coypel’s blind or the blind in Jericho, this reflects back to him his own image. A little more subtly we’ll see a bit later why, what the other source of this fascination is. In any case, the general hypothesis is that blindness is in a way the origin of drawing, the experience or the apprehension of blindness. Then why do I say “experience” or “apprehension”? When I say “experience,” I’m thinking of what this word means closest to its root. An experience is always a journey, an experience is always a crossing, therefore a movement in space. And the blind person is someone who experiences space by crossing it without seeing it. Apprehension is both fear, the fear of blindness, and then also, precisely because of fear, the gesture of holding out one’s hands, putting one’s hands forward in order not to fall. And the blind person is somebody who falls, therefore this is often how they are represented: they’re always falling or avoiding falling, protecting themselves against a possible fall, and the biblical signification, in particular, of blindness is always that of spiritual fall, of fall in the sense of sin. Therefore, the general hypothesis was this one: the origin of drawing was a certain experience, a certain apprehension of blindness. As you no doubt know—and forgive me if I recall things that you know only too well—there was in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries a whole thematic of the origin of drawing that gave rise to numerous representations around the character of Dibutatis. Legend says that Dibutatis was the daughter of a Corinthian potter who, at the moment when her lover was leaving her, when she couldn’t see him any longer, at least when he was disappearing from her sight, began at the same time, in order to keep his memory—and this is where it all begins, with memory—by drawing his figure on a wall. Then she couldn’t see him any longer, she simply saw the shadow, or she recalled the shadow of her lover’s figure and she drew the outlines of the shadow on the wall—sometimes, other variations on the same legend say, on a veil, on a canvas—she drew the outlines of the one whom she couldn’t see. A gesture of love, therefore, the origin of drawing in love, but also a gesture to capture, fix, keep the stroke or the trace of the invisible, of the beloved who can’t be seen or who can’t be seen any longer, whom one recalls only from the shadow. And this experience of drawing as the shadow’s outline, of the other’s projected shadow, is often interpreted as, and in fact titled, The Origin of Drawing:12 the origin of drawing as the gesture of a woman who traces the outline of the invisible, of what she loves and that is invisible to her. In a somewhat muddled fashion, since I’ve

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just said “woman,” I’d like to recall in a word what was one of the guiding motives of this exhibition, namely, that although the origin of drawing was attributed to a woman, to a female lover—a blind woman, therefore, a woman who can’t see, who draws insofar as she can’t see—the great blind of biblical history or Greek mythology are always great blind men. There is no great blind woman, no blind woman, or in any case they are a very small minority. The story of the eye—and this exhibition or exposition was a story of the eye: I’ve mimed or parodied the title of Bataille’s text that is well known to you, “Story of the Eye”13—so the “story of the eye” as the story of threatened, exposed, lost sight, is a men’s story. The gaze, therefore the authority of the gaze, the authority of drawing, the threatened authority of the eye, being always—now here is where we open up the great psychoanalytic or post-Freudian scheme on the Oedipus complex, etc.—experiences of filiations of men, father-son relationships, etc., and there are lots of stories that are told in the exhibition around drawing and go in that direction, woman not being committed here, as it were, to the representation of the authority of seeing, to the drawing of sight, as if the eye were made for seeing. It’s often said: “Well, the finality of the eye is vision. To see, to know, to have [Voir, savoir, avoir] objects, to draw, to master, etc.” That’s the purpose—in French, the “dessein”: e, i, n—of the visual function and this is masculine. Whereas one can ask oneself—and I’ve quoted especially English texts, by an English poet whose name is Marvell14—whether the purpose of the eye, of the human eye as opposed to the animal eye (and there are lots of representations of animal eye, of wolf’s eye or lynx’s eye, in the Louvre collection) whether the purpose of the human eye is to see or to weep. There’s a very beautiful text by Marvell that says basically, all animals endowed with eyes can see, only the human eye can weep. So that if the meaning of this hypothesis could be verified—something I have a lot of questions about, but let’s leave it at that—if this hypothesis made sense, it would mean that what’s peculiar to the human eye is not to see, and therefore to draw by modeling itself on sight, since animals can just as well see with the eye, but weeping would be proper to the human eye. And therefore, not to see or to show the object’s truth but to do what one does when one weeps, that is to say, to be affected by an emotion that makes one’s eyes water, that can equally blur sight, that in any case . . . (the blind can weep, the blind can weep) would reveal—tears would reveal—truth, would unveil the eye’s truth. Now in the Louvre drawings that I’ve seen, the tears were always women’s tears, female weepers, and there’s one in particular that is shown, by Daniele da Volterra,15 one can see a female weeper. Therefore, running

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through this exhibition more or less unobtrusively, there is this thematic of the eye and of seeing, and of the authority of seeing reserved to man, weeping being revealed, the eye’s truth being revealed by woman’s tears. So the exhibition’s first theme: to show blind people. And what one sees in the blind, what is immediately the most patent, whether we’re dealing with groping blind people (I am thinking of Coypel’s blind people in particular) or with the blind healed by Christ (one sees healings of the blind ), what one sees first are the hands, drawings of hands. So I tried to analyze the hand positions of the blind, but also those of Christ who heals by laying on hands, that is to say, by laying his fingers on the blind’s eyelids. And therefore one can see a maneuver, a manipulation, manners if you want, in other words, a whole play of hands and sticks, of hands leaning on a stick, the stick being the prosthesis, the tip that allows the blind man’s hand to find his bearings in space, to draw in space; therefore, between the stick, between the stick and the blind man’s hand, and then the gesture of the draftsman who does the same thing with a charcoal crayon, analogies were gathering fast. This is the most obvious surface in an exhibition of blind people: one shows the blind, the blind are represented in their history or in their mythology, a pretext for narrating—but I’m not going to do that here—these richly significant stories in the Bible or elsewhere, or in Greek mythology, those stories that fill with meaning the experience of blindness as punishment, or else as privilege. Which means that the man struck with blindness is either the sinner whom God or Christ will save miraculously by restoring his sight, that is to say, by opening his eyes to a light that is no longer natural or physical, or sensible, but that is supernatural . . . And the metaphor of blindness always plays between these two lights: the sensible and the spiritual or supernatural light. Sometimes, it is a simple punishment that calls for a redemption, that is to say the healing of the blind; sometimes, the deprivation of sight, of sensible, carnal sight, immediately signifies access to an internal sight, to spiritual sight, to the revelation of the truth of faith; and very often—let’s say that this is the equivalent, the correspondence of this ambiguity—very often (this is the case with Borges and with Milton), the experience of blindness is regarded as a privilege, as an election: the blind man is elected because he is lucky to have memory, he is given over to memory, and because he sees better than the sighted. Now here—well, I’m not going to enter into this—there’s a whole discourse, which I might add is held by these very poets and writers, on luck: the luck of their undergoing the deprivation of carnal sight that deprived them of nothing and that on the contrary gave them the privilege to see better than

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others. Which sets us on the path of a kind of increased light or visibility in the very experience of blindness. In the night, in the night itself, the most light appears. Then, under this general theme of representation, of the blind as they’re represented, shown groping their way or healed by Christ, etc., another layer, if you will, of the graphic experience as blindness could be revealed. The demonstration that I attempted was concerned not only with fascination, didn’t directly concern the fascination that is felt by the draftsman in front of the spectacle of the blind, but the explanation of this fascination. That is to say, that if the draftsman is fascinated, it’s not merely because blindness can happen, as to everybody: he can be deprived of sight by accident, he can gradually lose sight, become nearsighted, may have to wear glasses, see less and less well, etc. This can happen to everybody, but it is enough to fascinate or obsess a draftsman who, when he shows eyes (when Chardin shows himself wearing glasses), knows what he’s doing. But, more secretly, the draftsman feels that, when he draws, he is already somehow blind. Now what does this mean? Even when he sees, even when he has, as one says, “normal” eyesight, the experience of drawing is the experience of blindness. Here, we must return to the stroke, to the structure of the stroke, in order to clarify this point. First, if one starts from the so-called representational or figurative drawing such as, for instance, I don’t know . . . , I try to reproduce something, to draw while looking at a model: I can’t draw what I see, I never draw what I see. Then, an autobiographical parenthesis in relation to self-portrait here. In my personal experience of blindness, there’s not only the story I told earlier, there’s the fact that, always—and this is why my initial declaration of incompetence was quite genuine—I’ve always had the feeling of never being able not only to draw (I’ve never been able to draw even the most basic thing) but I’ve never even been able to look at a drawing. You understand that somebody who has the feeling, the strange certainty of never having been able to draw in the most truly basic, most primary sense of the word, but who even feels that he can’t look at a drawing, that he can’t see a drawing, perceive a drawing, you imagine what happens when the Louvre invites him to organize an exhibition of drawings. Now let me explain what I mean and, well, please forgive the slightly narcissistic or personal nature of these little stories, but narcissism is, naturally, the theme of the exhibition. Besides, there are several Narcissus in the exhibition and we’ll get to the thematic of the self-portrait in a little while. So, in relation to Narcissus, let me tell you this story. When I was a child, my brother, my elder brother drew remarkably, and he was admired in the family for his talent as

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a draftsman. He drew all the time, he drew very well, I think, and his drawings were displayed a bit everywhere, and naturally I was very envious, very jealous. I tried not only to draw as well but to imitate his own drawings— naturally, they were disasters, humiliating catastrophes. And I could feel that if I was incapable of drawing, it wasn’t only a negative incapacity, it was a serious inhibition. I think I still suffer from a serious inhibition with regard to the gesture of drawing something, and I must have compensated for this inhibition with regard to silent drawing by turning my attention to words, to discourse, that is to say, to what comes and takes the place of drawing or that crowds round or besieges drawing. And, naturally, this story of jealousy about a brother clever at drawing, how shall I say, I used it as a guide in this exhibition in which there are lots of stories about brothers: the story of Jacob’s blessing by Isaac, who, you know the story, blesses him . . . Old Isaac has to choose, has to bless his elder son. He’s already old and blind—biblical history is full of old blind people, of blind grandfathers and forebears (aïeul: the French word plays within the text with all sorts of other words like œil (eye), Dieu (God ), yeux (eyes), histoire d’yeux (eye story), histoire de dieu(x) (god(s) story), etc.)—the old grandfather that Isaac is, seeing no longer, must bless his elder son, who will somehow ensure Israel’s posterity. And his wife, Rebekah, who has a preference for Jacob, the elder being Esau—they are twins but, as always in twinnings, one is born before the other, one is older—the elder of the twins being Esau, he’s the one who should have been blessed. And Rebekah’s ruse lies in replacing Esau by Jacob, since the old man could not see, in putting a camel’s skin or . . .—yes, a camel’s,16 I think—on Jacob’s hand to recall Esau’s hairy hand, and old Isaac thinks he’s blessing Esau whereas he’s blessing Jacob. But Rebekah’s ruse is in fact not a, how shall I say, damnable ruse since it’s already in order to make God’s predictions, God’s forecasts [ prévisions], foresight [ prévoyance], and providence come true that she substitutes the younger for the elder. And it’s full of stories about brothers—I’m not going to tell others—in those stories about blind people. Therefore, by way of a story about brothers, I’ve told my own story about brothers, namely, that my inhibition about drawing was not unrelated to the wounded jealousy that I felt toward my brother’s talent for drawing. So I wanted to try and give an account, not in order to justify my blindness, but in any case to account for the fact that at the very moment when he was drawing, the draftsman was blind not only because he couldn’t at once look at the model and draw; that, in any case, he was drawing from memory (even if the model is there, the very drawing, insofar as it is reproductive, representational, is made from memory: there are some very

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beautiful texts by Baudelaire on drawing and memory, which I cite);17 that the most representational drawing is never related to perception, therefore to intuition, to the gaze that is seeing the thing, but straightaway involves memory, straightaway related to the past: first reason. Second reason: at the moment when the stroke moves forward, even in the most representational drawings, the breaching of the stroke can do nothing but move forward in the night, that is to say, one can’t see the breaching itself, the tracing of the stroke. The tracing of the stroke is not visible, it produces visibility, but it is not visible in itself. Therefore, the experience of drawing as tracing and tracing activity is in fact strangely foreign to present visibility. And once the drawing is drawn—because one could say, well, the movement of tracing basically follows a movement, a certain motility of the hand guided by memory and therefore it’s not related to the visible—but once the drawing is drawn, one can’t deny, or so one thinks, that the drawing is now visible and related to lucidity. Then, this is when I would return to what I said a while ago at the beginning, namely, that the pure stroke—here I’m speaking neither of color nor even of the thickness of the stroke, of the colored thickness of the stroke, no matter how thin it may be—the stroke itself as pure differentiation, dividing line, interval, the drawing itself can’t be seen. It gives us to see what it divides, what it separates, but the stroke itself as pure line in fact subtracts itself [se soustrait] from sight: the stroke subtracts itself from sight. And therefore, from that point of view, one can say that drawing is a singular experience of blindness. Here, this thematic is at once modern and very traditional. It is modern because one finds indications of it, for instance in Merleau-Ponty’s The Visible and the Invisible,18 where he shows, not about drawing but about visibility in general, that the visible is not opposed to the invisible; that invisibility is not a resource of visibility, not the potentially visible; that there’s an invisibility that structures the field of visibility. So I cite texts from MerleauPonty that go in that direction, I’m not going to insist on them here. A traditional theme also because one can go back, for instance, to Plato to hear that basically visibility itself is not visible, that is to say, that the source of light that makes things apparent and that therefore allows the visible to appear, the source of light in itself, is not visible. That which makes things visible, therefore the visibility of the visible itself, is not visible. Light is not visible. What I see here are, naturally, visible, luminous things, but transparency, the diaphanous—as Aristotle says, doesn’t he, the diaphanous, that which allows visibility to show through [ paraître elle-même]—the diaphanous itself is not visible. Therefore, one cannot see the visibility of the visible. Which means that it is in an element of night, as it were, an element of nonvisible

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transparency, that the visible appears. In other words, at that point, there’s no opposition between the visible and the invisible, pure visibility can’t see itself / be seen [ne se voit pas]. Therefore, the condition of sight can’t be seen. Just as one says “the condition of sight can’t be seen,” one might as well say that the eye can’t see itself, that the condition for the eye to see is that it can’t see itself. So a reflection that can be brought back to what is called the blind spot, which is that point in the optical system where the whole field of vision must be organized around a localizable point in anatomo-ophthalmology called the “blind spot,” the blind point.19 That kind of blindness can take us back to the blind spot, as well as to a more infinite, undefined, illimitable blindness that covers the whole field. The whole field of the visible is a field of invisibility, and there’s no opposition between visible and invisible. The eye must therefore not see or not see itself in order to see. And then I claim—this is the hypothesis that has guided me in this exhibition, if you will—that the draftsman’s intense experience as an intense desire to see and show, and to exhibit and expose, that is to say, to pose here in front, to show what is exposed and to expose it in turn in front, in front of oneself; that the draftsman’s experience and intense desire cannot but bustle around this blindness, the blind spot or this essential blindness. The draftsman as seer is somebody who, better than anybody else, experiences blindness exemplarily and who endeavors not only to show blind people, all the time, but to show himself, to expose himself as a blind man. And then that thematic led me therefore to turn this exhibition of the blind into the exhibition of self-portrait, that is to say, somehow to link the theme of memoirs of the blind to the theme subtitled Self-Portrait. At that point, the self-portrait in the subtitle is not only the self-portrait of myself telling my story and the stories that I’ve just told, but also the self-portraits of draftsmen experiencing their own blindness in a sort of hallucinated, vertiginous way, experiencing the fact . . . that they see insofar as they don’t manage to see and don’t manage to see themselves. Then, if you don’t mind, since I know that this self-portrait business has caused some astonishment or concern in the exhibition, I’d like to pause on it a little. I’ve been speaking for how long now? I don’t know. f r anç oi s mart i n : One hour. j. d.: I’ve already been speaking for one hour? f. m.: Roughly one hour and ten minutes. j. d.: I’ve already been speaking for one hour and ten minutes! Then, I’ll add a few words, I’ll add a few words about self-portrait, and then, well . . . So those who saw the exhibition saw that there were a number of self-

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portraits. I think that these are the most beautiful drawings of the exhibition. There’s a series of self-portraits by Fantin-Latour, a series of selfportraits by Chardin—the Self-Portrait with Spectacles, where Chardin is seen wearing glasses—and then there was this one painting, because this was an exhibition of drawings, but I asked for an exception to be made, Courbet’s Self-Portrait known as The Wounded Man, where he’s seen with closed eyes, therefore blind, not being able to see and wounded, as if his very eyesight were wounded. These self-portraits were chosen, well, as all the drawings were, because they were beautiful. Then the question you could ask me or yourself, and to which I have no competent answer, is: “What does one call a beautiful drawing?” This is where negotiations were sometimes difficult with the curators because I had selected a great number of drawings, over a hundred, that in some way were useful for my purpose or my demonstration, but I was shown, by Mme. Viatte in particular, that the room wasn’t big and that it wasn’t reasonable to exhibit them all because . . . a matter of space, layout, a matter of compatibility as well—one can’t just exhibit anything next to anything—and then, especially, because the drawings were of uneven quality. I for one would have liked to exhibit lots of drawings, whether they were beautiful or not, as long as they were useful for my demonstration. And she wanted to keep the beautiful drawings only. So, basically, I was capable of agreeing with her on the quality of the drawings, but I would be utterly incapable of saying why, in what ways the beautiful drawings were more beautiful than the less beautiful drawings. Here I gave in and trusted the authority of experts who were saying to me: “Right, this one’s a beautiful drawing, that one isn’t a beautiful drawing.” But I must say that I was feeling blinder than ever in all this. I was capable of seeing what interested me in the drawing—the strokes, the situation, the structure, the themes, etc.—but as for saying “this . . .” There were extreme cases when I could see that a drawing was more beautiful than another, but there were cases when, really, I was not sure of my taste and I trusted the expert’s eye. Therefore, I believe, like the experts, that the most beautiful drawings in this exhibition, the most spectacular as well, were those self-portraits by Fantin-Latour and Chardin. Not all the self-portraits by Fantin-Latour could be exhibited because there are others, some of which are in the United States—the exhibition’s contract, you see, was that everything had to come from the Louvre, from the Louvre or from the Musée d’Orsay; there are things that were at the Louvre before that were then transferred to the Musée d’Orsay, and at the Louvre, there were these five self-portraits, but there were others elsewhere, which I think are reproduced in the book but which were not exhibited.

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Then—and here, I’m going to go faster so we have some time left for discussion—what was my hypothesis, to speed things up if you like, or my purpose in relation to self-portrait? First, it is that one can perceive, in Fantin-Latour’s eyes, when one attempts to stare into his eyes, a sort of terror, you know, of the “seeing without seeing,” as if he didn’t manage to see what he was seeing, namely, his own eyes. And when one sees one’s eyes— supposing one can see one’s eyes in a mirror—one sees nothing. When one sees one’s own eyes, one sees something seeing [du voyant], as it were. When I see eyes, I see my eyes looking at me in the mirror, I see my seeing eyes, but as I’m seeing something seeing, I don’t see something visible, therefore I see nothing. I don’t see when I see my own eyes, supposing I can see them. Therefore, impossibility of seeing oneself. You notice as well that when one exchanges glances with somebody seeing, with a sighted person, precisely insofar as one sees the other’s eyes seeing you and this strange experience of meeting eyes, this vertiginous experience of meeting eyes happens, one sees the other seeing and, consequently, one can’t see his eyes. One sees seeing eyes and one exchanges “sight for sight” [ voyant-voyant], just as one says “fair’s fair” [ donnant-donnant], but one can’t see the other’s eyes. Whereas on the contrary, one does see the eyes of blind people, when they are open, the eyes of blind people who don’t see you: one sees them as objects, one can describe them, etc., precisely insofar as they are dead and blind, one does see those eyes . . . In short, only the eyes of the blind are visible. But the eyes of sighted people are not visible. And this experience of double blindness in the self-portrait, and especially in Fantin-Latour—he tries to see his seeing eyes, and consequently, he can’t see them; or else, in order to see them, he must see his eyes as a blind man’s eyes and, then, see himself as blind—is this terrifying or anguished experience whose features [traits] I think one can sense when one looks at that. But this is relatively secondary compared with what I wanted to demonstrate, namely, that no internal analysis of a so-called “self-portrait” drawing can prove that it’s indeed a self-portrait. When one says, “This is a self-portrait by Fantin-Latour,” well, this is because Mr. Fantin-Latour gave the title of Self-Portrait to these works. But without this title, that is to say, without those words, that is, these discursive events, without these things that are outside the drawing, outside the picture—that are on the edge, that are parerga, if you like, outside the work [ hors-d’œuvre], but that don’t belong to the very inside of the work—without these outworks, one couldn’t say: “This is a self-portrait.” Why? Well, because the self-portrait, the definition of the self-portrait, is that it be determined as such only by reference to something that is outside the portrait and, consequently, by a

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discursive act. But if you analyze the inside of the work, an internal analysis of the work, nothing allows you to say that this is a self-portrait. Nothing allows one to say, for instance, that it is Fantin-Latour himself: it can be anybody’s portrait. Or else, Fantin-Latour being dead, one can’t compare, or even if one had photographs—the photograph is an element external to the picture—it may be somebody who looks like him. Or else one can’t say that at the time when he draws this alleged self-portrait, he’s looking at himself in a mirror; or else, then he may be looking at himself in a mirror, nothing allows that to be determined by an internal analysis; or else he may be looking at himself in a mirror while drawing or not; or else he may be looking at himself, he may be drawing himself looking at something else: nothing can attest that he is looking at himself in a mirror and drawing what he sees in a mirror. All these hypotheses are absolutely open, and no intragraphical analysis, if you like, no internal analysis of the drawing allows it to be determined. Which means that the concept of self-portrait always depends on an institutional and discursive act, on an act through which somebody gives the title of Self-Portrait to a work. Which means that the status of self-portrait always depends on a linguistic act, a social act, a conventional act, an almost museographical act. And as a result, not only, at least on the one hand, no self-portrait is attested by itself, can itself bear witness that it is a self-portrait, but on the other hand, and conversely, anything can be titled Self-Portrait. Anything, even the drawing of a ruin: I can always say: “There, this is a self-portrait. I’m drawing something that concerns me, that has happened to me, that is the story of a moment of my life, this is an element of self-portrait.” Anything can be called “self-portrait.” It is for this reason actually that I introduced the motif of the ruin into the exhibition— there is in fact one single ruin, we had to choose, there were magnificent drawings of ruins, and I would have liked to develop a whole discourse on the drawing of ruins, but on the one hand, we had no space, and on the other hand, I thought that one was enough, one beautiful drawing of ruins was enough. But, obviously, this theme of the ruin runs through the whole exhibition, namely that . . . now well, we’ll return to that in the discussion, there’s no need to overload this introduction . . . In any case, the question of the self-portrait was central to the exhibition. Because if . . .20 The supposed self-portrait painter can’t see himself or show himself in the place toward which his gaze is directed, the place that is precisely that of the spectator, that is to say, us. When Fantin-Latour shows himself, looking absolutely wild-eyed and crazed from what one supposes to be his own image in the mirror, in fact, he’s looking at somebody who’s looking at him, or he sees himself, he sees himself being looked at, he sees

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himself looking. Il se voit regardé (é) ou il se voit regarder (e, r), il se voit regarder. Seeing oneself looking, the image in the mirror, if you like, is in fact the spectator’s place. And it is because there’s the other as spectator of the drawing that (1) the draftsman is blind, but [(2)] that he is blind, blinded by the other. It is we who, in occupying the place of the mirror, make the mirror opaque in a way and prevent it from reflecting or forbid it to reflect its own image. That is to say, we are the condition of its reflection, the condition of possibility of its reflection and the condition of impossibility of its reflection. It is we who blind the self-portrait painter, it is we who, so to speak, put out the self-portrait painter’s eyes. The draftsman’s eyes are put out by the other, by the one to whom he shows or to whom he shows himself. So it was, from that point of view, an exhibition and an exposition of the draftsman blind to the other. It was an exposition of the exhibition, that is to say, of what in a way happens in the exhibition. From that point of view, the exhibition as a whole was an exposition of the exhibition. What does to exhibit a drawing mean? What does it mean to expose oneself to the other? And what is the relation between drawing and language? Since, in saying earlier that only a title, that is to say, a discursive event, could somehow legitimize drawing as self-portrait, this meant that . . . , this opened up a reflection, one that, well, I tried to develop in the exhibition and the accompanying volume, on the relationships between saying and seeing, between the word and drawing, but also that, insofar as the graphic dimension of drawing is always given in an experience of reading, that is to say, of a deciphering implying language, it implies blindness since the word “self-portrait,” or the accompanying sentences, the captions that go alongside an exhibition—and the Louvre exhibition came with texts, under each drawing there were texts—[are] an experience of blindness for the reason I indicated, namely, that when one reads one doesn’t see, one doesn’t see the words. Reading, as opposed to seeing drawings, is experiencing blindness. Therefore, it was between seeing, saying, and reading that this history of drawings was being narrated, in a way, just like Memoirs of the Blind or The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins. We’ll talk about ruins, if you like, during the discussion, but I think I’ve gone on for too long already if we want to speak together, which in my eyes was the point of this gathering. That’s it, I’m stopping here, thank you.21

Pregnances

Prégnances. Quatre lavis de Colette Deblé, with wash drawings by Colette Deblé (Paris: Brandes, 1993). Republished under the title Prégnances. Lavis de Colette Deblé. Peintures (Mont-de-Marsan: L’Atelier des Brisants, 2004); “Prégnances. Sur quatre lavis de Colette Deblé,” Littérature no. 142 (2006): 7–15. Originally translated as “Pregnant with Meaning,” trans. Andrew Rothwell, in Colette Deblé (Leeds: University Gallery, 1998), 6–7, and slightly revised for this volume. Reproduced here courtesy of Andrew Rothwell and The Stanley & Audrey Burton Gallery, University of Leeds. Other translations: Brazilian, Spanish, Italian, Russian. Born in 1944 in Coucy-les-Eppes (France), Colette Deblé lives and works in Paris. Her first exhibitions, “Boîtes-fenêtres,” “Portraits schizobigleux” and “Peintures,” were held in 1976. In 1990, she embarked on a large-scale project—a visual essay aimed at analyzing representations of women across art history—composed of an “infinite” number of drawings, many of which were exhibited in 2006 at the Galerie Des femmes—Antoinette Fouque in Paris. The Librairie Des femmes— Antoinette Fouque has also edited a catalogue penned by Jean-Joseph Goux, L’Envol des femmes, charting Colette Deblé’s artistic engagement with the female body. Her works have often been published alongside writings by philosophers, critics, and poets such as Jacques Derrida, Jean-Joseph Goux, Guillevic, Bernard Noël, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jean-Pierre Verheggen, JeanLuc Chalumeau, Jacques Henric, and Gilbert Lascaux. Some of these works were reprinted in 2011 in Colette Deblé. Mujeres en suspensión o la Historia citada, ed. and trans. Joana Masó and Javier Bassas (Capellades and Barcelona: Museu Molí Paperer de Capellades and the Women and Literature Centre of the University of Barcelona).

Figure 2: Colette Deblé, Diane découvrant la grossesse de Calixto de Jean Daret, 40 x 30 cm, wash drawing, Paris, private collection. Courtesy of the artist.

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As a writer and poet, Colette Deblé is the author of Quelque chose de très doux (Paris: P. O. L, 1990) and Partie de dominos (Paris: Écriture, 1993). A film about her work, Colette Deblé, entre-deux, was made by the Université de Lille in 2009.

Between two waters—she sees better, you see, than we can glimpse. Or if you prefer: through these waters she glimpses better. She knows how to cross over. History shimmering between two waters, impregnated/absorbent, like her women. Her technique, or rather her manipulation, her manner—manner and matter, manner and memory—is not watercolor, although, afloat in the same waters, it does flow from it. Not watercolor but, more often, a wash. Wash, how many words swimming around in just one word! Wash, not to announce some intention of cleaning up the history of women (sluicing it thoroughly, of course) in order to reappropriate, to lay bare (finally) woman’s true, clean body, her own. Of course not. No, following the firm contours of the line, a drawing colored with a wash sees itself discreetly tinted, impregnated rather than drowned, filtered but also preserved, the body of its lines intact, still shimmering in the liquid element. (However, with a wash we are always close to the bath (before or after, as in Colette’s Susannah after Tintoretto), close to one bank or other of the wash house. Washing, wash drawing, wash coloring too, or wash painting, which is not far from the meaning of gouache: Italian guazzo, to soak or wet, also to stock water (aquatio, a reserve of water or rain). Swollen by the confluence of so many possible contexts, the word “wash” overflows its banks. It is heavy with proverbs and word fragments, clamorous but in suspension, echoes to be combined or left floating: heavy like a pregnant woman or a departing ship laden with cargo. A wash always moistens.) What we see here might be nicknamed a washover [lavure] or an overflow [coulure], a color (sepia, bistre or Indian ink [encre de Chine]) diluted with water. Especially encre de Chine, for if, as you are invited to, you allow your

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attention to drift, you may find yourself musing on what Colette Deblé reveals about herself in her parody of a Chinese self-portrait: If I were an element, I’d be a liquid; if I were an animal, I’d be a whale.1

Which makes it tempting to invent a story: a certain whale swallowed up the whole of Western painting, from tip to toe, both historic and prehistoric, all those women gulped down one by one, swimming around and growing in its stomach—and now suddenly (suddenly but after the appropriate amount of time, as if to mimic a gestation period, a creative impulse) here they all are, returned to the true identity, still damp, their own spitting (spat-out) image. Delivered, re-engendered; engendered anew, for the first time. Saturated with love, in-venerate from birth, pregnant with the future and the memories that they bear as they emerge from the bath, all venerable Dianas and Eves, Venuses and Susannahs: impregnated, i.e., fertilized, by/ with themselves—having received a trickle of seed. They are the opus and corpus of an art that seems to combine the active and passive senses of two verbs, or rather two operations that can be distinguished but that it is not inappropriate to let mingle: imprinting [empreindre] and impregnating [imprégner]. Both carried out directly on the body. Invading and leaving one’s mark, but by penetrating, like the flow expelled from a lifted sluice-gate, flooding, making a womb big, impressing oneself in the fluid flow itself (nothing to do with impressionism). Marks of water and seed down the generations, drowned imprints and lines showing through. With the aim of refloating a female body. (This could be seen, long after Freud’s work and his famously titled book, as another Introduction to Narcissism, with the (hypo)thesis: Narcissus is the Painter.) Forget the (a)quarrel(le) that she, and all the other women, is picking, never complaining or making a fuss but without mercy either, in silence, with the whole history of painting, with artists’ patrons and all those male hands and male maneuvers, all those masters who have staged and represented (hidden, sublimated, elevated, violated, veiled, dressed up, undressed, revealed, unveiled, reveiled, mythified, mystified, denied, prized or misprized, in a word verified, for it all comes back to the same thing, to

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the verity of) women’s bodies. Which have borne it all. Always a medium to be painted on, always subjectile, woman has always been their subject, but now also, despite appearances, Colette Deblé’s. Slicing through the heavy layers of paternalist memory (all the Veroneses and Tintorettos, Titians and Rubenses, and all those other leaders of schools, licensed showmen, and stage directors), her sharpness of vision is unrivaled. Never just restoring what she refloats, but re(touching) the original (forbidden in galleries, but just wait till the keeper’s back is turned ), she attacks the most venerable of paradigms: hers are liberated women, women set free of their models, emancipated from their capiternal masterpieces2 now kept at arm’s length, and yet faithful women too, laughing daughters and sisters, mistresses and bearers of memory (they know who it is they are deceiving), primed virgins or airy mother-molds. The great and venerable history of painting then shows up better, emerges into the light of day, not injured but ultimately vulnerable, with the vulnerability that it needs to retain—it is mortal and finite, you see—if it is to show up at all. One question (just to see, this time in advance of any narrative): why should a history of painting be above all (after all, at all) a history of woman painted, represented, shown off, manipulated, avoided, modalized? Fled? Denied? A history of persecution? Can it be reduced to that, to a history, in sum, of her verity? Of her verity’s Unconscious? This question will remain suspended, but it deserves to be dipped into again. It is still a matter of verity. What an interpreter! She interprets the meaning (the hidden meaning, if you prefer) of all these respectable masterpieces, she interprets after them and in their absence, she exhibits their other scene. The trick is in the after, in the pirouette of a reworking after. For the performer also plays freely on these instruments to invent, after the event, a different orchestration of bodies. Without self-conscious borrowing. The cruel and joyful law of inheritance, a legacy of generations, an imitation of tradition, a feigned fidelity. What she wanted to avoid, you see, avoid above all, and although she might appear to have cited what might for convenience be called certain representations, stagings, imprints of woman—in their turn diverted or repatriated by interpretations imprinted with all the shades of rhetoric, all the affective colorings you care to mention (ironic, tender, compassionate, rebellious, curious, etc.): she wanted to avoid citing/summonsing woman to

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appear, which is a serious matter, through her representation, themselves represented by painters and lawyers, and thus by the voices and hands of their masters, before the tribunal of history, avoid any temptation of sententiously writing a feminist history of women, women persecuted, sacrificed, exposed, martyred, kidnapped, levied, observed, objectivized, drowned alive, a parallel one, though in pictures, to the kind of history being published all over the place nowadays under the feminist label (all worthy enterprises, certainly, and necessary enough though a little dogmatic: who is recounting whose history, from what point of view, using what language, which axioms, which archives, what other body? Who dreams there? Who goes there? And why not invent something different, a different body? a different history? a different interpretation?). In this sense there can be heard, above the murmur of her drawings, a gentle and disarmed critique of the sententious authorities who preside over the great specialist histories of women or even of the representation of women, the grand and confident narratives about the way things are, and the history of representation, and men and women, and their appearance stabilized in a picture, with no concern for what happens to line or color in a scene, myth, or story in which a woman figures as anything more than a figurante or extra, when she becomes or creates a figure in her own right, when she sees herself drawn or painted—and painting and drawing, which of course means, among other things, that she sees herself looking out, looking at others, through the window that a mirror remains (though from neither voyeurism nor narcissism: I am thinking rather of an echo-sounding, the trick played by the nymph Echo about which I will say a word or two, or less, later on). And then there is so little of the signing artist about her, the sort who makes authoritarian claims about copyright, patermaternity, legitimate title to representations: she mingles with the crowd, one woman among many in this immense history of women, treated as a history of painting. And quite innocently, lost in the tide of visiting women, she plots something like Venus’s flight, between sea and sky. Inventing a different citational logic,3 she cites all those great captains of representation, those authorized painters, but without actually summoning them, either, to appear, without subjecting them to the double violence of a female judgment. She pokes gentle fun (up her sleeve, as it were) at magisterial representation, mocking its familiar corpus. Perhaps in ironic homage: it’s time to take another look at all that. She only X-rays ( crisscrosses with X-rays, for her work is always crossing) this procession of women after

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having laughingly stripped it bare, always close to water, along the bank, at a particular moment in the bathing ceremony (Venus or Susannah, Venus again and again . . .), just look. Without being (too) disrespectful to them, she takes on even the most venerable among them. What does it mean to be venerable? Even once the meaning of to venerate has been clarified (venerare: to adorn with graceful and seductive attributes, or request respectfully; venerari: venerate, revere, request), we still need to explain what someone is doing when, like her, they attack what is venerable. She is after it, but that’s no simple matter. In this (hi)story of persecution, Narcissus, the bewitched painter, is also hunted by his own image, excluded and pursued: he too is persecuted. If we wish to understand what she is doing, smuggling in, when she cites, we must not forget mythology, on which she draws so deeply. Remember also the Metamorphoses (perhaps the most resonant work in this context), and among them, the trick played by sublime Echo. She too pretending to cite, and not far from that same water (water again) which heard the moans of Narcissus as he lay dreaming, to the death, of secession, secession from himself, mad enough, lucid enough to wish to be separated at last from that other which he loves, distanced from his own body, that is, his image reflected between two waters. Love of self as other in separation, that is the elementary solution. Water is not unconnected with this crisis and its solution. Love in fact, according to and after absolute secession, after absolution, even: O utinam a nostro secedere corpore possem! 4 So what did Echo do? What had she already tried to do, having been condemned by jealous Juno never to speak first but to repeat only a little, the end, the very end, of what that other person said, and therefore to cite a fragment, and offcut even? She had made play with her tongue, impeccably, as a performer at once docile and brilliant. She pretended to cite Narcissus, from the point where a repeated fragment turned back into a complete sentence, one invented, original and spoken (for anyone able to understand ) in her own name of Echo, without giving any evidence of her having originated the words, which would have exposed her to divine vengeance. For example, when Narcissus says, “Is there no one here?,” she replies, “One here!” (“ecquis adest?” et “adest” responderat Echo). Or again: “Come here, let the two of us meet!,”

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to which Echo responds: “. . . us meet!” (“huc coeamus” ait . . . “coeamus,” rettulit Echo).5 Among the initial resonances within me of what seems like the trace of an echo, I was surprised to find myself daydreaming, thanks to all these women in the picture, precisely, about the ending of that endless word aquarelles.6 What I found myself responding to first, though confusedly I must say, to the point of losing my footing, was the water ( aqua) in which all these bodies shimmer, swim, fly or glide. And the way they float like a thin film between two layers of water. I have long sought the flotation-line of these amphibious bodies. A floating of so many singular women, not so much rocked by the waves on the sea, nor sinking into the abyss of an ocean which swallows up bodies for good, but perhaps slightly dripped-on, as she might say,7 like a rain-dropped painting, or tears dripping or sperm, whalesperm perhaps or sperm-whale sperm,8 no, but between two waters that are also the same, the same element (“If I were an element, I’d be a liquid . . . a whale . . .”), birth-waters first (the amniotic fluid running down a newborn’s body as he stubbornly, blindly, gropingly hunts between the woman’s legs for the milky way), then (as it were) the only, the same water in which a photographic negative swims—when the revelation trembles with verity, trembles in the whole of its body and offers us the hazy, still unstable image, floating like a dream-association, a reflection of what is soon to be fixed on film: the imminence of that which is soon to be revealed in person, skin deep, remaining to be seen, or else, for— Like that of Narcissus but in a quite different way (exposed women’s bodies are short on narcissism), those bodies are untouchable and I have only words, fragments of words in suspension (Colette Deblé: “I paint to avoid speaking. I hurt people with words. Whether you are assaulted by words or left in want of them, language always involves power.”)9 Are these bodies intangible, then? They would already be so in their ghostly form, their being as representations—but in addition, what a strange relationship they entertain with representation itself! They perhaps undo it entirely by representing representations of women’s bodies: a whole complex plot. The imprint of each drawing seems impregnated, pregnant, imbued, saturated, with memory: if you can just look at the soft blotting paper in a different light, you see a new verity in its spreading, moving, slowly expanding forms: an invasion of flesh. The swell drowns, overflows and absorbs the drawn line, but without ever doing violence to it, rather, granting it the favor of a new transparency. A favor it grants also to itself.

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And yet: beyond actual contact, but open to that absolute tactful touch, caresses that touch without really touching, these inaccessible bodies remain singular, indeed, absolutely alone, solitary, insular, but they invent their singularity as much as they are given it by insistent repetition. On the one hand, because they belong to a series—a gallery, a wing of a museum exhibiting certain canonical representations of woman in painting, no, more than one woman, for the series never dissolves the singular or the plural into something capitalized like Woman in Painting. On the other hand, because they cite, reproduce and invite us to think about, in their irrepressible emergence, from their earliest generation, the essence of engendering, which is what we call reproduction. Birth waters, as we were saying (reproduction, generation), but also basin, pool, glass and window-pane, drinking glass, shop window, house window and rain, shower through the window, photographic developing bath (technical reproducibility thanks to the writing of light: so develop your photos in amniotic fluid from now on!). Series, citation and recitation in no way compromise the unicity of each picture, of each woman. What does this serial citation, this sericitation, involve? What does it mean to cite, hallucinate, solicit, in painting? Inevitably tampering with the original, manipulating it, embarking on a new hand-to-hand encounter, giving birth to a new body, in labor—bringing out the truth-effect of the old body. Something different from an unconscious. Something quite new. Rescued from the waters. But still dancing in some marine element. Weightless. The world of these women has silently left the earth behind. Venus’s flight. Quite different again. Secession. Dissidence. Now she wanders like a seaplane lost in the Milky Way. I should like to take my time explaining, working around to, the situation words reduce you to when they busy themselves around inaccessible bodies. First, by what sign can we sense the force of a drawing, its exposed force of course, the force of its exposition, and therefore its vulnerability, stepping back already, and its extreme fragility? Perhaps, among others, by the quality of the silence it commands. So, does a drawing enjoin us not to name? Not to name what? Here, for instance, what they still call a body, a woman, the specific/clean body of a woman. The first sin would be to rush to these words in order to name particular drawings of women. And say: here, present and correct, drawn, signed and designated by a woman who

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knows how to make play with them, are some women’s bodies, reproduced or represented after canonical stagings in Western history, right from the earliest prehistory of painting, etc. And history would then begin over again and a great, venerable history would fall back into its prehistoric infancy. The first sin because in general whenever evil is (ill-)named, it is always, by definition, a body (not the other or the opposite of soul, mind, consciousness, no, a unique body, an “extended psyche,”10 in the words of Freud, something absolute (unbound, alone, analyzed, absolved ), something all the more difficult to express in its secret intimacy for the fact that it is a sex but with no opposite: a sex has no opposite, you see, that’s the truth and we must manage to get used to it, or fall into its trap). And if woman’s body is more of a body and therefore more ill-named (such might perhaps be the plot of this exhibition, the knot of an intrigue that the artist narrates, analyzes, or silently unknots), the reason is that this memory of representation, this academic gallery of femininity, has perhaps worked it all out in advance, for and against her verity: hiding her by exhibiting her, doing violence to her by imposing respect and taboo. Colette Deblé’s irony can only play off one verity against another: in a rain shower or in the bath, she de-picts, dressing up and undressing, undoing painting and quickly redoing it differently, making others see what she sees through her eyes, through the pane of her window or the eye-piece of her telescope. For she is a visionary of bodies, a little mad, hallucinating a little, bursting out laughing at each appearance, as if she did not expect to see, can hardly believe, what she has just seen, by looking through what she sees before her—and what you see here: through, looking through the amniotic citation, the echo-(ultra-)sounding freeze-frame or the oneiric X-ray hallucination, you see through, through what she gives you to look at, for instance Leda slurping up Veronese’s swan, which she has taken in her mouth, like a piece of blotting paper, or again (as if it were another visitation) Lorenzo Lotto’s levitating Venus, or the Three Graces by Rubens in the Prado, that cinematography of a round dance, of more than a dance, for they are still swinging and dancing now. Note that she sees through, sees what she is seeing through/across, through herself, through the crossing, swimming across, the “crossing” that is her every action, her ductus or her genius, her powerful foible as an artist who paints and draws. She writes and describes her own foible, her delight in crossing, out in deep water, crossing through—and that is how she puts citation to work in painting, citations seen as a labor like childbirth. The labor of parturition. Recollected or anticipated in the pregnant forms of the generations. Her travail through, but through elements with apparently no resistance: air and water for a flying fish, the sensual displacement of an ocean

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mammal at once hugely heavy and infinitely light. These elemental things, these milieux, are even more difficult to talk about and show because they are diaphanous and perfectly simple, ephemeral as a shower of rain. They are a grammar of the generations. A sericitation: “. . . carrying on this labor day after day, I find myself carrying on a daily diary through art history.”11 And again (this time the capitals are C.D.’s, she always capitalizes the word “T HR OUGH”): I have often experienced the violence of passing time at the thought that my mother expelled my daughter THROUGH me, as art history pushes forward THROUGH each artist. My project is to visualize this push THROUGH the patient and ambiguous work of citation, because it both erases and at the same time underlines one’s personal efforts: 888 drawings12 are a long road which I way-mark with self-portraits in front of a window, not as a way of signing my work, but simply to put down landmarks to the effect of work.13

She does work. A lot, all the time. Everything passes, everything happens, through labor (“through patient and ambiguous labor,” “the effect of labor”), through the double operation of which we spoke earlier, and which precisely involves a double crossing, once to imprint, once to impregnate. Labor in view of, with a view to seeing, and so to birth, bringing into the world by shedding light. But this work is also play. She plays—with (a necessarily absent) authority. How does the self-portrait re-engender itself through citation? What is the glass of that window-mirror made of, through which you, the other, appear? “T HR O U GH the revolving scenery, we arrive at the ‘ladyablogues.’ An interior soliloguy [sic], I speak to myself THRO UGH me, you speak to yourself T HR OU GH you and me.”14 Toward you and me. Say Echo in your own name. It is a little as if Narcissus, too late (but time is no longer irreversible for this story or myth), just at the moment of saying “Farewell” (Vale) and sinking into the waters of the Styx in which he was still contemplating his own image, had not only heard what Echo had said, but understood its meaning. As if the lesson came home to him after the farewell. A beyond of the voice, like a painting lesson, beyond the farewell that, it continues to reflect or cite ( . . . dictoque vale “vale” inquit et Echo).15 Translated by Andrew Rothwell

To Save the Phenomena For Salvatore Puglia

This text appeared in the journal Contretemps no. 1 (Paris: T.R.A.N.S.I.T.I.O.N., L’Âge d’Homme, Winter 1995): 14–25, together with photographs of works by Salvatore Puglia in the following order: Ashbox (1987, 148 x 102 cm, watercolor); Intus ubique (1986, 50 x 64 cm, watercolor); Als Schrift (1987, 70 x 100 cm, tempera); Hors d’attente (1985, 160 x 110 cm, watercolor); Présages (1984, 24 x 34 cm, watercolor and Indian ink); Croce e Delizia (1986, 20 x 28 cm, watercolor); Vie d’H. B. (1982–83, 24 x 30 cm, inks and paper collage); Aurora (1985); and Orto petroso (1988, photograph). After doing some work as a researcher in the field of history, Salvatore Puglia (born 1953) began exhibiting his montages in 1985 at the Galerie Adeas in Strasbourg. Since then, his activity as an artist has always involved investigations into the documentary sources of images, in keeping with a practice that considers history’s traces as matter to be transformed. In parallel with his exhibitions, he has published texts in the following journals: Quaderni storici, Détail, Linea d’ombra, Revue de Littérature Générale, Vacarme, Lo Sciacallo, Mediamatic, Issues in Contemporary Culture and Aesthetics, and Any. He has edited the collective work Via dalle immagini / Leaving Pictures (Salerno, 1999) and organized two exhibitions: “Iconografie transitorie” (Rome, 1999) and “Memoria e storia” (Naples, 2001).

“To save the phenomena” (sôzein ta phainomena), or else “to save the appearances.”1 The phrase is attributed to Aristotle, but he probably never signed it literally [dans sa lettre même]. One should one day (but when?) revisit the prejudice of attributions, as one says or does in painting, but this time, and with the benefit of hindsight [selon l’après-coup], with regard to what

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Figure 3: Salvatore Puglia, Vie d’H. B., 1982–83, 24 x 30 cm, ink and collage on paper. Courtesy of the artist.

philosophers actually say. They will have signed some rather unbelievable philosophemes.2 Sometimes the philosopher writes for this blindness of the future perfect to the future perfect—in which he would like to rest. For having said more than he seems to have believed. Commenting on the De Coelo, Simplicius transcribes this almost untraceable formula, “to save the phenomena,” in Latin, a language that we need when we venture a hypothesis about an Italian painter: salvare phaenomena, salvare apparentias. One often relies on it when speaking of a hypothesis, precisely; one that, whether true or false, but preferably hardly credible, is still useful to predict, calculate, even explain the effects, after the fact [ après coup], anachronistically, at last to render an account of [rendre compte] what appears ( phainomenon), in the radiance of the phainesthai and the brilliance of the visible. This will be a bit the purpose and above all the imprudence of what I am about to attempt now, the randomness of which increases with my hypothesis from the fact that the sayable here seems to belong to the visible and, always inscribed in its time, would not be able to justify any claim

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to speak of anything whatsoever without being part of it. Without being at the same time part and parcel of it [ partie prenante]. Just to see at the same time what this gives. This safeguard of the phenomena, Aristotle certainly had none of it [ne l’entendait. . . pas de cette oreille], busy as he no doubt was having it out with Plato’s eidos (we shall also do so in our own way). In the Eudemian Ethics and in the Metaphysics, Aristotle speaks rather of “rendering”3 ( apodidonai) the phenomena. And this vocabulary of restitution, of reproduction, or of representation brings us nearer to what has always been attributed to the mimetic essence of painting. Let us not forget that the apodosis in question, as much as it speaks of acquittal, speaks also of the exchange of the gift, the countergift, thanksgiving [le rendre-grâces], attribution, accountability [ le rendre-compte], explanation, interpretation, translation, the delay between generosity and calculation. It would come and paint following [ après] the gift and “after” [ d’après] it. But we are no longer in Greece. A hypothesis could guide my “saving the phenomena”: in light of an event that would perhaps no longer inhabit the Greek world, even though it exhibits its language. Or, in spite of so many appearances, the Roman world: for I will stop neither in pre-Christian nor in Christian Rome. The simulacrum of a soteriology, this doctrine of a salvation by the Holy Savior ( sôterion), will first lead us toward the risk taken by whoever in painting divests himself of Greek, Jewish, and Roman elements. What can, in Europe, the one who takes the risk of being everything save [sauf] Greek, and Jewish, and Roman still save? What salvation can be expected for him? And from him? Let us draw and now give other forms to the same question. How to gather ashes in painting? To put it otherwise, how to keep [ garder] them while looking at them [regardant], and for that very thing that they just are, ashes? In a word, how to save them? Will it be by the word, “just” the right word [ le mot, juste], and by the word “ash”? Let us observe this word, it must be seen at work and heard resounding in Ashbox, for instance. Ash is in Ashbox just as the ash is in the urn. We shall perhaps use this word as Ariadne’s thread through the maze of this exhibition, a thread that we shall hold loosely and that we shall follow from afar, like the hypothesis, with a somewhat distracted gaze. This ash word, we were saying, must [il faut] at once, at the same time, be seen and heard. Is

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there a being-at-the-same-time (hama, syn), is there a once for the being at once of this must? Ashbox, one of his English words, is the title of a watercolor (1987) by Salvatore Puglia, an Italian painter no doubt, as both his name and first name indicate, from Rome, I think, but whose work puts into play, or if you prefer puts to work, various foreign languages: Greek, German, French, sometimes English. How can one paint in several languages? What can painting have to do with translation? With a translation that would no longer consist in restitution, according to apodosis? And what do proper names become in painting? It is too early to ask this. Ashbox is not only a title on the edge of the picture, outside it. The letters of the word are also inside ( intus), in the picture, mixed with the ashes, just below the man, a small man, the small bit of a man kept, gathered, intact [entier] in short, in what could make one think, thus giving it to be seen (intueri, but this is also merely an intuition on my part), of humanity’s urn, body, psyche, and language thus comprised, if not saved. Ash is everywhere (ubique), outside and inside (intus)—therefore already in another picture— just thanks to the word, whose body can no longer be confined in a single space, to the word that thus gives place to be thought. And the box of this ashbox represents just very little, but at once the burial place, the place for mortal remains [ dépouille], a sober pavan for a deceased infante, in other words, for a painting whose words speak without speaking, so quietly, very quietly, the artifice of a limit between the inside and the outside, the word “inside” and the word “outside,” the body and the soul of words, the outside and the inside at the border of all language. The proper name in short, as we’ll see. And when we say the outside of discourse, we don’t mean its external appearance but what exceeds it absolutely. Metonymy, rhetoric of the holy sepulchre in the painting of the twenty-first century. Only an urn can give the limit, confinement, exclusion, separation to be thought, all that saves while losing its voice. Ashbox is obviously a present, but it does not give anything that presents itself. It gives itself out of time just as the unconscious does its work, the only condition for a gift, if there ever is any: the absolute crypt of what never returns, the selfsame ash loves me [ la cendre m’aime].4 How to save thought in painting? But how to save thought without painting? Just by the word? One wonders whether a painting can ever divest itself [ se dépouiller] of letters, if not of the word. The words steal away [ s’emblent].5 One believes in their simulacrum. By themselves always they feign the proper name, they emblematize the unheard-of of the very thing that holds for one, only one [un seul, une seule].

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So they seem [semblent] without assembling [sans (se) rassembler]. In painting, they divide themselves and are shared, they no longer identify (themselves), precisely, because while looking at us, they resemble one another [ se ressemblent]; they do not sound, they look like words,6 which does not prevent them from resounding. One thinks them at last because one no longer recognizes them. They dislocate their own duration as they say the place. They give (rise to) place [ donnent lieu], they give this place in silence, for a word seems to keep quiet all of a sudden while exploding when it “enters” into painting, as one says with words and as one should from now on no longer say, when the intruder [intrus] explodes into ( intus) the mute space of the picture, when it explores it curiously, with the anxious curiosity of whoever still wants to save that of which he divests himself. It explodes it without ever allowing painting any longer, well almost, to expose itself, provoking, convoking, invoking in it the implosion of the very voice that gives us to think while giving (rise to) place. Is it not so? [N’est-ce pas?] 7 We inhabit, do we not,* the ashes of such an old history, when with Socrates and Plato, S. and P.,8 the thinkable or the intelligible (noeton) was heralded in the figure of the visible (eidos). A figure that may not be a metaphor. A merely apparent paradox, and whose appearance must indeed be saved: this is the condition for what could be called “logonomy,” the very law of the logos. S. and P. had thought thinking under the law of daylight, and yet this optical assignation was not ephemeral. It will last until the end of the sun, which, let’s not forget it, does not merely give us to think while giving us to see, not only engenders but also burns and reduces, will reduce everything to ashes. Can one save the ashes of the eidos? What’s new under the sun, since S. or P.? The question will resound on its own in the night of this labyrinth. His words seem to keep quiet, but at the heart of a howl. They are madmen pointing the finger at reason. They have just lost the normally so-called discursive function, now they are running wild: either in their alphabetical phonics, or in their graphic relentlessness, in the aphony of the line. But the sound and the line can no longer be heard, they no longer reflect each other. They go out of tune [se désaccordent], they are discordant with one another but justly (Dike¯: Eris). The normally so-called discursive function, the old intelligibility is not really lost, the “deceased” [ la défunte] is safe and sound, a survivor gone astray in the landscape, a still eloquent yet deposed ruin.

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Pompeii lovers, their sublime graffiti. A monument in which the memory of what saves decreases in time [en mesure]. Music. So it sounds [On dirait], does it not?* Such a work can first of all be read, can it not,* like a funeral homage to the old couple: not to S. and P. but to Dichtung und Wahrheit9 and perhaps better still to Dichten und Denken, to the alliance of poetry and thought. This alliance could be sealed only with the advent of the untranslatable. The poetic is what gives us to think language in the place where the absolute idiom, that is to say, the proper name, at once calls for and limits translation. The poem is the untranslatable, the signature of the proper name, the singular event in what this or that metaphysics would call the “sentient body of the letter.” Admittedly. But this untranslatable is never absolute between languages, it can be so only between language and nonlanguage. It is this untranslatable, therefore the thought of the poematic itself, that the inscription of language in space, in nonlanguage, can deliver at last, give, if not render and save. No poem will give one to think the essence of poetry, the untranslatable [intraductible] history of a proper name, as a certain putting into work of words in the mute space of painting can attempt, if not definitely achieve. You will say, won’t you,* well, this is what poets do, they space out the words’ sonorous visibility. Yes, this is what I wanted to say: then they are also painters of the family of the one whom I am speaking about. The essence of Dichten/Denken is to be thought in space, isn’t it;* it spaces itself out “before” gathering in the ashboxes of spoken poetry (Ashboxes is also the title of a series exhibited in 1988) . . . For it must be said, as long as the multiplicity of languages, Babel in a word, as long as the tower is held in language, as long as it entowers [s’entoure] and surrounds itself with words, it leaves beyond reach the ruthless gravity and the disconsolate chance of space, of space played against time, forever: the absolute untranslatability of sight-speech [parole-vue] out of time, of writing as such. And, therefore, of such and such a proper name, this one. As long as it entowers itself, as long as it rises in the midst of the word, in the element of the hearing-oneself-speak, it has time. It gives itself

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time to go around [ faire le tour]. It has history on its side, and the odysseys of translation. A monument of nostalgia, Phoenician too, like the alphabet, Babel raises [élève] the hardened ashes. It raises them (like those children who are taught to read history) and arises from [relève de] their scattering. Ashbox is something else. Absolutely untranslatable, not because it is mute (a proper name is pronounced, is it not*) but because it keeps words outside words. In itself but outside words, this funeral urn suspends man in a memory of letters that exceed him, downward, with all their size, held aloft in the colored matter of a language, the English language, the title once confined in the heart of the thing, the ash box, the other thing I was speaking about: in the ashtray of language, the selfsame dust loves me.10 Hoc est meum corpus: without soteriology, without assumption, see me speaking to you, see my name backward. “I see myself dying” does not exclude, quite the contrary, that never, never ever, never in full daylight do I see myself dying. Each time I see you, for example, I know, I think that I know that one of us both will see the other one dying and never will we die together as we do—therefore—of this very knowledge, at each moment. Never will I see that very thing—that I see permanently, such is the eidos of what needs thinking, is it not:* the losesave at once, in one single noun that is a verb. Losesave who? Salvatore Puglia, for example. But how to aim? How to see the uniqueness of this example without losing it immediately in the generality of a concept and in what binds the name to intuition or the logos to the eidos? Salvatore Puglia inscribes the other. Does he really inscribe, S. P.? Apparently, he by himself gives himself over to inscription: incision, insertion, stamp [ frappe], typography, impression, imprint, mark [ griffe], graft [ greffe], parenthetical clause, inclusion. He types the voice, the verb, the word and the nouns, the noun “name” for example, and in Greek: see onoma between brackets, in the righthand bottom corner of the watercolor Intus ubique (1986), where the name’s noun seems not to oppose but to associate itself between brackets to the thing’s noun ( pragma) in space, in the site that seems to have always preceded said inscription of the saying [ladite inscription du dire], given place, and opened itself to the in or to the intus of penetrating inclusion, according to what is already a European setup (the triangle of the Greek, Latin, and Germanic languages). No, space does not precede. It is not a preexisting form or box in which one would confine the verb’s tense or the contents of words. The boxing-in [emboîtement] is born of intussusception, it opens in the penetration of an intuition through the generality of the

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concept-word, of the term that opens and terminates the box. Intussusception brings to appearance, together with the European setup, writing as such (Als Schrift, we’ll come back to this, is the title of another picture (1987), about which we could say that it belongs to the same series), writing, as writing, of a colored, originally chromatic spacing, in the very implosion of words and names, beyond any possible translation. Beyond said,11 precisely. Because it is untranslatable and singular, it gives us to think what gives place: to Europe and to translation. Before Babel but without the very horizon of a totalizing summing-up. There is even no more gathering [recueillement] (Versammlung) or possible collection [recueil], no more logos. Imagine the prayer, the one about which Aristotle said, beyond appearances to be saved or not, that it was neither true nor false, by which he meant the prayer in front of a burial place without gathering, and the blessing it calls for. I name ash thus, beyond any pure poetry and any reine Sprache, a putting-oftruth-into-work according to the “origin of the work of art.”12 Let’s observe. And keep silent.13 Let our gaze keep watch near Intus ubique (1986). The title’s words, instead of being simply outside, are planted, stuck [ piqués], as for an injection, at the black pointed angle of the two U’s, in the very body of the picture. In the heart of the picture but above what resembles the heart, toward the lower part of the heart, which also assumes the pointed form of a U, a man with a dagger, a small bit of a man, as in Ashbox. Is he rather going to sacrifice the beast? A Greek? A Jew? Place your bet: Abraham sacrificing Iphigenia, perhaps, the random reading of a card, a queen or a jack of hearts, the heart in the heart, with arrows and syringes on all sides: the heart is everywhere, the inside spills overboard, it is repeated abyssally, and its diastole is a flood that irrigates (like the heart, it is a vein). Its rhythm regulates the whole surface, it coils itself within the volume of a muscle, which muscle beats with so many words, pulse after pulse. At the bottom of the heart, there is still a heart tattooed with thing-words. Pragma (onoma), the thing (name): together, they break in and out, on the lefthand side. As a result, with the outside irrigating the inside and the inside pouring outside, the abyssal part becomes bigger than the whole that is a part of it, the pictorial rhetoric bigger than plain rhetoric and the metonymy of the heart is a bottomless figure. There are also indecipherable words (for me) on the righthand side (Ad deos), Latin words. The hyperbabelization of Europe on a drip. Isn’t* the heart memory? You do not understand anything, like me, you are delirious. But if you do not save yourself and run, you will take the outside by heart. It drips into the whole space and thus renders life unto you.

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Of course, I won’t tell you the truth—at least the truth of this signature in progress. Not only because it is in progress, a progress for which the end of a telos is beyond reach (it does not even wait for it, it does not call it any longer; the very call, S. P. incisenerates it [ l’incisenère], and by titling a picture Hors d’attente (Beyond Wait) (1985), rather than, as the French idiom would have it, hors d’atteinte (beyond reach), perhaps it colossalizes the not merely phallic form of the absent I through this small difference). I won’t tell you the truth because the order of truth, Europe itself, supposes, does it not,* some submission of the visible to the sayable, of the phenomenon to the legomenon, even if the truth of the poem (aletheia, hermeneia) anticipates judgment (homoiosis, adaequatio). Truth founds or terminates random hyperbabelization. It boxes it into the blue mirage of a metalanguage. Not that the work of S. P. is truthless. It is one truth itself, by itself, the simulacrum of a signature, the light of the phantasma in which a signature of the proper name always consists—and a proper name can be said only in painting— like a salutation or salvation [salut]: salve, vale, khaire, hello [salut], good day, be well, enjoy, run for safety, farewell. But in order to give one to think the truth of truth, it opens the hiatus, the chaos slightly, the bocca della verità that shows itself and says, doesn’t it,* open-mouthed (khainô), the stuttering yawning gap in which truth can be said and, isn’t it so,* a mouth can call. On the bottom of this chasm, an incessant upheaval. It gives everything over to randomness [ l’aléa]. Truth remains for me, does it not,* a casual encounter. I say only how I go to meet S. P. No appointment, this is at least the appearance to be saved, had been given to us. By no third party at least. By crowds or by peoples but outside time, that is to say, by no liable third party. The relation of this signature to what it does not sign, to what it does not do but lets do, to what it does not say but without keeping it quiet, is for me anything save negative. Safe from all negativity, safe at last, safe to give / save for giving thanks [sauf pour rendre grâces] to that very thing. For example, this or that signature interrupts genealogies, it renders them manifest without rendering them unto themselves, in the cruel play of the saying [ du dire] that de-monstrates or of the drawing that retracts [ dédit], design(ate)s, pseudo-speudonymizes14—and dedicates [ dédie] (do the Sagen, Zeigen, Zeichen, Zeichnen still give the measure, the cadence, the time of this anachrony?). Europe’s mother tongues then stop laying down the law, one thinks of those calligraphies of quite a different order, alphabetical or not: Arabic, Chinese, or Japanese calligraphy. One cannot see them, therefore

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one thinks about them. With the anamnestic interruption of this genealogy, there is no orphanage, rather the expulsion of a birth, as if a mother suddenly not recognizing her child, unable to name him, or herself become a virgin again, then the proper name abruptly streams out of oblivion, ready to plunge back in. Space begins there, where, divested of everything, it stops being the medium of the time needed to translate. It immediately incinerates language. Ash block. It will have first electrocuted the locution. Transfixed with cold and fire, the mother tongue exposes itself in its body, through the parted lips, barely open, set back [en retrait], the withdrawal of written language as such, als Schrift. The work that bears this name, Als Schrift (1987), signposts (perhaps, does it not*) all holy scripture, and literally (by which I mean, thanks to letters) all the history of salvation [salut], from Genesis to the Apocalypse, not the alpha and omega but as a discoloration of the red ochre, that is to say, of the miniature, the phi, the omega and the psy. One can complete, or not, in the Greek lexicon, in all the alphabets in which we are foraging. The Als says the “as such” of holy or profane writing, scriptures that are thus exposed, but perhaps also the simulacrum of the als ob hidden in the ochres, the fiction or the figure ( comme si, as if) of what appears as such in the retrait of the remark and can be said only according to the image. Here is what gives us to think while giving something to see, to think what is seen and to see what is thought, where they no longer let themselves be disarticulated because they hold or, rather, move on the articulation, and blink, in the instant (Augenblick), from one to the other without consensus, outside common sense and time, without co-belonging or Zusammengehören. Words keep their eyes open, painting all the time keeps them shut, intus ubique, the inside is everywhere. Meantime [Entretemps] without time. What’s new under the sun, we were asking? What S. P.’s signature seems to assign for the future, and which is not the truth, but only the als ob of truth, can be gathered it seems in five propositions that I am uttering in the terse style of negative theology (gods’ eyes [les d’yeux] in me, an atheistic proposition to scandalize atheism). 1. The spacing of the verb, its taking into sight [ prise en vue] is no longer a graphic or pictorial integration of discourse. The latter is not comprehended in a larger or more powerful set; it is not taken, only left, in the state of a legacy abandoned to the gaze [regard ], to aleatory safekeeping [ garde], given over to chance or the encounter, to experience as a wandering, at random.15

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2. The putting into work no longer pertains to collage. The latter still posed, apposed, juxtaposed, or superposed several identities, chunks that remain whole because they are what they are, identical to themselves. Follow the carrier pigeon and see what Omens (Présages, 1984) show, say, predict, sign or signal, cite and send in more than one language, from (Büchner/ Lenz’s?)16 fragment to the child with the slingshot at the letter [ petit frondeur à la lettre]. 3. This writing no longer renders. No more exchange. No more circle or spherical time. It is no longer a representative calligraphy, it exceeds restitution through the image, the mimicry of a descriptive graphopoetics that would bend a sentence to an order of things, just as the lines of Apollinaire’s “It’s Raining”17 can simulate an oblique shower of these very words, “it’s raining”—and other calligrams of the same kind. 4. There’s nothing of the “rebus” about this, this trivial perversion of phonetic writing, when things (res) take the sound value of their own name to form eloquent pictograms. 5. About the spacing of the word [verbe] that was in the beginning, one can no longer say that it grafts or splices the music of the sonorous body onto an extended body, or the time of a speech onto the synchrony of a surface. It carries beyond any organic or genetic metaphor. Indeed, such a metaphor still dreams life, and of an integral body. It fantasizes the one-body to reappropriate, the “this is my body” that has been haunting all of our painting, for the last 2,000 years it has thus wanted to save itself in the deictics of its own signature (the jouissance of Ecce Homo, self-portrait, autobiography, Croce e Delizia, 1986). Beyond metaphor itself and metonymy, beyond any rhetoric of the image or, as its name indicates, rhetoric of the word, in other words, is it not,* just rhetoric in short. The spacing of words and letters “as writing” cannot become the object of a rhetoric. It stages rhetoric, and all of a sudden, the latter loses sense of itself. Through the words, space is not mute or blind but it becomes the jalousie, the “blind.”18 It glimpses in-between [entrevoit]: the words’ half-closed eyelids, with eyelashes, eyebrows, pupils, lenses.19 The eyes, like these words, are color. Which they change. Listen to it. Why speak here about S. P.’s halftone sets [simili-ensembles]? I call him thus not in memory of Socrates and Plato, or of the Spiritus Sanctus, or of the Self-Portrait,20 or of the Primal Scene, but rather of the formal resemblance

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of a letter, W, with the wings of a wasp, Wespe. We know, don’t we,* what a Wolf-man did to strip it of them. And in SP’s pseudo-autobiographical or pseudonymous work, there is, resounding in French like Ashbox, one Vie d’H.  B.21 (1982–83), Henry Brulard, alias Beyle, alias Stendhal, with English words, a date in a journal perhaps (Monday 14),22 other “Memories of Egotism” for this Frenchman, this Italian, this Englishman, this peninsular doppelgänger. These halftone sets are open-ended, they run over series, are run as so many risks. But each of them already bears within itself a sort of open seriality, a multiplicity, an internal distraction that forbids the gathering to oneself and first of all rests on the de-hierarchization of the relations between the thinkable, the sayable and the visible, sense and form, sema (sign or grave, sign of a burial place) and soma, psykhê (that of Aurora, 1985) or soma, soul or body, spirit or letter, speech or writing, stroke or color, word or thing, life or death. Life itself loses-saves itself in it as it gives itself to be thought from its borders, from its beyond without beyond. Life and gathering—which is neither the system nor synchrony—are given to be thought from the ash’s dispersal without recourse. Not that the word becomes again a thing in turn. The thing (cause,23 chose, cosa, Ding) is already a speech, it is originally an affair ( pragma), the stake of a litigation in an assembly of speakers [causeurs] or a litigants’ summons; it is political, juridical, symbolic. The contretemps is the deconstruction of the symbolic, the symbolic in deconstruction. The gift that gives one to think does not give anything. No present [Pas de cadeau]. It no longer produces. It gives neither a thing nor a word, nothing that is a present. It gives itself without ever presenting itself, and still less representing itself. Beyond any apodosis, it no longer gives itself back. Stripped of everything, and first of all of itself, it gives us to think the whole history of history, the linguistic triangle of a Greco-Christian philosophy that bears the 2 of words and things, pose and opposition, the law as theme or thesis (thesis, nomos, Setzung, Gesetz) and, therefore, dialectic. S. P., the initialed signature of this work is, quite initially: without pose and without repose. To give-to-think the without-pose and the without-repose no longer consists in presenting or representing in the light of the image, in making the phenomenal or phantasmal als of the as such ( phainesthai, phos, phantasma, phantasia) appear in the overexposure or underexposure of a film surface. And yet another synthesis, photographic synthesis, is at stake, another writing of shadow and light, another Skia-Photographia. Spectral, is it not.* Here are two examples of it to conclude.

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The first is the series titled Orto petroso (1988). It is a photographic work, but the writing of light caught another writing by surprise, the mute cinematography of strokes first colored on stones. Planted in foreign soil (plants, seeds, atoms, milestones, tombs, monuments, semaphores, and tokens), transplanted out of expectation, the petroglyphed burial places are themselves laid out like letters on the path of a line: to be seen, read, covered in all directions, a book’s volume and surveyor’s path, palindrome of my name, boustrophedonic epitaph, cemetery and nursery, a drive arrived [ allée venue] from one knows not where, instead of an ageless garden, neither French nor English. Specters of S. P. And then, second example, the silhouetted outline of the mobile specter that, photographed by her, S. D. (Suzanne Doppelt),24 emerges as a work in homage to her shadow in the picture [ombre au tableau] that he, S. P. has just overtaken. (Such is at least my supposition, to save appearances, my appearances. I reflect, I speculate on him to find myself in him.) The stability of the picture was composed only for the time of a pose. Cinematographies on the blackboard,25 for a proof without negative.

Four Ways to Drawing

“Le dessin par quatre chemins” (its original title) appeared in the magazine Annali. Fondazione Europea del Disegno (Fondation Adami) (Milan: Bruno Mondadori Editori), vol. 1, 2005, pp. 3–5. This text first appeared in Institut du Dessin—Fondation Adami (Milan: Skira Editore, 1996), with Italian, English, and German translations in the same volume. [Trans.—A new English translation appears in this volume.]

From what Matisse, then very ill, wrote in a moment of respite one day to Aragon, I will recall only this: that in its very own gesture, in one single institution, drawing must configure while shining with all its strokes toward painting, poetry and music: I am quite pleased with myself: my trouble seems to be clearing up. . . . And so I have taken advantage of this respite from my torments to work at Painting, and I’ve produced things which allow me to hope for progress in my development. Ronsard is finished except for two or three drawings—and I’ve become close friends with Charles d’Orléans, who stays by my side. I get constant new delight from him, as when you find violets under the grass. If I were to illustrate him, it would be fascinating to seek for a graphic expression worthy of his music. I can see myself reading him early each morning, as one takes a deep breath of fresh air on rising. That’s what I did with Mallarmé.1

This was in 1942 during the Occupation, which made Aragon write one day: I pay to light a tribute of justice Motionless amidst today’s woes I paint the hope of eyes so that Henri Matisse May tell the future what man expects of it.2

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Today, it must be said that the question of drawing arguably repeats itself in an unprecedented historical configuration. The possibility and signification of drawing remain to be thought, between the hand and the machine. At the moment when this major timeless question is represented in a new figure, which is precisely that of a new experience of representation and of figuration, of the line [trait] and of technique, other institutions are required, other models of experimentation or learning, unheard-of forms of knowledge sharing, original breachings [ frayages] between disciplines, one would even say unknown exercises of community, even of friendship, beyond the simple alternative between the private and the public, the commitment of the body proper and mediation or technical reproducibility, the idiomatic gesture and industrial art, the brilliant invention and the— national and international—market. Drawing has always been more than drawing. If it has always required the draftsman’s art and technique, both being indispensable, it has always signified more and something else. To put things squarely [ carrément], in broad, angular strokes and to square things up with drawing [ mettre le dessin au carré ], here are therefore a few lines of force: to draw or design [ dessiner], to designate [désigner], to sign, to teach. Has it not always been difficult to dissociate these four ways, and to erase the attraction that these operations exert upon one another? Has it not always been impossible to think the possibility of drawing and the responsibility of the stroke without attracting it in one and the same gesture toward those, related and showing some affinity, of all that signals (toward the thing itself, the designatum of any reference and of any drawing), while itself designating and projecting (in the signature) and especially toward teaching, namely, the discipline, the organized experience of what is learnt, of what one learns oneself or of what one learns from the other, teaches the other, be it in the case of a brilliant ductus and even where the institution no longer lives up to inventive experience? Then, in the discipline, but also between disciplines and beyond, the design [dessein] or drawing [dessin] of a new institution is needed, another tradition, another transference of knowledge, the one masterfully projected here by Valerio Adami. No drawing without the adventure of this unique experience. Experience means crossing, transmission, trajectory, translation: “The Journey of (the) Drawing,”3 said Adami one day. A shore and a horizon are needed for this journey. This is how the institution Adami finally proposes to found seems to me: a systematic reflection on history and on what is at stake in drawing (in the West and in the East), a learning of graphic techniques would intersect with theorizations

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or experimentations in other spaces of (visual or nonvisual) art, technical and scientific knowledge, wherever the stroke, inscription, impression, archive in general and its old and new supports are at stake. (As for me, I would be tempted to insist in particular on the necessity of a philosophical meditation of drawing, especially from a tradition that, from Plato to Kant, Heidegger and so many others, has always sought a way of thinking as well as teaching in a reflection on the eidetic figure, representation, the line, the limit and the stroke.) Long-term teachings, seminars, lectures, shorter exhibitions, and experimentations would gather friends from everywhere. From one generation to the next, from one country or continent to the other, elective and inventive affinities would reconstitute, now around drawing, what used to be called “the psyche among friends.”4

Ecstasy, Crisis An Interview with Valerio Adami and Roger Lesgards

Originally published as Valerio Adami, Jacques Derrida, and Roger Lesgards, “Extase, crise. Troisième entretien,” in Valerio Adami, Couleurs et Mots (Paris: Le Cherche Midi éditeur, 2000), 27–45, the interview comprised several photographs of works by Valerio Adami: a lithograph made from Glas by Valerio Adami and Jacques Derrida; Ritratto di Jacques Dupin, drawing, 3 March 1973; Musica in casa (1980, 194 x 261 cm, private collection, Hamburg); Récital (1991, 198 x 147 cm); Concerto à quatre mains (1975, 243 x 365 cm, Fondo Adami collection—Institut du dessin); Il trio (1994, 198 x 147 cm, Fondo Adami collection—Institut du dessin); La Terre natale (1994, 180 x 245 cm, Fondo Adami collection—Institut du dessin); Figura in casa (1969, 198 x 147 cm, private collection, Paris); Circus Performers (1988, 147 x 198 cm); Il ruolo dell’artista è di rappresentare il tragico (1976, 198 x 147 cm, private collection, Hamburg); L. T. (Tolstoï ) (1989, 198 x 147 cm, Ellen David Weil collection, New York); La Montée à l’Acropole (1995, 194 x 260 cm, Fondo Adami collection— Institut du dessin); Viaggio in treno (1991, 198 x 147 cm, private collection, Milan); Attentato (1971, 243 x 180 cm, Fondo Adami collection— Institut du dessin); Dr Sigmund Freud (1972, 198 x 147 cm, Fondo Adami collection—Institut du dessin). Born in Bologna in 1935, Valerio Adami has maintained close relationships from the beginning with writers and artists of the Paris avantgarde. The main themes of his paintings are literature and travel, as well as the relations between poetry, music, and painting. Several philosophers have commented on his work, such as Jacques Derrida, JeanFrançois Lyotard (Que peindre? Adami, Arakawa, Buren [Paris: Éditions de la Différence, 1987]), and Jean-Luc Nancy (À plus d’un titre—Jacques Derrida. Sur un portrait de Valerio Adami [Paris: Galilée, 2007]). After studying painting at the Brera Academy in Milan, in Achille

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Funi’s workshop, between 1951 and 1954, Valerio Adami painted his first canvases related to expressionism. During his first trip to Paris (1955), he met Wilfredo Lam and Roberto Matta. He secured his first personal exhibition in 1958 in Milan, where he exhibited his works influenced by Matta. During the 1970s, Adami established himself as one of the significant representatives of New Figuration. He developed a pictorial style characterized by elaborate drawing, which uses color in order to divert or amplify it. In 1970, Adami settled in Paris, where the Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris devoted an exhibition to him. In 1985, his work also became the subject of an important retrospective at the Centre GeorgesPompidou. From 1970 to 1994, he exhibited at the Galerie Maeght. In the 1970s, his work on individual, then collective memory led him to tackle portraits of celebrities (Joyce, Freud, Benjamin). Since the end of the 1980s, he has been painting several large-scale murals for different public buildings (for the First National City Bank in Madison in 1973– 74, for the foyer-bar of the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris in 1989). He also created eight stained glass windows for the town hall in Vitry-surSeine (1985) and monumental paintings for the concourse in the Gare d’Austerlitz in Paris (1992). In 1993–94, he also completed four monumental paintings for the Park Tower Hotel in Tokyo, designed by Japanese architect Kenzo Tange. A foundation devoted to drawing was set up on his initiative in Meina, Italy, in 2001. His work has been awarded several prizes, including the Premio Internazionale di Grafica Do Forni in 2010 and the Lissone Museum of Contemporary Art prize in 2006. He is also the author of two books: Les Règles du montage. Sinopie, trans. Françoise Gaillard (Paris: Plon, 1988; SE Editore, 2000) and Dessiner. La Gomme et les crayons, trans. Jean-Paul Manganaro and Philippe Bonnefis (Paris: Galilée, 2002).

jac que s de r r i da: One day, my friend Jacques Dupin, who was working at the Maeght Foundation, offered to connect me up with a painter for a joint work, a silk-screen print mixing line [le trait], painting, and writing. I was worried and rather intimidated. We spoke about it a lot together, but I didn’t suggest any name for our collaboration. A few months later, Jacques had the idea of associating me with Valerio Adami. I wasn’t familiar with his work. rog e r le sgar ds : Which year was that?

Figure 4: Valerio Adami, Viaggio in treno, 1991, 198 x 147 cm, Milan, private collection. © 2019 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

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j. d.: In 1975. Dupin brought me some catalogues and I was immediately struck by the force, the energy of the stroke, but also by a call in the drawing—in the painting as well—to other types of writing: literary, political, “historical.” Very quickly, I noted the existence of a certain syncopated relation to the literary or political event in his work, to writings by Joyce or Benjamin, to the European revolutions of this century, to the Russian revolution, to the Berlin revolution, etc. All of that captured in elliptical, syncopated fashion, in a stroke with a most singular form. By a strange coincidence, a few hours after thumbing through his catalogues, I was fortunate to meet him at mutual friends’, rue du Dragon, where we had both been invited to dinner. This is where I saw Valerio’s face for the first time. The features [traits] of his face, his script as a draftsman, his script period—the manner in which he writes, traces letters—all of that immediately seemed to me to constitute a world, an indissociable configuration: the way his face was cut, drawn, with an energy worthy of his works, the stroke of his drawing, interrupted [césuré ], sharp, elliptical, angular, all these cuts, all these angles already seemed to me at once to draw and sign a world. All of that sort of came together as early as the first evening, within a unity of action of twenty-four hours, as Joyce would say. In less than one day: Dupin had come in the morning, and that very evening I’d made the acquaintance of Valerio. Therefore, we decided to sign a silk-screen print together. I say “together,” but Valerio did everything. A few days later, we met again in his apartment to talk about the composition. Valerio suggested to me that we start from Glas, which had appeared a year before. He chose a passage, isolated a sentence, and asked me to write it, then sign it on paper with a pencil—next, he set to work. It wasn’t long before he showed me a drawing, which soon became an immense painting in which he’d written said sentence, across a magnificent fish at the end of a hook. His work responded, as it were, to what was written in Glas. He was countersigning the passage in question, taking up an adolescent poem again, with the following line: “Glue of the pool milk of my drowned death,”1 on which I comment at length in the book. This scene is recreated, from Valerio’s phantasmatic imagery, whose work is full of fish, fishing, rods, and lines [ fils]. There is a great affinity between the tip of his draftsman’s pencil and the hook, the world of fishing, the mythology of waters, maritime legends. Besides, Valerio reproduced my handwriting absolutely mistakably and indiscernibly from the original. He has a genius for imitation. This is my writing, my signature, but in his hand. Our collaboration first resulted in a drawing, then a painting, and last a series of five hundred silk-screen prints. We spent hours together signing them near Denfert-Rochereau. Append-

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ing one’s signature five hundred times is an ordeal. Our mechanical gesture was accompanied by more or less self-analytical reflections on our respective patronyms, on our fathers’ names. A few months later, Valerio made an exhibition of drawings at Beaubourg, entitled “Le Voyage du dessin,”2 and generously asked me to write the text for the catalogue. In that text,3 I develop a—more lucid, more patient—analysis of Valerio’s art. Our friendship grew stronger, became deeper, as this joint work was proceeding—I say “joint work” but it was his work, I repeat; I was following as best I could. The following summer was our first holidays in Arona, our first Italian holidays . . . r . l.: Do you recognize yourself in Jacques’s words? Or do you have a slightly different version of what happened? vale r i o adam i : Our friendship dates from this project around Glas; the hook fished out our friendship, in a way . . . I was very struck by your face; in your face, I found the whole Mediterranean. I still remember this encounter, despite the social landscape in the background. Why did Dupin think of bringing us together? Did he think it would be interesting to bring us together? r . l.: A correspondence, perhaps. v. a.: In a recent interview, Jacques said that he also printed erased sentences. This fits in with my work as a draftsman; drawing is indeed an accumulation of erased lines. It is in this tissue of erasures that the drawing appears—a complex image, knots of a dot that becomes a line. With its knots, Glas was decisive: its reading gave free rein to a visual inspiration. The choice of this magical book, one of the most peculiar that I read in those years, wasn’t innocent. It stimulated my work on form, in the direction of allegory—a heritage from Italian culture, the representation of the universal in the human body, the reinvention of a body that is a metaphor for something else . . . In following this allegorical imagination, I’d chosen the theme of the fish, of fishing . . . j. d.: You’ve just spoken of allegory, and I too am persuaded that there are narrative elements, in any case certain affinities with narration [ récit], in all your paintings—obviously, they’re not truly narrative, but there’s always one at least metonymic allusion to a dated event. How would you otherwise articulate between them allegorical desire and narrative desire, which basically intersect in most of your works, sometimes through a mythological, literary, political, historical reference, sometimes from events in private life, which are not identifiable by collective consciousness? What do you think of the relation between allegory—“saying something else than what one says”—and a certain narrativity, albeit elliptical, interrupted, or reserved?

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v. a .: I had lots of certainties about art, but today I realized the limits of my knowledge . . . A few years ago, I’d have said that painting has a fascinating possibility to tell stories—even though, as you emphasize, my work has never attempted to tell anything. The aim was rather to use signs that themselves could represent . . . j. d.: There were no sequences but an incorporated narrative. v. a.: A narrative incorporated into the intelligible of form itself. It’s all there, between the intelligible and the non-intelligible—and form, this chemical precipitate, thus takes shape. I begin drawing with an empty head. Of course, there’s a thickness behind this emptiness—personal experience, life, philosophy, politics, art . . . I then press the pencil against the paper, I make a dot and the hand moves: this dot therefore becomes a line, this line becomes the profile of a mountain . . . It’s a path toward wonder, discovery, in direct relation with instinct and memory—instinctive memory. The hand moves because I really manage to empty myself of everything while leaving it its freedom. Freedom from the self rather than freedom for the self—one must rid oneself physically of all desire. j. d.: Since you mention the hand, it should be recalled that you’re above all a draftsman—you want to be one—and that you’re extremely respectful, sometimes to the point of intolerance, of the art and discipline of drawing. You’re also a painter, of course, but a painter for whom drawing takes precedence. A painter who wouldn’t be first a draftsman wouldn’t speak about the hand as you’ve just done. The hand itself isn’t only the organ of the maneuvers, manners, and manipulations you’ve just spoken about, but also a major theme in your drawings. I was immediately struck by the recurrence of hands in your work, in all the possible everyday gestures, and I remember a drawing titled Concerto with Four Hands in the 1970s. What won me over straightaway in Adami and enabled me to approach his painting, to enter it, if one may say so, is obviously the fact that, no matter how absolute a draftsman, and a painter, he may be, nevertheless he welcomes numerous arts, especially literature, within the space of what he signs—in which sentences, texts, characters from literature, the family of writers, Joyce or Benjamin for example, can be found. Music too, very present as a subject—there are a lot of musicians, violins, piano duets—often vibrates like a theme he would assemble, disassemble, but also like a rhythm of the drawing itself. There’s a music or a rhythm through the hand in the drawing itself. I like to see his hand as what draws, as the drawing hand, as the drawn, that is, shown hand, but also as the playing hand that imparts a rhythm, as on a musical instrument or in a conductor’s movement. Besides, his canvases are full of bars, vertical lines, strokes, arrows, knives, umbrel-

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las  .  .  . The instrumentalist and conductor of many of these arts, such is Valerio. What’s more, we both speak with our hands . . . r . l.: This is no doubt due to your Mediterranean origin, which brought you closer. v. a.: I remember an exhibition at the Louvre4 in which you’d chosen the theme of the blind—a theme with many references to the hand, as in the painting by Ribera at the Prado where a blind man caresses a Greek classical sculpture . . . As soon as one closes one’s eyes and begins to touch an object, one acquires a different knowledge of it—perhaps the true knowledge of the object, the one that’s experienced through the tactile senses. This is how the painter works. In the nineteenth century, a student at the BeauxArts proved how talented he was by drawing a hand. The hand has always been one of my obsessions . . . j. d.: You’ve insisted a lot on your mutation when you turned sixty. I wanted to know—not at all to “periodize” you—how you interpret this transformation in your work. (I met Valerio in the mid-1970s, I followed his output as the years went by while taking an interest in a less well-known aspect of his work: the output prior to 1970. Now there was a real revolution, a break, a turning point, a considerable displacement between the very first exhibitions and what stabilized at the time we met.) From then on, I won’t say that your work hasn’t changed, but that it crosses a line in the same space. v. a.: I wasn’t the one who entered a crisis, it was the crisis that entered in me . . . I’ve spent all my life working within the space of Western art—with its conception of the painting as a window. This is not the case with Eastern art, where there’s no perspective, no straight line, no anatomy treatise. I’m not saying I’m getting carried away by the appeal of another culture, even though there were affinities between the two in the Middle Ages . . . Rather, I’m saying that this different conception of culture entered in me as a crisis. r . l.: And of knowledge as well . . . Would you go as far as to pronounce the word “mystical”? v. a.: Maybe  .  .  . I’m more and more attracted by Meister Eckhart’s sermons, but it’s difficult for me to give you an answer. As for the formal evolution of my work . . . j. d.: It’s precisely the formal aspect of your work that caught my attention (and not the transformations of your culture or of your interests). v. a.: A draftsman enriches, removes, modifies every day, more than a painter could do . . . One must also speak about closed form and open form. Closed form comes from an Italian tradition whereas open form, dear to

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Rembrandt, corresponds to a different philosophical thought, to another vision of representation. The evolution of my work consists in slow formal modifications, it’s all a matter of style. But how to define it? r . l.: Ninety percent work and ten percent craftiness, Céline used to say. j. d.: You didn’t reply to my question about this break in the mid-1970s. The work prior to 1975 seems radically different in its treatment of the stroke. So what happened then? v. a.: In Western art, the divine used to be represented by a triangle. Is there, perhaps, an unconscious attempt in me to return to this form of triangle? r . l.: As Vonick5 pointed out to you last time, this evolution seems rather intellectualized. It doesn’t seem to be closely linked to history, to events at the time or even to your personal life—the fortunes or misfortunes of your private life. v. a .: It’s an organic evolution . . . j. d .: I’d like to pick up on the word “scene.”6 One can nevertheless imagine an art in which there’s no scene—you mentioned Eastern art previously, but in the West there are also landscapes, still lives without a “scene.” In most if not all of your works, there’s a scene. That is to say, a knot, the plot,7 an intrigue, something dramatic—and drama means “action”—that is played out or suspended the moment you fix it like an event. There’s the reference to a scene, the visibility of a moment when a history, a past or a future are concentrated, when something imminent is going to happen. A theater, a scene, an event. Does the triggering of a drawing obey a law? Is it the reference to a past, current, or imminent event, whether it be political, private, phantasmatic, that orients your hand at the decisive moment, just as you’re about to stop the pattern of the drawing on which you’ll then be working with the rubber, the erasure, the retouches? Or else do you welcome the possibility of a drawing without event, without a scene? v. a.: It’s the law of drawing that it should have a scene, but it doesn’t intervene at the very beginning of the work. The form evolves, changes, feels its way on its own—otherwise I couldn’t modify it so radically . . . It all begins with fear: it springs from the heart, from the head, reaches the hand, settles on the paper. Then the paper reflects what was drawn, and it all goes back to the hand, the arm, even the body’s position. It’s in this dialectic of toing and froing and corrections—imposed by the form, but also by the heart and the head—that the scene takes shape. If I decide to represent the theme of Oedipus, I then have the choice between the Oedipal

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scene in a hotel room or on the edge of a cliff, but the truth hidden behind is altogether different . . . j. d.: Previously you mentioned the hand “that orders” and seems to play a more important role than the gaze—as if the draftsman were blind, basically. The hand is, in the last instance, the master of the drawing. Nevertheless, you must probably calculate, examine the different possibilities of interpretation, of memory, before negotiating with the hand. To take the example of Oedipus again, there’s a moment when you’ll choose the hotel room rather than a reference to Sophocles or Freud. You bank on a reserve of possibilities: in your memory and in culture. How do you orient yourself then to negotiate between the different possibilities with your hand? Does it take a long time? What time? Do you sometimes have the impression of being passive before other orders from a law, one day from a private injunction, the next day from a reading, the day after from whatever symbolic authority? In short, is your answer each time different or generally the same? v. a.: Drawing is a tissue made up of weft and warp, the weft being elastic and the warp solid. The scene is the warp, but its construction is the weft, the decision of the drawing. j. d.: I’m not claiming that there’s no decision, but it’s not the same kind of decision that stops the scene. There are other possible forms of decisions. At a given moment in your work, you must stop the general structure of the drawing, even if you’ll spend a long time reworking it later. There comes a time when the basic features of the scene stop. An active interpretation then fixes things, seals them. This is where, in my opinion, the mystery truly lies. What’s happening? At what point in time do you decide? I’ve sometimes seen you working in your workshop, and each time I’ve wondered at what point in time the decision had been made: in you unconscious, in you sleeping, in you active. v. a.: Some artists think that the work is finished when they abandon it . . . It’s up to my drawing to decide whether I have nothing else to add. The composition is then accomplished, and it abandons me. j. d.: I wasn’t speaking of the end of the work, the completed work [œuvre], but of the moment when the figure stops, fixed at last, drawn, even if the artist’s work carries on, interminably . . . It will be Oedipus at the hotel rather than Oedipus on the road. v. a.: An inner voice tells me: “You’re on the right track, stop here.” j. d.: Once the canvas is completed, the drawing finished, you then enjoy a form of bliss [jouissance], a soothing feeling to the effect: “There, that’s it, that’s how it should be.” Obviously, culture, skill, competence,

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expertise—some colors are more suitable than others—play a significant role. But there’s also a satisfaction, an affect, a phantasm that provoke the blissful enjoyment [jouissance] of this color, of this form, or of this scene rather than of any other . . . Is there somebody in you that authorizes you to enjoy that form? v. a.: Yes, the truth of the line and the space conquered by it: I draw a circle, the circle becomes a sphere . . . But this conquered space isn’t an aesthetic space. j. d.: Your description emphasizes that the aim, the very form of bliss, is to conquer space. It must be occupied, invested (so many metaphors at once economic and military), and its mastery must be secured. Your stroke, whose energy I was praising at the beginning of the interview, is endowed with a force that takes hold of the space violently (in the right sense of the word ). The moment comes when the violation—the mastery in the occupation of space—achieves a kind of serenity . . . Good form is reached through this violation, this occupation, this mastery  .  .  . It’s not a purely “aesthetic” bliss and pleasure—even though, naturally, you have respect for aesthetics—but the ultimate desire for a symbolic mastery of space that ensures a kind of hold, of investment . . . I wouldn’t want to make excessive use of this metaphor, but the word “investment” seems to me appropriate: it designates a military and economic reality; strictly speaking “to invest” means to circumscribe and surround a space, without necessarily taking possession of it. The work becomes a work only from the moment when this space, occupied, invested, structured by the artist, is finally abandoned. As soon as a canvas is signed, it’s no longer your space. Once the symbolic mastery of the investment has occurred, the work is deserted, abandoned; it recedes, goes to a museum. There’s therefore this double gesture that is a painful bliss. One invests and occupies space symbolically, as well as possible. But once the good form has been found, and the utmost mastery ensured, one signs and cuts the umbilical cord. Then the work becomes one and does away with the creator. It’s another satisfaction, which is painful for it’s the time of departure and separation: the work separates from its creator. It comes from him, since he’s the author, the signatory, and leaves from him, in the sense that it separates. It proceeds from him, while freeing itself from him, while becoming emancipated. r . l.: One can understand your creative process better when one knows that your paintings are always preceded by a small-sized drawing (a pure drawing, without colors). When Valerio draws only strokes on a white paper, he already has in mind the colors he’s going to use. j. d.: These are hypotheses.

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r . l.: When Valerio begins painting his picture, he respects the drawing scrupulously. He no longer modifies any stroke. It’s like he’s held prisoner by it. And the colors, then, can play. Few contemporary artists paint in this way . . . v. a.: Some painters remain involved in their paintings and cannot dissociate themselves from them—therefore, the artist remains in the canvas. I for one abandon the painting . . . Thus, I never retouch a drawing: the drawing of a flower is different from the drawing of my cat. What lives on is the desire, in painting, to define things. In my youth, in front of Botticelli’s Primavera, I asked myself all sorts of questions—today, I discover ecstasy in it. j. d.: “Crisis” and “ecstasy” are the real leitmotivs of our interview. Each scene is a moment of crisis and describes the imminence of a tragedy, of a catastrophe, of a denouement—a catharsis, perhaps. A critical moment. In short, in terms of dramaturgy or literary history, what precedes a denouement. In each scene, the event that tenses up in the narration is a critical event. The relation of bliss—mentioned previously—in the face of this concentration, where this crisis finds its best form in drawing, is bliss, ecstasy. The artist then reaches a sort of acme, of pointed, punctual instant, and the point [ pointe] of drawing tends toward this. The Greek word for “instant” is stigmê, which is the point, the punctuality of drawing, the punctuality of the instant that is at once critical and ecstatic. As soon as the crisis finds its good form suspended, it’s ecstasy, bliss as exit from the self. “Crisis” and “ecstasy” are Valerio’s key words. He’s critical and ecstatic. v. a.: “To say nothing is no easy job at all,” as you once said. j. d.: In Of Grammatology this sentence was felt to be puzzling. I’m saying, in short, that “thought means nothing.”8 Which signifies that it means nothing, and at the same time, that it’s beyond the “wanting-to-say”; wanting and thinking aren’t the same thing. Therefore, I explained that “to mean nothing” isn’t simple; it’s no “easy job.”

Color to the Letter1

This text was published in the catalogue Atlan grand format (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), 8–27. Born in 1913 in Constantine, Jean-Michel Atlan left Algeria in 1930 for Paris, where he studied philosophy at the Sorbonne. He began painting in 1941, then was arrested in 1942, both on account of his involvement in the Resistance and because of his Jewish origins. Sent to prison, he escaped deportation to extermination camps by simulating madness. He was then committed to the Hôpital Sainte-Anne, from which he was released at the time of the Liberation. A few months later, in November 1944, he published a collection of illustrated poems, Le Sang profond, and had his first exhibition at the Galerie L’Arc-en-Ciel the following month. In 1946, Atlan met Asger Jorn, then joined the CoBrA movement. In 1955, he exhibited at the Galerie Charpentier and as early as 1953 enjoyed increasing success in Japan where he exerted an important influence on abstract Japanese calligraphy. In 1956, he exhibited at the Galerie Bing, his first solo exhibition in Paris since 1947. Self-taught, unclassifiable, neither figurative nor quite abstract, the artist declared: “I am not abstract, either from the point of view of my works’ environment, or from the point of view of their ‘execution.’ A form interests me only when it lives (or else when I managed to make it live) and then it is no longer abstract: it is alive!” His language, close to abstract expressionism, brings him closer to the CoBrA group. His paintings, especially from the first period, are harshly constructed, in a dark, thick, sooty black style of drawing that delineates basic curved or aggressive forms materialized by vivid colors. His paintings belong to several important collections, including the London Tate Gallery and the Musée national d’art moderne in Paris. After his death in 1960, the Musée national d’art moderne in Paris devoted a retrospective to him in 1963, followed by the Tel Aviv Museum

Figure 5: Jean-Michel Atlan, Untitled, oil on canvas, 195 x 114 cm, private collection, catalogue raisonné nº 299, Paris. © 2019 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

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in 1964. In 2008, on the occasion of the exhibition of the Atlan Bequest, the artist was given a dedicated room in the Centre Georges-Pompidou. 1. Visions, Terrors

—Imagine him, dreaming endlessly, see him first kneeling in front of a single canvas: Pentateuque2 (1958). Captive already, the dreamer will no longer detach himself from these strokes of color: grave, dense, powerful, somber, black bands (Atlan’s black has already caused a lot of ink to spill, beginning with his own), bands spread out and held back, hesitating without trembling between drawing, painting, or writing, tensed [bandées], demure forces, contracted in imminence. The dreamer feels caught in the net of these knotted, indecipherable letters. He knows that one cannot distinguish between a certain kind of knotting in Atlan and the composition of a literality; loops of writing, hieroglyphs or ideograms. Very near me, following me or preceding me like my very shadow, the dreamer allows himself to be transported, already, bound hand and foot, to one of those Amerindian cultures (he knows the painter loves them dearly), that of the Incas, for example, in which people write with knots, the “quipus” (a Quechuan word meaning knot). In the Incas’ royal archives, the support of the message, let’s say the subjectile, was made up of bundles of cords, with knots varying in colors, weaving and twisted forms. The colored knots start representing letters, to the letter. Add to this rhythm, dance, extreme tension, the force that carries form away, precedes or survives it, and this is Atlan’s signature. With Pentateuque, we’re far from the Incas, you’ll say. Possibly [Voire]. Very near me, he, the dreamer, sees [voit] nothing, reads nothing. Only the title, Pentateuque , if that. But he loves the title. He pays homage to it. He knows that the painter has explained himself about the big, decisive, inexhaustible question of the title. A title would be supposed, among other things, to give “to the spectator a suggestion, a poetic indication.”3 Thanks to the title, Pentateuque, the dreamer projects a sort of royal zoology, the vision, yes, the vision of a political theo-zoology, into the scene thus entitled: a noble animal, a god perhaps, a sovereign lord, an anhuman living being could well attempt, but in vain, idly [à vide], to admire its face in a semblance of mirror without image. A mirror that could hold captive but makes nothing of its capturing power—and holds nobody hostage. It is true that the painter often speaks of “capturing” [capter], not of imprisoning somebody or something but for example of a painting that should “capture the essential rhythms.”4 And then there are so many mirrors in Atlan! He never stopped speculating on specularity. The dreamer dreams of becoming his faithful ally, his guest [hôte], not to say his

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hostage. He dreams of becoming, as regards painting at least, this one, and in order to see it at last, a man of faith. Why would he then give in to the desire of holding this Pentateuque, this one, signed Atlan, for a pseudonymy? For a pseudonym with the force of / by dint of [à force de] truth? The title Pentateuque would not be a representation, not a reference or a quotation, but a metonymic substitute: a name would appear for another, for more than one other, a part for the whole, etc. I do say Pentateuque, this one, Atlan’s Pentateuque, which takes place only once, once and for all, the irreplaceable body of this work, this alphabet from before the alphabet, these bands of intertwined letters, these quipus looking for their words in the night. Pentateuque would become a metonymy among others, true, but thanks to its movement the substitute would rise to the rank of a master-word: a name, only one, perhaps the name of the One. A politico-theological coup d’état, in short. Pentateuque would install itself on the throne and would become the hidden name of all these so-called “large-size” [ grand format] works, their law, their superego [surmoi] or their nickname [surnom], their general title, perhaps their credits [ générique]. Why, especially, having become a man of faith, a captive guest or hostage for a time, would the dreamer begin to tremble from now on? Why would he thus allow himself to be led back to the brink of a terrifying scene? Irresistibly? For what matters beyond figures, words, and representations, still beyond figuration as well as abstraction, of course, would be here what he feels but no longer knows how to say—or not yet: an affect, a nameless fear, on the threshold of a sacred convulsion. As if, in the trance or in the dance of this translation, in the vertigo of this trope, the origin of religion, the origin of the unique God rather wrenched itself from the pagan background (indeed look at these other canvases, keep the register of their titles, Baal (1953), Tanit (1958), Calypso III (1958), etc.; this is still paganism, a genealogical tree of idolatry). As if, moreover or thereby, at the birth of monotheistic law, the history of painting itself, a certain history of painting, played itself out in such and such a sequence from the Bible and in order to pretend to be gathered in it; I’d almost go as far as to say the desire of the image, of the icon or of the idol, there where a primal commotion gives rise to this desire, at once erects and paralyzes it. Painting within painting, as is often the case, a genealogy of the false opposition (figuration/abstraction) against which the signatory of Pentateuque never stopped railing—and which he would summon to appear, here again, from a wholly other place, the one that he and nobody else will have breached, invented, signed. —Which scene, for example? Which scene will have made the dreamer tremble, very near you? Which moment from the Pentateuch is this dreamer dream-

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ing of arbitrarily? What is he still projecting? What is his hallucination? I am wondering whether this apparition responds to the painting itself, to what is in it literally coated [s’y enduit] with colors and strokes, or first of all, only, to what its title induces [induit]. What would happen if this painting were, like so many others, “untitled”? And if the dreamer knew nothing about the painter, not even his name, nothing about his Jewish and Algerian origins, which were also the dreamer’s origins a little? I can also sense the violence of a projective interpretation, the vision of a visionary, in short, and the imposition of a bias. On the pretext of signing while countersigning, on the pretext of doing his part by reaching out to the canvas, doesn’t the dreamer risk leading us astray by breaching his own path? by taking us hostage in turn? —It’s always a possibility. One would never read without this risk. Even if he gave himself over to a vision, to a visionary’s vision, as you put it, he could still avail himself [s’autoriser] of Atlan’s name.5 If his painting is “that of a visionary,” shouldn’t one go toward it by countersigning it with a countervision? Which scene from the Pentateuch, you were asking? Well, terrorized, the people of the children of Israel no longer want to listen to Yahweh. The divine word transfixes them with a fright still unknown to them. God has just dictated his ten commandments (including “thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing . . .” and “thou shalt not kill”),6 but he has not yet asked Moses to transmit his “judgments” (including the death penalty for the murderer: “He that smiteth a man, so that he die, shall be surely put to death”).7 All of a sudden, between these two moments, as if they sensed the coming of these strange, terrifying threats—the death penalty, in short, instituted by the God who said “Thou shalt not kill”—the children of Israel no longer want to hear. In truth, they want to, but they no longer want to hear the voice alone, the only voice of God, the unique voice of Yahweh alone. They no longer hear, they decide, they are decided—what decision are they making now, what decision has come over them, what’s come over them!—addressing them directly, apostrophizing them, they intend no longer to hear [entendent ne plus entendre] the voice of God. They proclaim their decision: “. . . but let not God speak with us, lest we die.”8 —Such a narrative does have its place in the Pentateuch, but is it really at the center of its homonym or of its pseudonym signed Atlan, in its mirror without image and without a face? Could you prove it? Going by what you say, it is as if what the sons of Israel then decide, as if what decided them, rather, was a properly deicide gesture, an attempted murder. What is one doing when one actually decides no longer to hear, not to reply, no longer to correspond, to forbid the Wholly

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Other or the Most High to address one? One wonders what dictates, and who also dictates this decision to forbid? What is the purpose of this interruption other than to bring death, on the pretext of protecting oneself from death, from a death coming from God, the worst that could be imagined, a divine homicide? Are the sons of Israel not already somehow premeditating the death of God? Precisely upon the coming of the unique God, as soon as his first manifestation? As soon as he utters his first words, which are orders and which seem to open a struggle to the death between God and his people? Then no longer to hear does not always signify to begin to see, to paint, to draw, to knot or to write. —Very obscurely, indeed, outside any possible representation and any anthropomorphism, perhaps what is at stake is the stroke and the letter, what knots the stroke to the colored letter, to the letter of the color. And here, things get complicated, they thicken, darken, they even blacken sometimes. All of Atlan’s painting bears witness to this, all his bands of unreadable letters. These are not only knotted, intertwined, binding; they are also interrupted, they cross and intersect, they vanish. The trope of these discontinuous momentums would be the anacoluthon, the break in the sentence, rather than analogy or metaphor. Others could depict this silence, in fact, that of anacoluthic ellipsis or that which the sons of Israel ask from God, as a deadly silence. In truth, the patent lesson of the Pentateuch is different. It is not about the sons of Israel interrupting God’s word, adoring nothing but an aphasic idol, cultivating the image, color of cut stone, choosing resemblance or analogy. They are not ready to invent figurative or representational painting, or even abstract painting; they are not yet reconciled with an iconography. —Consciously, at least, for to paint without words is also to be bold enough to let the unconscious speak. To which a colored stroke often gives its space and its chance. Darstellbarkeit , Freud used to say in order to name this oneiric theater, this figurative scene, this imaged spacing of the dreaming unconscious. Besides, is it so certain that the sons of Israel did not want to put God to death? Or at least Moses, as Freud precisely suggested?9 Who would dare affirm it? Who took sides? Who will have decided what in them, in this absolute surprise that then swoops down on them vertically? If all of history began in this way, no imaginary variation of the narrative is possible any longer. What took place took place, and it is the place; nothing will change anything about this. The only thing left to do is to paint and depict. —Admittedly. But they no longer want, and that is said to the letter, they no longer want, consciously, to expose themselves—to God. They are afraid of him,

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they no longer have the face to face him, to confront him, to appear before the face of God, frontally, immediately, directly, literally; they no longer want to surrender bound hand and foot, straightforwardly, to the divine word. They require reflection and that everything be diverted, returned [renvoyé ], mediatized through the agency of some mirror. A sort of divine aphasia is then decreed in them. Let God keep silent or no longer speak to them face to face! They entrust Moses with a mission, they delegate him to the place of God’s delegate or minister. They ask him to become a sort of priest, the interpreter of the divine voice and letter: “And all the people saw the thunderings, and the lightnings, and the noise of the trumpet, and the mountain smoking: and when the people saw it, they removed, and stood afar off. And they said unto Moses, Speak thou with us, and we will hear: but let not God speak with us, lest we die.”10 Human mediation thus seems to placate them, and the visibility of the mouth, the face of the one who speaks. They want to see and know, they want to recognize the one who speaks to them, and they want him to hold himself, very close to them, level with them [à leur hauteur]. A question of measure, dimension, size, “format”: no [point de] Most High, let man still remain the measure of all things, a great Greek philosopher will say later. A certain human figurality, reassuring, pacifying, anesthetizing, is at least sketched out. Between the immense or sublime invisibility of the Most High and the people’s earthly humility, well, human greatness, the imposing size, the visible large size [ grand format] of Moses ensures a historical and bearable transition. However, God maintains the prohibition on idolatry, on representation, on figuration. Soon after Moses attempted to reassure Israel (“Fear not: for God is come to prove you”), and although the people stood “afar off,”11 Yahweh said to Moses: “Thus thou shalt say unto the children of Israel . . . Ye shall not make with me gods of silver, neither shall ye make unto you gods of gold.”12 —Isn’t the dreamer converting—others would say perverting—this painting into a religious painting, into the sacrament of some Jewish memory, freely interpreted, what’s more? Isn’t he making it speak, giving it a voice, forcing its voice, arbitrarily, where the painting keeps silent? And even where the point would be to keep Yahweh silent? —In the first place, nothing is more legitimate—and it wouldn’t be the first time—than to bring what would misguidedly be called the “thematics”13 of these works back to the Bible, to what is strangely called the Old Testament and to a Judaic vein. Pentateuque is not the only work to justify it. To limit ourselves to this “large-size” set, a network of references gathers around the same biblical or Judaic focus: Jéricho (1958) (which will be echoed, one year later, in

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1959, by Murailles de Jéricho (Walls of Jericho), Sodome (1958), La Kahena (Kahina) (1958), this warrior priestess from a tribe in the Atlas (and Jewish, as one rumor has it) who is still in the memory of any inhabitant of Constantine, as if he had dreamt that she gave birth to him, or at least adopted him, like Hassan.14 For I still have a thought, coming from the back of my memory, for Atlan’s Algerian childhood, and I also remember—while saluting Artaud, very close, as different as a heterozygote twin—that, feigning madness at the Hôpital SainteAnne, during the Occupation, Atlan declared himself “bishop of Constantine,” and I still dream of our fellow countryman Saint Augustine, bishop of Hippo, of all the wars of religion as so many syncretisms that marked the common destiny of Algerian Jews. And then especially, I’m coming to it, in the series of these Hebraic references, with Pentateuque, Jéricho, Sodome, La Kahena, there is the Livre des Rois (Book of Kings) II (1959). Why privilege this painting, after Pentateuque? Because, second, God does not keep silent, and if he is still speaking, if he speaks through his works, it would be with this still small voice, this almost inaudible voice that makes itself heard to Elijah, finally, after it has stayed away from the deafening roar of the wind, from the earthquake and the blaze. Now this is precisely in the Book of Kings. Without being able to adduce any proof, blindly trusting the “suggestion,” the “poetic indication” of the title and the “vision” of which we were speaking earlier, I’d be tempted to hear this work of Atlan’s, Livre des Rois II, as one of his most inventive translations—there are already so many of them. A translation of what? The translation of a speech [parole] without articulated words, translation of a murmur, welcoming this passage of the divine breath (yet again life, breathing, animation, psyche), an almost inaudible breath between noise and silence, between the term and the mute letter, between living speech and the inscription of the trace, “a still small voice” [voix de fin silence], a time-honored translation in its literary usage, next to “a soft, slight murmur,” “the sound of a light breeze,” “a subtle silence.”15 If Atlan’s painting resonates, if it sings, if it always combines the dance with song (one of these “large-size” paintings is called in fact Danses incantatoires (1959), and like so many others, it could make a claim to the metonymic power of a general title or credits for the whole work), it is also a painting of voice, albeit at times of this almost inaudible murmur. One must believe. One must believe in order to hear it, one must prick up one’s ears with an always insecure, almost voiceless faith, as faith worthy of this name always is. One must therefore doubt everything in order to see this voice coming in painting. To see it coming or to come to see it. One must wait for men—and for the figures of man, for anthropocentrism and for anthropomorphism—to have deserted. They went back to the desert with their idols. Desert of this theo-zoomorphic painting in which

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one would in vain look for the measure of a human size [ format] between gods and animals. 2. Unmeasuring [Démesurer] greatness

But at this hour, I who am not dreaming am standing in front of him, himself, in front of him who with sovereign power signs “Atlan” but makes playful use of his name. He also plays his name. Like a bet, he lays a wager on it, he inscribes it in a square or in a frame, right into the title of a painting. A creator’s gesture, of course, that carries a world, that brings the world into the world after conceiving it, that’s for sure, and, like Atlas, is not far from carrying the world. A world becomes the world. Unless I am standing, beyond the borders of his patronym, in front of his overflowing Greatness, that of the giant Atlas or that of the Grand Roi Atlante (Great Atlantis King) (1956), a divine animal crowned on his throne. He signs with his nib in a mirror, between angles and loops, in a palace of black, ochre, yellow, and pastel-blue golden pomps. Almightiness of the painter, sublime haughtiness of a gesture that itself is perhaps in front of the Most High. I say “sublime,” sublime mathematics or sublime dynamics, in order to replay in turn, with a word, the Kantian distinctions. These concepts should be put to work here in order to analyze the “Atlan effect.” One should know whether the Kantian oppositions (beautiful/sublime, mathematical sublime / dynamic sublime) stand the test. I won’t really attempt this test, as one should, however, in homage to a painter who was first a professional and a teacher of philosophy. Diagram, sketch, in very broad strokes: the mathematical sublime qualifies absolute magnitude, beyond any measure, any comparison, and even any sensible evaluation of size (big or small, for example, small or large size: the mathematical sublime requires a nonstandard size, absolutely big or infinitely small; but the “large size” can signal toward the “outsize” [hors format] of the sublime). What Atlan’s works deal with (their supposed “subject,” their “theme” and not their event, not their very existence, their act, their space, their strokes, their colors), I will say, again in Kantian terms, often hesitates between the prodigious (Ungeheuer), that is, the enormous, the immense, the excessive, the unheard-of, and, on the other hand, the colossal (kolossalisch),16 that is, the presentation, the staging, the appearance [comparution] of that which appears “almost too large for any presentation” (der für alle Darstellung beinahe zu gross ist):17 almost unpresentable. The “almost unpresentable” would be a fairly appropriate [juste], almost appropriate category to determine that by which, each time, Atlan allows himself to be provoked. But in order to put this category to

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work on each work of Atlan’s, I would have privileged the dynamic sublime, the one that is linked to the idea of might (Macht). More precisely, to power (Gewalt), which prevails over the resistance of what also possesses might. And I would have also privileged, for the benefit of the dreamer we have just left, and closest to each painting of Atlan’s, three observations of Kant’s. 1. Indeed, Kant suggests that nature, beyond aesthetic judgment, can be held to be sublime, dynamically, only if it is an object of fear (Furcht). Now nature can be perceived as terrible, fearsome (furchtbar) without being afraid in front of it. (As if you were told: You must see La Redoutable (1956) without being afraid.) We must then think (denken, says the Critique of Judgment, which does not mean “know”) the case where we’d attempt to resist it while knowing that any resistance would be in vain. 2. Kant then gives a peculiar example, peculiarly appropriate here: the virtuous man fears God without being afraid of him for himself. He does not “think” that there would be something for him to fear in wanting to resist God and his commandments (here is, in reserve, therefore, another reading of Pentateuque). 3. Further on, Kant pens his celebrated remark, as if he were addressing our dreamer: Perhaps there is no more sublime passage in the Jewish Law than the commandment: Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image [Bildniss], or any likeness [Gleichnis] of any thing that is in heaven or on earth, or under the earth, etc. This commandment can alone explain the enthusiasm which the Jewish people, in their moral period, felt for their religion when comparing themselves with others, or the pride inspired by Mohammedanism. The very same holds good of our representation of the moral law and of our intrinsic capacity for morality.18

In front of the large size of these immense subjects, of these gigantic jets of color, in front of these supple, tight bands, in front of the choreography of these knotted letters, I feel inclined [enclin], I should say prone [incliné ] to obey twice. Bent, bound to two laws. Twice prostrate, twice once and for all. Double prescription, therefore, two obligations, but one and the same injunction, one only, at once divisible and indivisible: keep silent and speak. On the one hand, according to my choice and because I feel disarmed, because I am keen on remaining so, in a movement that henceforth resembles that of faith, to the absolute decision of a chosen vulnerability, laying myself open to receiving everything from the other, unpredictably, and therefore

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passively (but not without still dreaming of some revenge, there where the desire of mastery and of jealous reappropriation never gives up), I should act as if Atlan’s name were unknown to me. Untraceable, swallowed up, submerged, like Atlantis. (Here, in parentheses, I would have fitted onto Atlan’s work, in particular his “large-size” canvases, another reading of Plato’s Timaeus; without rushing, as I did elsewhere,19 toward the staging of Khôra. I would have followed, at the very beginning of this great book, the account by Critias reporting the words of Solon reporting the words of the Egyptian priest about the foundation of Saïs, by Neith or Athena, in the Nile Delta; for among all of Atlan’s titles that are names of countries, there are so many of them, one can indeed note Le Nil (1957) at the same time as Pharaon (large size, 130 x 80, 1956–58). The Nile saves the memory of Egyptians: The Nile, so often our savior [o Neilos . . . sôter], saves us at these times from disaster [literally, from this aporia—and this great woe, this catastrophe, is amnesia, the destruction of men and the disappearance of the archive under the joint effect of lightning, fire and water] by being released [ek tautes tes aporias sôzei luomenos].20

I would have insisted especially on the disappearance of the island of Atlantis.)21 I should not merely act as if Atlan’s name had disappeared, forgotten, swallowed up, drowned under Atlantis. But as if the works of said Atlan had lost their titles. Their proper noun and the name of their creator. As if, to the letter, they said nothing to me. As if, rather, they authorized me to nothing, as if they granted me in any case the authority to say nothing about them. Besides, how can they be described? Allow me here to do without a long theoretical, yet ironic disquisition on the description of a painting. When I think that some dare or claim to do just this, to describe or sketch the slightest description of a painting! It is always impossible, it should be forbidden to describe a painting, to “acknowledge” [constater] it, other than by ordering: go and listen to this painting that is no longer a painting, that no longer has the appeased stability of a painting, hear its incantation, its prayer, its injunctions or its commandments (this or that imperious painting sometimes resembles a table of commandments), vibrate to the vibration of its scream, and then go and see, if you can, these lines, these strokes, these bands, these knots, these dance steps. They remove and raise [ enlèvent et soulèvent], they lift [ font lever] colors in order to pass on words [ passer les mots] while “turning” them; they are made in order to do without the

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words [se passer des mots] that, however, they call for. Not only but especially when, as is the case here, it is impossible to decide whether there is or there isn’t representation, abstraction, figure, coded letter, codeless letter, even the sketch of a new alphabet, without alpha or omega, that is feeling its way, without support, while producing, like the quipus cords, its own support, its own subject, I mean its own “subjectile”: by painting painting, and to this end by begetting color, a color without common noun (“ochre,” “black,” “yellow,” “gold,” “night blue,” “pastel blue,” etc.), a color from before painting, by bringing said color into the world, by doing as if, like Kahina, the painter was giving birth to the adopted color. Besides, how can a color be described and how can it be named? How to do so without a figure, without a tropic detour, but to the letter, literally? For example, his “black” that is not black, that is black beyond all known blacks? From one individual to another, from one culture to another, how can one agree to identify and especially to call colors, to stabilize and to codify the names of colors, in particular in the Bible? How can somebody born blind be taught the names of colors after the operation that restores his sight? I find myself here, with Atlan, mutatis mutandis, like a blind man who has been operated on, facing the same impossibility to say at the moment of recovering his sight in front of an unheard-of spectacle. As is wellknown, this problem of the man born blind obsessed the eighteenth century of European philosophy, from Molyneux to Berkeley, but I find it again here, intact: I feel incapable of naming one of Atlan’s colors, I feel neither authorized nor entitled to do so, even in the dark [dans le noir], even in the case of black, and I sense that a new nomenclature should be invented for this chromography, even for that of each work . . . As if, therefore, the works of said Atlan never bore any title. Admittedly, some “large-size” canvases already grant themselves the title of “untitled.” Hence probably the idea that came to me. No more words, never again. Breathless. Aphasia. Even if already the name “Asia,” the phoneme Asia, the letters of Asia, on the other side of the biblical Middle East, detached themselves to resonate, resound, and reflect in one of the titles (Les Miroirs de l’Asie (1954), the clearest and bluest of all these “large-size” canvases: as if, almost in the center, between vague snakes reared quasi-symmetrically, in order to return their image to one another face to face, a sort of submerged, perhaps Christlike fish, one of these numerous animal or zoo-theomorphic figures of the collection, were still holding a mirror up to the sun—unless it were to the moon. But now I find myself describing yet again, despite the promise or the prohibition). We are still on the eve [à la veille], we keep watch [veillons] on the border,

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we watch out for [surveillons] the coming of monotheism, of the unrepresentable, of the “almost unpresentable” or of the unnameable in painting. As I heard it said about Pentateuque, or about Danses incantatoires (but one could give any number of examples), “untitled”22 becomes the general title of each painting. There is a painted picture, and one that makes a work out of this event, only where the title, the legend, the (explicative, descriptive, constative, prescriptive, performative even) discourse is called upon to keep silent, to turn words, to pass over its titles in silence—or almost. Pentateuque itself remains an “untitled” painting and speaks only of absolute silence, of God’s silence of which the other was dreaming. On the other hand, and conversely, since I must say things, I need to speak, these canvases make me speak. And even tell stories. One will eventually become aware of it and probably complain about it. Temptation of endless talk. Among them all, I would like to recognize, through these paintings, a spectral history of religions between Asia, Greece, and the biblical Middle East. I cannot nor should keep silent concerning them. At the very place where, beyond any assured, above all human, figural representation, they bear no title, where they do not let themselves be borne by a title, where they cannot bear a title. Ah, all the stories people can tell themselves, just to see, either on the subject of each “large-size” painting—to be respected in its solitude and its absolute singularity, that of a hapax—or on the subject of their configuration, as if there were an encrypted narrative sequence, as if a narration had to be reconstituted, so as to combine in the same narrative both the birth of monotheisms with a forever resisting paganism in the background and a certain origin of painting, even of all its filiations. These would have come off the background of an originary prohibition of representation, whether figurative or abstract. Painting of the sublime or of the colossal: to see higher up, toward the Most High. From the beginning, directly or not, we have revolved around the question of size, dimension, measure, and format. What does a painter do when he chooses the format of a canvas, when he thus frames it before any frame? I’ve always wondered. What does a painter decide in this respect, when he seems to settle on such and such a dimension? Who then decides in him, which character, which Bildungsroman of the format [ roman de formation du format]? Of course, we have in mind those cases in which this dimension is not imposed, as happened so often, almost always, in the history of painting, by the apparently external constraints of a commission or of a place of inscription. When a painter believes he can choose the format of the painting himself, by himself, without external necessity, one may probably ask

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him about this, and the explanations he will give you will often be more or less convincing. He will tell you why, in all conscience, he thought he could settle on such and such a dimension. But nothing prevents us, in the night of the unconscious, and without ever counting on a calculable certainty, from looking for a secret link between a certain “inside” of the painting (and this is not necessarily a figure or a “subject”) and its dimensions, even the mismatch between size and movement. There may be a secret of measureless excess [dé-mesure]. Atlan always puts me on this track: the secret of excessiveness [démesure]. The mystique of this secret allies a size to a name, a spoken name or a hidden name, in its crypt. Any painting, any painting as such, and even if it seemingly bears and supports [ porte et supporte], as its “subject,” a title, that is to say, a name (and titles without a substantive are rare, whether names be common nouns or, as is often the case here, proper nouns, or else whether they hesitate between the common and the proper, always including in any case some proper noun in the common noun: Grand Roi Atlante, Tanit, Calypso III, Baal guerrier (Warrior Baal), Pentateuque, Le Tao, La Redoutable, Les Miroirs de l’Asie, Jéricho, Sodome, La Kahena), any painting worthy of this name, therefore, as such, has the vocation to do without a name, I mean without a title. This is where its essence and its space, the very spacing of its spatiality—and literally its color—would be exposed. Hence the energy of its dance and of its song. At the place where, doing without the name, unnaming itself, it still calls and gives the name its place. Irresistibly. It is not called by this or that name, it calls (for) a name. The Pentateuch is also the story of a unique God with an unpronounceable name, of a God whose name, one of whose names is also not without naming Place. Wouldn’t there be, consequently, a sort of negative theology at work in painting that this painting of Atlan’s depicts? Apophatic painting: the stroke of address beyond the name, the attribute, and attribution. One merely has to scratch a little beneath the layer of color to find the challenge to verbal eloquence, the stubborn, mute retort to any rhetoric, also the ironic withdrawal [retrait] of an untitled: fend for yourself, the Thing murmurs without a word; learn to see and even to read beyond the legend. Yes, as he says himself: “The problem of titles is irritating indeed.”23 Consequently, all titles sketch the gesture of erasing themselves. They suspend themselves, ironically, they pretend [affectent] to withdraw toward their contingency in order to emancipate your sight. They can then, by metonymy, signify the effect of being “untitled.” This absence of a title leaves you alone with the painting, that is to say, also with an “affect.” This affect

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remains ordered, inflexibly, by forces and forms, by the energy of colors and the tension of knots, by the dance and the trance of the “Thing,” alias nameless work. At the place where, for want of a better word, I call “affect,” where I could simply say “what happens to or arrives at you,” the arrival of some arrivant, the arriving [arrivance] of an event, the coming of this newcomer, of this one and none other, where you could not be prepared for it even if you were waiting for it secretly, even if you were expecting it unawares, like an unknown visitor to whom it is no longer possible to refuse hospitality, there you are, “affected” without being able to account for it. You then speak about force, magic, miracle, and this is justice in order to surrender to the truth of the arrivant, of the wholly other or of the event. In the same series, I could inscribe everything that “turns” language and passes on words, for example music, dance, or color. What occurs then, how can it be described? How can it be accounted for beyond the theme? My hypothesis is that what does without [ se passe de] the title, what then passes [se passe] between the “untitled” (or the “themeless” or the “subjectless”) of the Thing, between the untitled Thing and you, is an earthquake to which each painting also alludes, as if it applied itself to describing, sometimes to nicknaming to excess [ sur-nommer] this or that dimension, such and such a signification of said convulsion. I will indicate only three possible exemplars: 1. For example, one could say that, with or without a title, the event of each painting visits you. It appears suddenly, it comes about without warning; it pays an unexpected visit to you, it asks you for hospitality. But at the same time it welcomes you without reserve, without a question, without even inquiring about your name or about your visa: absolute hospitality offered to the arrivant, visitation before any invitation, an unconditional exposition that gives the host [ hôte] over to the guest [ hôte] and puts the “first” (the first occupier, if you want) at the mercy of the “first” (of the first-come, if you prefer). Now the painting titled Calypso III (1958) may signal toward this unconditional hospitality, that is to say, it (painting or hospitality) may say, name, cite, in order to dedicate itself to it, the event called by all the paintings of the painter named Atlan—the signatory of a singular work also, singularly titled, let us recall, Grand Roi Atlante. Besides, isn’t Calypso Atlas’s daughter? In the Odyssey, as we know, it is this goddess’s role. She gives at once hospitality and immortality. She welcomes the other, you and me—and the signatory’s work, her father Atlas or Atlan, who therefore multiplies her appearances. He cannot keep count of all his daughters any longer. Before Calypso III (1958), there was Calypso I and Calypso II (1956).

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On the back of Calypso III, two sketches do mark the musical and choreographic character of this series of resounding paintings. They all of them resound in one another. They are consonant and accompany one another, like acolytes; yet they separate and can be distinguished: each is alone, ab-solute, absolutely alone, and never lets itself be accompanied. Dissociation, discontinuity, caesura, split [schize], ellipsis, eclipse: in the place of the acolyte who then no longer accompanies, the anacoluthon interrupts and passes over in silence. Atlan’s rhetoric, if there is one, would admittedly be metaphorical, analogical, rooted in the magnetic field of resemblance—and yet, on the other hand, in love with caesura, ready to subtract the event of each work from any serial configuration. Between the two logics or the two rhetorics, that of accompaniment and that of solitude, that of the acolyte and that of the anchorite, the anacoluthon ensures a strange alliance. The figure called anacoluthon interrupts the sentence or the apparent consequence, but in order to work in silence, underground, and to give more to hear in the desert of separation. One might say that, from one work to another, Atlan thus divides in two the rhythm of his sentence. A continuous flux carries on unperturbed, which multiplies repeats [reprises], internal allusions, apparent repetitions, “citations,” memory acts, while slashing, insularizing, even stopping, stabilizing each painting: each painting refers only to itself. One can understand Gertrude Stein. Having herself invented a new sentence, which is not unrelated to Atlan’s, she must have been interested in him and planned to devote a book to him.24 2. Another example. Nothing can therefore rigorously distinguish this unconditional, unpredictable hospitality from a violent intrusion, an assault, an aggressive invasion, an occupation, a virtual war. Signify peace, call for the gift, forgiveness, and grace it may well do, yet unconditional hospitality may frighten as much as war. For it is excessive and hyperbolic, by vocation. The violence of this irruption breaks into all of Atlan’s works, whether or not they bear a title. As to those that name war or fright (Danse guerrière (War Dance) (1956), Baal guerrier (1953), Le Samouraï (1954), La Redoutable (1956), La Kahena (1958), and perhaps Carthage I and II (1956– 57)), they invade everything, they are in truth invested, without losing anything of their absolute singularity, with a limitless power of irradiation. Perhaps (nothing allows us to eschew this “perhaps,” the condition of the event and of the encounter, the condition of hospitality). Perhaps they also allude extensively to all the works. They overtitle them perhaps like a meta-title and simultaneously describe the experience to which you find yourself assigned each time you encounter a work signed Atlan. You are at once the

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host [hôte] and hostage of his hospitality (Calypso). The host or guest [ hôte] is always the other’s hostage. Levinas made this the definition of subjectivity itself. “The subject is a host,”25 Levinas said one day, but later: “A subject is a hostage.”26 The host and his other, the visitor or the invited guest then become a hostage for each other. (Here, with these figureless faces [visages] in the background, and in memory of the Occupation or of the Resistance, an experience they had in common, I would bring together Atlan and Fautrier, who painted the Otages series. Then I would attempt to displace this terrible logic of the subject (of the “host” or “hostage” subject) toward the subjectile, namely, the support of a painting, what ensures its uniqueness as an irreplaceable work escaping both reproduction and substitution. Hospitality makes a hostage of the host while wagering this uniqueness, that is to say, the body, that is to say here the subjectile’s body, at once a proper and objective body, a body in the world.) When Levinas speaks of “nudity” in connection with Atlan, he has probably the host’s or the hostage’s vulnerability in mind. Just as each of the “large-size” canvases gathered here must be reinscribed in families of, if I may say so, congeners, whether they belong or not to the same epoch (for example the group of Calypso and Jéricho paintings, Pentateuque, Sinaï (1957) and so many other biblical “subjects,” then the Miroirs de l’Asie and so many other Miroirs, like for example Miroirs magiques du roi Salomon (1959), then Baal guerrier, Tanit, and the Salamboo series, then La Kahena and Peinture berbère (1954), etc.), likewise Levinas’s reading of Atlan must be reinscribed within the chain of a discourse that in his own way he names ethical and that, sooner and later, never ceases to think together, in the same gesture, nudity and vulnerability, the exposition of the host and of the hostage, mercy in the strictly biblical sense of the word—and the work of art. One must thus reread the conclusion of the essay on Atlan (“. . . art seeks the unclothed thing . . . the beauty of the thing is its nakedness . . . Chaste eroticism, tenderness, compassion and perhaps mercy which bring the Bible to mind”).27 These last words become clearer in light of that which is deployed broadly elsewhere and which, precisely, also has to do with art, but more ambiguously. Why more ambiguously? For Levinas, it is as if nudity in plastic art were not naked enough yet—except perhaps, indeed, in the exceptional case of Atlan who, without having ever painted any “nude,” would have reached, thought, put into work an experience of nudity more naked than the nude. In “Subjectivity and Vulnerability,”28 for example, the “opening” of the subject presents, as its third sense, the exposition of “showing oneself” in vulnerability, that is to say, in nudity, that of the skin

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proffered to the wound, the nudity of a nude more naked than the nude of “plastic arts.” I single out two passages here that, in their allusion to art and to biblical “mercy,” shed light on, confirm, and delimit the singularity of the essay on Atlan: Opening is the vulnerability of a skin offered in wound and outrage beyond all that can show itself, beyond all that of the essence of being can expose itself to understanding and celebration. In sensibility “is uncovered,” is exposed a nude more naked than the naked of skin that, form and beauty, inspires the plastic arts; nakedness of a skin offered to contact, to the caress that always, even ambiguously in voluptuousness, is suffering for the suffering of the other. Uncovered, open like a city declared open to the approaching enemy, sensibility . . . is vulnerability itself.29

And two pages further: To suffer by the other is to take care of him, to bear him, be in his place, consume oneself by him. All love or hatred of one’s fellow man as a thoughtful attitude supposes this prior vulnerability, this “moaning of the entrails”* mercy. From the moment of sensibility, the subject is for the other: substitution, responsibility, expiation. *We have in mind the biblical term rakhamin, translated as “mercy” but bearing a reference to the word for uterus, rekhem; it means mercy that is like an emotion from maternal entrails.30

(Here I will not ignore [ ne passerai pas . . . sous silence] the temptation that nonetheless I am still resisting. As an aside to Levinas’s text, where he speaks of “chaste eroticism,” “compassion,” and “mercy” in connection with Atlan, I would like to invite Sade to come by—he is never far away. I would recall what Jacques Polieri told us about the “allusion on the subject of Justine’s rape.”)31 3. For example, talking about passage, what would happen [que se passerait-il] (I presume so and say “perhaps”) if you went over [ passiez . . . en revue] a list of all the titles? Just try it out. My hypothesis is the following: no matter how unique the unique may be, it repeats itself and keeps itself [ se garde]—in its intact singularity. It keeps itself by multiplying itself— exemplarily. The example is unique; exemplary, a unique exemplary it may well be, it proliferates straightaway. Between the war and peace of hospitality, on the border that seems at once to separate and associate pagan memories and Abrahamic (Jewish, Christian, Muslim) memories, the mythologies

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of Europe and its others, well, the absolute transcendence of the One god (Pentateuque, Sodome, Livre des Rois, La Kahena, etc.) marks itself for itself, admittedly, but also, exemplarily, according to the logic of a metonymic substitution, for each work. It also becomes the feature [trait] of the unique event that transcends any serial repetition. This is what is called a “work,” whether it is God’s or the painter’s, color in nature or color in painting, whether it is the painted work or the world that is borne by a signature: irreplaceable transcendence, act, birth certificate, force and form of a song, dancing incantation that is knotted, literally, only once and for all. At once poetic and choreographic,32 the work attracts and attaches you according to its loop; it elects you, it inscribes you in advance, an absolute dissymmetry, in the alliance. Even before you could decide, accept, or refuse. You have undersigned even before knowing how to sign. You have been furiously desired by this painting, jealously loved by it, all alone, you all alone, lost among these animal or divine letters, whereas man has disappeared in the measureless excess [démesure] of the desert, of a desert in the desert. You are all alone, more alone than ever. The creator no longer forewarns you. He does not give you the word. At the same time, laying down the law, he orders you to speak. Still you feel comprehended by what you see beyond what you see, welcome like no one else, yes, comprehended, but already taken hostage.

The “Undersides” of Painting, Writing, and Drawing Support, Substance, Subject, Suppost, and Supplice1

This is the fragment of an unpublished lecture (Jacques Derrida Archives, Abbaye d’Ardenne, IMEC, box 77, DRR 169) that Jacques Derrida gave on 1 March 2002 at the Maeght Foundation in Saint-Paul-deVence, at the invitation of the Société des Amis de la Fondation Maeght. These typed pages bore no mention of place or date. The bracketed insertions are by Jacques Derrida. In 1997, again invited by Jean-Louis Prat, Jacques Derrida had given a lecture titled “La question du musée: le coup d’Antonin Artaud” (The Question of the Museum: Antonin Artaud’s Coup) at the Maeght Foundation in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, which was published later under the title Artaud le Moma. Interjections d’appel (Paris: Galilée, 2002). [Artaud the Moma, ed. Kaira M. Cabañas, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017).]

If I told you without delay that I start from a hypothesis or a supposition, you could say that there’s already something underhand going on [ qu’il y a anguille sous roche]. For a “hypothesis” (a word of Greek origin) or a “supposition” (a word of Latin origin), a hypothesis or a supposition, is what one poses underneath. The thesis, the thêsis in Greek, is what one poses, what one puts; it is, as one would say in Latin, a position, a putting [une mise], and a hypothesis, a supposition, is what one puts forward by posing it, putting it, from underneath [ par en dessous],2 underneath, in the underside [dans le dessous]. Well, here’s the first fold of the paradox; my hypothesis, the supposition from which I will start, of which I will inform you to call you to witness, is that something happens to us, and happens to us from underneath [ par en dessous, par dessous], in happening to what is called the “underside” in art, that is to say, something happens today to the work’s support, to its substance, to its subjectile.

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So many words (support, substance, subjectile) that will have to be defined. But you know full well that they designate what can be found underneath, what one poses, puts, positions [dispose] beneath a drawing, a painting, a piece of writing (the paper, the papyrus, the skin, the parchment, the cardboard, the canvas, the wood, or any other matter, etc.). Something would be happening from underneath to the underside of art today, such is my hypothesis, and in happening to art, this event happens to us from underneath. What happens to art—and I will invoke a bit later the account of the great witnesses who are near us and are welcoming us here tonight—what happens to art, underneath [au dessous de] art, happens to us from underneath, but also on top, into the bargain. From underneath and on top of it [Pardessous et par-dessus le marché ], for I will also deal, at least in principle, with a certain art market, and there’s no market without a hidden side underneath, and without some excess that is not merely that of surplus value and that comes, like art itself, into the bargain, an art market that, as we shall see, is possible, with its undersides, its intrigues, its overbids, its transactions or its speculations, only insofar as the works’ supports, the substances and the subjectiles, therefore the undersides of the works, are not reproducible, belong to what is unique, therefore rare, in a work. The rarity, rarefaction, and nonreproducibility of some undersides is the condition of the work of art, of some types of works of art (to be defined ) as well as of a certain art market, of a politics and an economy of art. These undersides of the works (supports, substances, subjectiles) are also what is at work as well in what could be called the undersides of a politics and of an economy of art, art’s undersides, whether these be visible or invisible, easy to decipher or not. And it is about these undersides of what lies underneath, of their market too, of these hypotheses and suppositions as to what happens to us in happening to the underside from underneath, that I’d like to speak to you this evening (in a shamefully superficial way, of course). I won’t let you dream too long about the undersides of the word “undersides” in the title of this evening’s talk—undersides to which, as is always the case with undersides and with the word “underside,” we cannot help but feel attracted, with a desire mixed with a vague anxiety, as if some underground maze opened up beneath our footsteps to lead us to a crypt or else as if some nudity to be unveiled aroused some trembling impatience in us. Undersides always open onto a possible abyss, onto the bottom of what is bottomless, onto the possible emptiness of a vault or of a cenotaph; this is why undersides make our heads spin and literally cause in us what is called vertigo. In both cases, underneath signifies at once the hiding place of what

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is hidden and of what is hiding, on the one hand, of what remains hidden in the bottom, even in the bottomless [sans-fond ] or bottommost [bas-fond ] part (hidden underneath, buried underneath, kept, saved, or interred in the underside of a basement, of an underpinning, or of a vault) and, on the other hand, of what hides itself, not in the depths of a bottom [ fond ], or of a foundation [ fondement], but on the superficial side of a surface. For example, these garments beneath, or underwear, modestly conceal, beneath the surface, the object of desire; these undies are beneath the surface of a more superficial garment, but on the surface of what is most intimate to the body. The linen of which we then speak—and from this point of view, one thinks more readily about the underparts or the veils of woman’s lingerie— these undergarments share a common textile origin with paper or canvas, of which I will speak a bit later: the underparts of lingerie, the papers or canvases that form the underside of drawing and painting, are fabrics and textiles, and like the wood of some sculptures and of so many frames, they are often of vegetable origin. In both cases, as I was saying, whether we’re dealing with what hides, what is hidden, or what hides itself in this hiding place or this G-string [ cache-sexe], whether we’re dealing with what is concealed or with what conceals, with what is veiled or with the veil, with what is veiled or what is veiling, the values of secrecy (in politics, diplomacy, or in business), the values of crypt to be decrypted, of secret language to be deciphered, become eroticized. Whether it be in the space of arts, of politics, of diplomacy, of criminal law, undersides are always worrying and attractive, disturbing, provocative like erogenous zones. As soon as one speaks of what lies underneath, promise and desire are indissociable from prohibition [ l’interdit] and threat. As soon as one speaks of what lies underneath, as soon as there is something visible and invisible, but also as soon as this topography of the superficial and the profound, of the top and the bottom, of the superior and the inferior, takes shape, well, there is hierarchy and therefore law: promise, prohibition or threat, reward or sanction. In the hierarchy of a topology, the underside can be the inferior, but it can also have the superior value of the foundation or founding [ fondement], therefore of justification, just as one is justified in [ fondé à] doing, thinking, or saying something. What is it then that all these undersides can thus be laying low [mettre bas], subjecting, but also offering while refusing it, exhibiting while cloaking it [en le dérobant]? Before even all the “undersides” that I’d like to identify with you this evening, I’d like to say a word about the “undersides” of my very title, therefore about the law to which I intend to submit it, and to reveal to you

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in a word or rather in a few proper nouns what lies beneath [ sous-jacent] my title, what underlies it and what is perhaps not immediately accessible, visible, or legible. Indeed, to begin with, this time I won’t simply thank you for your faithful presence, and first say how grateful I am, once more to Jean-Louis Prat, to all his assistants, starting with Annette,3 for the incomparable hospitality that has been offered to me for years, with the opportunity to meet again all those who have now become near and dear to me, and among those my faithful publisher and friend Michel Delorme, always by our side in these meetings and without whom so many things of which I will speak this evening (writing, painting, drawing) would never have been what they are or provided so many opportunities to so many authors, writers, or painters, French and foreign, for so long. No, I won’t simply express my gratitude thus, no matter how sincere and moved it still is. My intention is more precise. My intention, the hidden agenda beneath [dessous] my intention, which I won’t conceal any longer, which therefore I expose and disclose without delay, and shamelessly, is to dedicate by way of homage the very contents of these reflections to those I have just named. Whether we’re dealing with writing, painting, or drawing, and I should have added sculpture to my title, the undersides of which I’m going to speak are indeed their thing, here in this foundation, but also in galleries and museums, in Paris or in the world or in publishing. It is their profession and it is their art, it is their expert knowledge and their love for the works. Jean-Louis Prat and Michel Delorme are both, each in his own way, in different places, with a history and ambitions that are, of course, different but often common or allied, [they are both] publishers and museum or gallery directors. Which means that those things I’m going to talk about, painting, writing, drawing, sculpture, and their undersides are—this is our luck, all of us—their things, their things, but also the things that they offer us unstintingly, giving those to us to see and read while enriching public space with them. More precisely still: if, as is suggested by the “undersides” of my title, this modest lecture is first of all intended to pay fitting tribute to them this evening, this is because, according to me, their activity, their profession, their knowledge, their art are unthinkable without a constant concern and a care, without a discipline, without a know-how and a technique, without love too, in tune with that which, in any work, is inseparable from the “underside,” from this underside that is forgotten, neglected, made secondary, from this underside that is taken as read, that is called “support” or

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“subjectile,” whether its materiality be made of wood, stone, metal, copper, bronze, or paper, whether its substance be canvas, fabric, or textile. To say nothing of the frame, the “parergon,” which in the past I busied myself with a lot,4 but about which I won’t speak this evening, of a parergonal frame that, although it is found around rather than underneath, still has itself no less of a tendency to be forgotten, shunted to one side [ latéralisé ], made secondary, denied, as undersides also often are. The frame, as edge and side, often ignored and left aside, despite the huge problems it poses, the parergon of the frame, the outwork [hors-œuvre], the hors-d’oeuvre of the frame, although and because it passes as being incidental [ un à-côté ] to the work (this is what parergon means), and left aside, therefore silenced, is left to sink out of sight when it is not repressed into the undersides of which I’m going to speak. Basically, in the title I suggested to Jean-Louis Prat, I should not only have added sculpture to drawing and writing, but, dealing with places and topology, I should have added to the above/underneath opposition, the inside/outside opposition and, between the two, the edge, the “side” or the “aside,” the edge or the border, the frame, what is called the parergon in scholarly parlance. What the frame has in common with the underside of the support, what the parergon has in common with the subjectile, is that they’re too often neglected, made secondary, toyed with or forgotten, ignored, misapprehended, repressed, denied, whereas the work would be nothing without them. (I realize, after the fact, many long years afterward, that almost always, whenever I modestly approached drawing or painting, for example in The Truth in Painting or in “Maddening the Subjectile,” on Artaud, I was tempted to emphasize, on the contrary, what these two scholarly words name, that is, the parergon, the question of the frame, of this border that is left aside because it seems to be only an external or extrinsic aside of the work, and the question of the “subjectile,” a rare word, I’ll return to it a bit later, a somewhat quaint, animal term that Artaud more or less resurrected, reactivated, drew out from the undersides of language’s memory, where it lay asleep like a mummy, to designate the support, the canvas, wood or paper substance that comes underneath and seems to hide beneath the work, thus subtracting itself from the gaze or the attention that are turned more spontaneously to the surface than to the support.) Now the friends I’ve just named and to whom I dedicate these modest reflections deal constitutively, essentially, by vocation and by mission, with what in a work cannot stand [ne supporte pas] the loss of the support, or leaving the underside to sink [laisser sombrer le dessous], abandoning it to its night, any more than they hold the frame’s border to be an aside incidental

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to the work. The charter that is like the ethic of their trade, their profession of faith, their responsibility, is precisely to watch most lovingly and intractably over what, in the body of a work, in the unique, irreplaceable body of the work, is indissociably at one [ fait corps] with this “underside” that is called “support” with the textile body of the canvas or paper (in the painting or the art book, even in any book), with a picture’s sometimes ligneous body, with the wood, with the stony or metallic substance of a sculpture. Their responsibility, one among others, is to keep a jealous watch over what in the work cannot be reduced to the surface or to what is visible or legible above [le dessus] in form or representation. There is a work, this work to which places like this one are devoted, there is a work where there is uniqueness and singularity, irreplaceability, nonreproducibility, that is to say, where what imposes itself, what lays down the law is this indissociability, this irreducibility of the underside as a body, where this impossibility, even this prohibition to touch the support’s body (to neutralize it, destroy it, replace it, reproduce it, dissociate it), where this non-power or this non-duty-to-touch [non-devoir-toucher] the support’s body, this dutynot-to-touch [devoir-ne-pas-toucher] the support’s body, this tact, this absolute respect, is the very principle, the beginning of this experience, of an experience that commits itself [s’engage] to the work of art, that pledges to it [lui donne pour gage] a token of respect for the absolute uniqueness of each work. Now this uniqueness stems from the indissociability I’m speaking of: whatever its matter, the support’s body is an indissociable part of the work. To love art, to devote or dedicate oneself to it, as one does here, is first to know that one must not separate the support from the work, that the latter cannot be separated from what seems to support it from underneath, that we cannot separate from it. Now there would be here something like a double inseparability, an overbid in what is inseparable. I’ll begin by suggesting that the inseparable divides or multiplies itself. It separates itself without separating from itself. How is that so? We cannot separate ourselves from what in the body of a work does not tolerate separation; we cannot and we must not separate ourselves from what holds [tient] and maintains as inseparable these two bodies that are, on the one hand, the substance of the “support” or of the “subjectile” (so many words that do convey the subjacency of what lies underneath) and, on the other hand, the top layer [le dessus] of form: the surface, the volume, representation, the line [trait], color, etc. Before emphasizing two motifs and allowing myself to be guided by two questions in the huge field of this problematic—the singular question of paper first (of the underside as paper, for not all the undersides and sub-

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jectiles are made of paper), and the question of the subjectile in painting and drawing, more particularly in Artaud—who has treated the thing and the word “subjectile” most originally—[before emphasizing] each of these two undersides successively (twice underneath, the paper and the subjectile in drawing and painting), I’d like briefly to put this double topic into perspective by saying a few words, a couple of words: on the one hand, first, about the affect that relates us to the underside, typically, in art, in the love for art; on the other hand, second, about what a phenomenological description of the different, differential relations between the support and the work in the body of the work could be, according to whether we’re dealing with a discursive work (literature or poetry, for example), a musical, graphic or pictorial, and, last, sculptural work. In each of these arts, a specific difference can be noted in the structure of the relation between the support and the body, even, as I will clarify later, what I will call “ideality,” the process of the work’s idealization. This difference, from one art to another, is always interpreted as a hierarchy that tends to classify arts by putting some of above or beneath others, according to their relation to the underside, precisely, which hollows out another mise en abyme in this strange space; finally, third, still schematically and as a preliminary, I’d like to recall the transformation [mutation] through which we’re living, as you know (I said “transformation,” I won’t say “crisis,” because the word “crisis” is at once too negative and also suggestive of an illness, a provisional ailment of which one could be cured one day, after a bout of fever); not crisis, therefore, but the irreversible technological, techno-scientific transformation that we’re going through right now and that affects our experience of supports globally, in a globalized and globalizing way. This transformation is the arrival and first of all the production of new supports, of new underprops [ dessous] in the space of arts, or the increasing virtualization that immaterializes the body of former supports. Three preliminaries and three stages [temps], therefore: (1) affect; (2) the phenomenology of the support/surface couple in each of what are called the fine arts; (3) the transformation of new supports. 1. Affect, that is to say, equally, desire, libidinal investment, even fetishism. Earlier, I spoke of two separations or rather of two places that dictate to us, as one dictates a law, the prohibition of separation. As I was saying, there is here something like two inseparables that are at once distinct and inseparable. There is, on the one hand, the body of a work, and this body is

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the very thing that resists separation between the underside of support and the surface of form, of representation, of the line [trait], or of color. This body is first of all, as underside, at once the place where the artist or signatory comes to grips [corps-à-corps] with what will become the work, a work that, in the case of painting and drawing, and, in another way still, we’ll return to this, in sculpture, in a wholly different way in music and discursive arts, [a work] that will keep the traces of this close struggle [ corps-à-corps]— sometimes, the signature in the common sense of the term still shows through, the signature of the author, which, more often than not, without being part of the work, nonetheless inscribes itself right on [ à même] the support, on the underside—but a work whose nonreproducible uniqueness will no longer allow the separation within it between the body of the underside (the support or the subjectile) and the form or the figure, abstract or not, representational or not, that will have inscribed itself right on the support. This expression “à même” (“right on,” difficult to translate) does mean the contact without interval, the indissociability between the underside and, let’s say, the top part [ dessus]. The trial of reproduction, of “technical reproducibility,” as Benjamin puts it,5 is the touchstone of this inseparability of what lies underneath and above. In a museum or in a place like this one, only works in the strong sense of the term are exhibited, that is, as goes without saying, only so-called original works are kept and exhibited, never reproduction (at least in the place of the museum [ lieu muséal] properly speaking, even if posters, books, and postcards are sold as reproductions in the adjacent shop). What characterizes a museum or a gallery of visual art—drawing and painting, and here again, I’ll return to it, a special place has to be made for sculpture, for music, and for literature—is that, statutorily, the museum or the gallery are dedicated [consacrés] places that welcome, keep, exhibit original and, therefore, unique works, that is to say, bodies in which the support underneath is never abandoned, as it were, in which the underside is indissociable, as subject and object of the most vigilant care. The museum and the gallery, the foundation, are dedicated places, and dedicated to welcoming and keeping, safekeeping these original works inseparable from their support, thus dedicated, sacralized works protected by a sort of sacral immunity. Well, what I call here, to make it short, affect, in other words, desire—the desire to see, the desire to have, the desire to keep, to keep watch, to assume the responsibility to save the work’s immunity, the concern for the salvation and security of a work (and this goes for experts, curators, as well as for enthusiasts, admirers, art lovers, visitors, and spectators)—well, this affect is what must be called an attachment. This attachment attaches us; it is a link, a tie [une attache], a ligament,

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an obligation; that is to say, the tie, the affect of the tie affects us by dictating to us not to detach ourselves, not to separate ourselves, not to accept reproduction, to separate as little as possible from what in the work itself remains inseparable from the unique body of the work, that is, from its underside and as long as it was, remains, and keeps the unique trace, sometimes the signature, of the close struggle [corps-à-corps] between the artist and the work in the genetic moment, in the inaugural instant, or in the process, in the history of what is called genesis or, in theological parlance, creation, the moment of properly poetic invention. In the originary production before any reproduction. Not to separate from an inseparation, to do everything to make oneself inseparable from an inseparable, from a body in itself inseparable, indissociable, that is the affect. But there arises a dramatic complication, even a tragic fold in this scene with the two impossible or prohibited separations. Everything I’ve just said seems to go without saying. I’m merely describing this double movement that seems to be only one (not to separate from a body that is itself inseparable from its underside, from its support or from its subjectile). Everybody can recognize in it a usual affect, the one that motivates all the desires of appropriation, the surplus values, the market, the hidden sides underneath [ dessous] the market, its often mysterious, occult, even clandestine character, its socio-politico-economic undergrounds, fetishism, at once the sacralization of the original work, the collector’s overwhelming desire (the aura of the nonreproducible work of which Benjamin speaks), and [at once, therefore] an apparently desacralizing becoming-commodity—therefore at once sacralizing and desacralizing, undecidably sacralizing-desacralizing when the work’s very sacrality makes the surplus value and the speculative overbid proportional to rarity (and the unicity of the original’s body, the unicity of the bond with the underside, is absolute rarity, the absolute of rarefaction: nothing is more rare than what is unique and singular; this is rarity par excellence). All this is well-known, therefore; it all depends on an “I won’t ever wish to separate from an inseparable, I want to remain inseparable from the inseparable, always at one with it or closest to what is most proper to it, etc.,” it all goes without saying and I won’t insist on it. I now emphasize on the contrary what I called the work’s dramaturgy, the dramaturgy of the ergon, the drama that torments and is at work, the drama that operates (this is what dramaturgy means, the urgy signals toward work, toward the energy of the ergon, and toward the operation of the work [œuvre]), the dramaturgy that is at work right on the work, right on the opus, right on the operation of the opus, right on its originary production; that is, the paradox of a fold that complicates everything in the structure of the unique. As is well known,

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any unique thing is not valorized, desired, fetishized, sacralized as such, simply because it is unique; any unique thing is not held to be rare. What affects us, in this unique which is held to be a work, what is invested with sacrality and surplus value, is precisely what the underside of the support makes possible, that is, an anticipation, a detachment of the work that subsists outside us, a subsistence ensured by a certain autonomous substantiality that enables it to do without us, that can detach itself from us, separate from us, survive our absence and our death. In other words, there where the subjectile underside, where the support seems to imply the inseparability of all the bodies (the inseparability between the body’s support and the body of what the support supports, also the inseparability in the close struggle between the artist and the work, the inseparability between the admirer, the art lover, the enthusiast or the collector who wants to keep and not separate from the work), where the underside seals and founds all these inseparabilities, well, paradoxically, by the same token, it triggers and ensures on the contrary emancipation, autonomy, therefore the work’s separability, the possibility for the work to separate, to emancipate itself from the artist, the creating subject, as well as from the spectator, the enthusiast, or the collector, from the contemplative subject. The underside of the work is that base that ensures the possibility of the work’s movements, of its circulation, of its passing from hand to hand, therefore also of its market and of its market value. Therefore, the underside both supports the relative solidity, the work’s relative stable identity, but also threatens and exposes the work in its fragility, its precariousness, even destructibility, so many things (emancipation, circulation, fragility) that, far from appeasing, kindle desire and the affect of reappropriation of which we’re speaking. This is what I’ve been calling the trace effect for a long time. It allies inseparability and separability in the same paradoxical logic. It attaches, it binds, it is engaging [ attachant], it provokes attachment through the very possibility of unbinding [ déliaison]. One gets attached only to that from which one is or can be separated, weaned, deprived. The paradoxes of this topology are never neutral. For reasons I have just indicated, they inevitably produce all the affects that affect us while affecting the work with the erogenous values of desire, of sacrality, of the (cryptic or hermeneutical) secret, of mortality, of finitude, of fragility, while calling upon acts of faith, responsibility, the desire to keep, to save, to maintain the cult and organize the heritage. For all of that, in the abysses of the underside, is a scene of cult and heritage, I will even go as far as to say the origin of the cultual and of the testamentary. And where there is sacredness, secret, crypt, abyss, groundless ground of the foundation [ fond sans fond du

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fondement], the unconscious joins in, there is suppression, repression, denial, fetishism (a fetishism about which I tried to show elsewhere,6 probably against its dominant interpretation in Freud, that it is general, limitless, and does not even tolerate any longer the opposition between the fetish and the thing itself), etc. 2. With regard to the phenomenology of the work of art and of its undersides, I shall recall too briefly that it must take into account structural differences between types of art, even though those may here and there work [composer] together, graft or articulate themselves onto one another. Production and reproduction. A phenomenology of the support/surface couple in each of what are called the fine arts should put to work the phenomenological concepts of ideality and idealization, of ideal object (explain) free ideal object (the number 2) concatenated ideal object (the word “two”) Painting and drawing (a special case for lithographs or silk-screen prints: a multiplicity of originals) Sculpture Music Literature: support: idiomatic letter, untranslatable . . .

3. The transformation of new supports, techniques of virtualization and dematerialization (for places where visual artworks are kept and exhibited ): no longer reproduction (books, postcards, posters, etc.), but hic et nunc visit of places and paintings on internet screen for example (develop). Since this transformation also has to do with the history of paper, affects the future of paper, but also greatly depends on it, I’ll tackle directly the first of the two big questions mentioned before, that of paper, then that of the subjectile (to which I devoted a number of texts7 in the past and not long ago), of which I’d like to attempt, sketch today with you a kind of reinterpretation. So 1. The question of paper Two stages: A. Paper as multimedia, its paradoxical finitude or its interminable survival. Read A8 B. Depaperization (about the right to paper, the economics and politics of the “undocumented”) Read B

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2. The question of the subjectile It is less the question we’re asking ourselves about it than the question it asks us through Artaud’s voice and work, at once written, pictorial, and graphic. (Subjectile: who or what?)9 Three stages. 1. Betrayal Read A 2. The jet or the here-lies [ci-gît] of the subjectile Read B 3. Who is the subjectile? Read Q

. . .

Aletheia

“Aletheia,” trans. Pleshette DeArmitt and Kas Saghafi, Oxford Literary Review 32, no. 2. © The Oxford Literary Review. Reproduced with permission of the Edinburgh University Press through PLSclear. Also published in “The Truth in Photography,” ed. Michael Naas (2010), pp. 169–88. Other translations: Brazilian, Spanish, Italian. This text was published in an edited volume titled “Nous avons voué notre vie à des signes” (Bordeaux: William Blake & Co., 1996), 75–81. The introductory note reads as follows: Previously unavailable in French, this text was initially published in Japanese, in the March 1993 issue of Sincho, devoted to a volume of photographs published by Asahi Press [Tokyo] in February 1993 as part of the Accidents 3 series. The book’s author, Kishin Shinoyama, is as famous in Japan as his model, Shinobu Otake. The original edition bore an English title, Light of the Dark. Published in a large format (31/24), it contained more than fifty photographs. We thank Kishin Shinoyama, Shinobu Otake, as well as the book and the journal’s editors, respectively, for their authorization to reproduce, in a smaller format, the photographs that are explicitly named in Jacques Derrida’s essay.

Born in 1940 in Tokyo, Kishin Shinoyama is the second son of the head monk of Ensho¯-ji, an ancient Buddhist temple. Although destined to follow in his father’s footsteps, Kishin Shinoyama developed an early taste for photography, undertaking formal studies at Tokyo’s Nihon University (1961–63). From 1961 to 1968, he worked for the Tokyo advertising agency Light-House. Kishin Shinoyama became an independent photographer in 1968, subsequently exploring the theme of the human body through his photography series. Tanjo (Birth), for example, consists of nude studies on

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a beach in Tokunishima. Another of his most emblematic series (1973– 74), also on the theme of the body, depicts tattoos in the style of a documentary. His nudes are often perceived as unconventional owing to his highly stylized renderings of the body. Indeed, Shinoyama approaches nude photography as a sculptural exercise in molding. His nudes occasionally resemble abstract forms, especially in the Shinorama series. The exhibition “Japon 1945–1975, un renouveau photographique,” which took place in Paris at the Hôtel de Sully in 2003, situates Shinoyama within the new wave of Japanese photography of the 1960s and 1970s. Voted photographer of the year in 1970 by the Photographic Society of Japan, he is considered to be one of the most important photographers of his generation.

The photographer left; he told the truth. It is she. She remains without witness, save an invisible witness to attest that there is no more witness. We left; it is as if the two of us were dead, the photographer as well, after having spoken the truth—spoken without seeing [voir], without knowing [savoir], and without being able [ pouvoir]. It is as if she were dead, buried alive in the flowered crown of her wedding dress. But she remains and she will have shown her name, on the verge of more than one language. It is (the) truth and she comes to us from Japan. “Light of the dark”? What does that mean? We wonder about this before opening the work. Then while looking at it, thus while reading it, we wonder about it again, after the fact. And the question resonates in the very body of the images, right on the captive body of these images. It is borne like a child; it comes to the lips of this young woman who nevertheless remains silent and exposes herself in silence to silence. But what is a word, then? What is a name? Indeed, this great photographic work does not say a word. It remains silent, to be sure, and apparently it is content to tacitly show a scene of silence: a young woman exposes herself to the light and to the eye. She even seems for an instant to expose herself to death like a virgin, a fiancée, a

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Figure 6: Kishin Shinoyama, série Accidents 3, February 1993.

wife, a mother between day and night, but without ever speaking. And yet, the work, already from its English title, makes us think language; it even promises to touch upon the body of the word in the play of tongues. It animates a tongue that conceals itself before the camera; it lays bare its movements, which are at once indecisive, incomplete, innocent, and perverse. Imminence of the tongue or of language. There is in fact only imminence in this photographic narrative where everything is sketched out, announced, and seems to prepare itself (for all the events of life: love, marriage, birth, death, their cyclical, thus reversible and thus ahistorical order, and thus in defiance of all narration), but nothing seems to come to pass from these

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preparations [ préparatifs]. Words come. Light.1 Perhaps it is an adjective: light [ léger] (how does one say light [ léger] in Japanese?). This young woman is the very lightness of an image body. Nothing is lighter than an image; the image of heaviness has no weight. Like all images, this one, this image, this woman comes from the night and returns to it without waiting, as if to her native element. She divides and shares herself between night and day; she says without words the sharing of light and shade. She is born there and she dies there, borne by the night like the lightest of simulacra. Now, because, she exposes—others would say proposes—her nudity to the gaze, even to the voyeur and to the potential mercantilism that always accompanies spectacle, curiosity, optical prostheses, and technical reproduction, the lightness of this image is also appropriate for what one calls in French une femme “légère,” that is, a “loose” woman (play of modesty and seduction, coquetry, perverse science, and venal sublimity of someone who knows how to fold herself and to keep hold of the other, on the verge of desire and pleasure, though she’s on the verge of tears, in the dealings of the marketplace, where charm itself, and the appeal of pleasure or profit, ignites the movement of merchandise, greed as much as gratitude: the dark soul of lightness [ la légèreté ]. Twilights: just as the noun the dark* can, at the break of day, name, thus call the night, obscurity, invisibility, shadow, the dark continent of sex, the unknown of death, nonknowledge, be it learned ignorance but also the hidden eye of the camera (beneath its black veil as in the beginning of the century or today its coffin-box [ boîtier-cercueil]), and as an adjective dark* can describe all that, by metonymy, darkly conceals itself from the light and resists being seen; so in what is more than an opposition, light* (which is preceded by no article in the title and could be an attribute or a subject, an epithet or a noun) comes to signify light [ léger], certainly, but also the day, the light, and the visibility of the phenomenon (light, the daylight*). Now it is also what, discreetly, in seeming to exhibit something else, the work shows and the allegory allows to be understood: light itself, the appearance or genesis of pho¯s, light. This young woman is herself, certainly, unique and very singular herself, but she is also light [la lumière]; (the light [ légère] allegory of) light [lumière] hides itself, she holds herself in reserve, between parentheses, in something else, that is, in shadow. She thus signifies. She signifies what the clarity of the day will have been, yesterday, the day before: the written archive, the graphic memory of this birth of light to photographic light, that which at once captures, inscribes, and keeps visibility imprinted. Photography as skiagraphy, the writing of light as the writing of shade. In the shadow of this shadow, how not to think of Juni-

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chiro¯ Tanizaki? His In Praise of Shadow2 in 1933 evoked a “national genius” that “already reveals itself in photography.”3 Likewise in cinema, with “the same equipment,” the “same developing chemicals,” the “same film,” the Japanese do not write like the Americans, the French, or the Germans. They play otherwise with shadows; they calculate differently, we could say here, with the idiom of light in shadow. Tanizaki also declared that “the Westerner” “has never pierced the enigma of the shadow,”4 that “the intrinsic obscurity of the No¯ and the beauty that emerges from it form a singular world of shadows that in our day we see only on the stage.”5 And the already scandalous author of A Fool’s Love [L’amour d’un idiot] (1924)6 also recalls the preference of his ancestors for a woman “inseparable from darkness [ l’obscurité ]” whom they “tried hard to immerse entirely in the shadows.”7 The filming, the signature of the shadow took place one time only [ une seule fois], this occurred only once, and this time, like this woman, remains unique, singularly alone, absolutely solitary, absolute. But that’s not all. How is this (light) clarity of the night? Why does it appear not only to come out of and proceed from the night, as if black gave birth to white, but also to belong still to shadow, to remain still at the heart of the dark abyss from which it emanates? There are two typical answers to this question. One appears classical: it recalls in its principle a truth of truth, the one that is imprinted and reflected in the entire history of philosophy since Plato. And this young woman will also exhibit, as much as a (philosophical) story and history of modesty, of reserved nudity, an allegory of truth itself in its movements of veiling and unveiling: the origin of light, the visibility of the visible, that is, the black night, that which, letting things appear in the light [ la clarté ], by definition hides itself from view. That is what she does: she hides from view [se dérobe à la vue], she escapes from view by slowly exhibiting, making you wait in imminence, the gesture by which she suggests the movement of disrobing. Visibility itself is invisible, it is thus dark, obscure, nocturnal ( dark*), and it is necessary to be blind to it (immersed in darkness, in the dark*) in order to see. In order to be able [ pouvoir] to see [voir] and to know [savoir]. This law of the luminous phenomenon ( pho¯s) is inscribed, from the origin, in nature ( physis). Like a story of the eye. The laws of photography are in nature; they are physical laws; and to say this takes nothing away from the unheard-of event of this modern technique.

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Against the abyssal background of this undeniable and ageless response, I can nonetheless see coming into view what might be called the photographic reply: a modern apparatus [dispositif], let’s call it a technique, becomes the witness without witness, the prosthetic eye, an eye too many but invisible, at once producer and preserver, the origin and the archive of this insinuation of shadow at the heart of light, of everything that in physis thrusts clarity [la clarté ] into the night, light in the dark*, penetrating it without touching it, without the least noise, like an imperceptible thief with the force of a desire (this work shows, without saying anything about it, that which suspends photography upon desire and desire upon photography). The force of desire is an irresistible thief, but a thief who needs a witness and installs a camera even there where he defies the law. Thus tekhne¯ becomes the truth of physis; and the history of photography, as this work recalls—this singular work and this woman who cannot be dissociated from it, as might be done in other kinds of art—marks or gives to remark such an event; not the history of photography as the history of a technique or as the time of an ocular prosthesis which comes to surprise an already given light—in order then to inscribe it on an image and in order to make it thereafter into a reproducible archive. No, rather, the interposition of an optical apparatus coming to remind us that, in physis already, the interstice will have been open, like a shutter, so that photography might attest to it: so that the invisible witness like a third (terstis) might see and give to see, even there where seeing is forbidden and hides in secret. Already in physis the difference between day and night could only appear in reversing their values. Nothing is more black than the visibility of light, nothing is clearer than this sunless light (lunar night, moonlight: go back to the first photograph, to the archi-still [archi-photogramme], the moon is there, a matrixlike [ matricielle] moon): the photographic “negative” to be developed, the always possible inversion of the projected image, the nudity of the body unveiled by the veil itself which calls for and suspends desire—these are so many indices or emblems. However extraordinary and irreducible the modern event might be, photographic mutation belongs, like all technique, to physis; it marks the différance of the relation to self in a physis that looks at itself, at herself, one, unique, alone with herself, she who comes and moves away from herself in the time it takes to see herself and thus blind herself to herself—and who loves herself. Who loves to hide, as Heraclitus said of physis (kryptesthai philei),8 and who thus, like this young woman whom I love (as a result) as much as she herself, which is to say more and more, loves to show that she hides on the very threshold of light. All alone [Toute seule], yet with herself, she figures (the) truth: of photography. Photography, these

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are the two points and everything that they suspend: incessantly, without waiting, like a negative in suspension, but by an instantaneous snapshot effect [ un effet d’instantané ]. Yes, for she is alone [seule]. Unique, irreplaceable, wholly other, over there, at a nearly infinite distance, on the other side of the Pacific, this young woman whom I could have met or loved, with whom I could have spoken, by telephone for example during a visit to Japan, is also, this wholly other, a living allegory (thus she could be anyone, any one, anywhere, there where the truth of physis could show itself and say itself in something else, in someone else, and everywhere there are photographic machines and some tableau vivant to bear witness to the without-witness, there where, as Celan says, Niemand / zeugt für den / Zeugen (No one / bears witness for / the witness).9 From where does this emotion come? From where does it come to me? From her? This emotion is, I know, sustained by a nonknowledge, born, no doubt, of an indecision in which desire breathes. I don’t know any longer, I don’t know yet—will I ever succeed in knowing?—if I love this photographic work or this woman, on the verge of the name that I would like to give her but cannot, the name that I give her for the first time as if I had given birth to her without ever having seen her and without any chance of ever seeing her, bringing her thus into the light of day, giving birth to her (lui donnant le jour, as we say in French), but giving birth to her in the night from which she comes and from which she distances herself at the same time, by blindly giving her a name that I nevertheless forbid myself, out of respect for her, to give to her? How is it that, sure of loving her, I no longer know if I love this work (each still [ photogramme] and each still that stands alone—that is entirely alone like her, for she is absolutely alone looking at the camera that looks at her, to which she exposes herself so dangerously, offers herself so solemnly, refuses herself so gently, sometimes on the verge of tears that blur one’s vision in order to show the eyes, and in silence she responds so attentively, waiting for an imminent event, like a birth that will never occur in slow motion, the prolonged duration of a purely phorographic [sic] narrative that is thus only the event of the day in its graphic revolution), if I love this work, thus, in the series, linked or interrupted, of a film, that is, of a thin film [ pellicule] without history, I love this work, thus, irreplaceable, but also this young woman, entirely other and singular—and yet just any one (every other [one], the wholly other, is every [bit] other [ tout autre est tout autre])?10 No work of art, outside photography, is so troubling. It is also the troubling confusion that, in reference, conflates the image and

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its model, the images this time and only once, once and for all [ une fois pour toutes], only one for all, only one, inseparable from that of which it is an image. When I say and repeat that this young woman is alone [seule], I mean one time alone [une seule fois]. She signifies and gives to think the unthinkable: one time alone [une seule fois]. The photograph marks a date. What irreducibly belongs to the photographic effect, and Barthes11 had greatly insisted on this, is that the unique existence of the referent (here of this young woman whose name is a secret) is undeniably posed as the condition of the work (but I prefer to say supposed, and this changes almost everything), and that this young woman exists, that she posed, actually exposed herself once, twice, three times, and each time is a unique event, one time alone [une seule fois], even if, as in love, each caress prepares for another and advances in the imminence and metonymy of the other. Now this confusion between the actual existence of the “referent” or of the “subject” of the work, on the one hand, and the still, on the other, produces of itself what we could call erotic confusion, the unsettling, troubling desire [ trouble de désir] that goes toward the other, the other who is undeniable but only promised through its double, through the veil, the film, the membrane [ pellicule] of the simulacrum, through modest emotion, the emotion of modesty and of the veil itself, thus of truth, disinterested emotion, emotion without measure, that is to say sublime, infinite renunciation at the heart of desire, this young woman, she and no other, inseparable from the photographic eye to which she was once exposed, more than once but each time one time alone [ plus d’une fois mais chaque fois une seule fois]. Out of this confusion, we come to suspect that desire, even love itself, is always born of a certain photographic sketch. Everywhere love reveals itself to desire, that is, through infinite renunciation, a photographic event will have already been called forth, we would even say, desired. Desire is also the desire of photography. From time immemorial. As long as there has been physis, and even if this goes way back, photography will always have been imminent, incessantly, imminence itself in desire. Imminence is of photography, of the photographic snapshot, the imminence of the shot as well, and we could play without playing at interpreting this entire series of poses: she awaits photography, the photography that makes others wait for it; all the signs of imminence that we read on the body of Aletheia (there we go, I named her, this time, the Greek name for truth all of a sudden resonates in my ear like a Japanese name), everything that we are tempted to decipher on her face, sometimes worried, questioning, timid, reserved, attentive, welcoming, this waiting without horizon, this waiting that does

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not know what is coming to surprise her, but which she prepares herself to want, this is the imminence of the photographic act. This act becomes, and there is nothing fortuitous about this, the metonymy of all possible acts (in the sense of the event and of the archive that records [ prend acte] and preserves memory): the acts and certificates of love, birth, marriage, and death. More precisely, this metonymy in action [en acte] describes the imminence of these acts (love, marriage, birth or death) while it at once freezes movement in a snapshot and according to the shot [ cliché ] schematizes a type and thus makes possible the play of figures, photographic rhetoric. All these “acts” are not separated or discrete. Each is also the figure of the other, what at the same time links, carries along, and nullifies all possible narrativity. This recounts the “instantaneous” story and history [une histoire “instantanée”] of a series of “snapshots’ [instantanés] or paradoxical instants, of these impossible instants, as Kierkegaard would have said, whose decisive force interrupts but also makes possible the story and history. At the center, for example (figure 29,12 and the roll of film is made up of 54 of them), the figures of the virginal girl, the wife, and the dead woman are but one, the white light of the wedding flowers shrouds a child, while Aletheia can also be, with eyes closed, delivered over to the night of dreams. Through condensation and displacement, this reading could irradiate all the stills that precede or follow. And imminence, which describes the daybreak, the day breaking through [ poindre] the night, the breaking through of the “light of dark,”* also signs all these instantaneous snapshots that are at the same time the movements and freeze frames of a film that turns around all the revolutions, beginning with that of day and night, of light and dark,* of birth and death. Imminence is a movement of reserve, a movement without displacement, the suspension of a breath, the epokhe¯ of what is going to happen but has not yet happened, the story that has not begun. Photography, when it is a great art, comes to surprise the instant of imminence, bearing witness to it and registering it [ prend acte] in order to make it an irrecusable past. Testimony and evidence—and this would always be impossible—tend to become one and the same. How can the “not yet” become and remain, like what it is, “not yet,” like what it is not yet, and when it is not yet, a past? It is Aletheia, the beloved photographed one, Aletheia ready to hide or veil her vision with tears. She appears, and she appears alone. Absolutely alone, ab-solute, detaches from everything. Solely visible. Visible but without witness, except for the eye that does not say “I,” the excluded third between her and me—that I

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foresee [que je devine]. She remains alone with me, who am alone in looking at her alone exposed in a light or before an invisible eye—that I become [ que je devienne]. Because I would become thus. Not a single living person visible in the space around her; she is alone with the invisible visibility, alone with a desire for light, alone with the love of photography, which, instead of slipping away, instead of sweeping down upon her [ fondre sur elle], comes to appear through her. Poindre. To come up, peep through, break through. I don’t know any more if the too insistent use that I have made of this word, as it imposes itself on me, and only on the basis of Light of the Dark, is in agreement with Barthes’s use of it in Camera Lucida. I do not think so, but it matters little for the moment. I find it appropriate for the solitary singularity of Aletheia, for her solitude, so unbearable to us, for the held breath of all the imminences that I just mentioned but also for a breath that I feel right on her breasts and right on what in them points. The tip or pointing of the breasts dictates each of these words, it makes the mouth water with words and gives meaning to this space, to the space of this gaze that she invites for the caress but also for the kiss—of the lover, of the newborn, of death.13 Aletheia of photography: it, she, gives birth to light, promises it, nourishes it, poses it, expels it from herself like a newborn, exposes it and deposes it, brings it into the world and puts it to death. To the questions “How can she hide (me)? How can nudity veil? And how can modesty tear off its clothes?”—questions that interrogate no one other than Aletheia herself?—we would be tempted to respond with a narrative that would feign to follow with some consequence, in their discrete sequence, each of these snapshots, one by one, one after the other. Thus, at the moment when this could have taken a theatrical form in fifty acts, to tell the truth [à la vérité ] (for example: (1) Raising of the curtain. She waits—the dawning of the day—still she holds herself in the night, the day breaks through, she sees the event coming, she will always hold herself in imminence, she is inside and looks outside from where the day is coming, the ceremony has not yet begun. We see her on the edge, between the inside and the outside, in the opening of the window. Note that she holds herself in a corner. A slightly concerned curiosity: will what breaks through be something other than the day? (2) Moonlight. Exposition, leaving the self. She has left (but it is not the next moment, it is the same moment that overflows) the house, not far from

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the corner. The day dawns in the night, unless the sun is setting. Today will be the night’s day. Alone with the moon, this time she turns toward the eye, ours, toward that of the optical instrument or the voyeur. She turns toward me while looking at another. She leaves me alone with the phantasm [ phantasme] or the fantasy [la fantaisie], that is, of course, with a kind of light? No phantasm and thus no specter ( phantasma) without photography—and vice versa. The distance will never be surmounted between us; it is that of the day itself, of its veil and its film. Infinite renunciation: in the promise itself. Her dress from another time, the white collar (a boarding school for young girls, a school or convent, and there will always be, we are condemned to this, the visiting room between us). (3) The threshold, the roof. Always on the verge and at the corner, she turns toward the eye and exposes herself on the light; or rather, she prepares for the exhibition [exposition], as for ecstasy. The ex-position always comes to a standstill on the verge of ecstasy, like each of these stills. Apprehension, imminence, nothing has yet happened, nothing will ever happen, but she has already taken a step. We are in the past of this step [ pas] toward that which is not yet and will never be—only the loneliness of photography, her loneliness, but which we can love up to ecstasy, on the verge of exhibition. (4) The portrait. To face up, to face [ faire face]. Full face [De face]: in this very moment, in this book, “here I am,” she faces, before the law of the photographic phantasm, she exposes her face, in a dissymmetrical face-to-face with the eye without person, without anyone (without me), with the look from which her visibility appears. She looks at the eye that we do not see, mine for example, she stares at the invisible, and it is this that is “dark”:* myself (I [sink into] darkness [je-sombre]), this place of invisibility from which I look and which she looks at but that no one sees. Often, you see her looking outside, as we say, out the window, through a framed space, as on a screen. There shall be no witness for us. That is the absolute secret of this book, published to cry out “here I am.” Everything will be possible on this day, this day of the night: birth, marriage, and death, promises made, promises broken. Everything remains possible, this album (the white of an album is always virginal) offers an immaculately matrix-like surface, like kho¯ra, like Right of Inspection,14 for all the stories that you would like to project there, for all imaginable intrigues, “plots”* and schemes. She is only the actress in them, and the subject immediately withdraws. This mortal woman has just seen herself give birth, even seen herself see the day, she has just been born; she is a fiancée, a promised virgin, a mother who will also give birth and will see herself enshrouded in her wedding flowers. All of this will happen without happening. This will happen to the future, without happening to her, in the future [Cela arri-

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vera au futur, sans lui arriver, au futur]. (5) The home, the focal point [ le foyer] (domestic and optic) of seriality—dwells [ demeure]. At the moment that the veil is lifted, and she begins to undress, the movement puts the image out of focus; and the laughter, but everything will have been already inscribed in an exhibit of photographs. A gallery, a bookstore, a photo archive, a passageway, a cemetery where one takes a walk on Sundays: a done deal. The book appears dedicated to a female passerby, to the memory of a passerby exposed to other passersby. Aletheia is no longer there for anyone. (6) Come see, see (what is) coming [Voir venir]. The exposed one exposes herself more, but not too much, she responds, she gives the impression of responding, she opens her mouth without saying anything: the point of the breast will always be promised to the impossible. To go much further . . .) . . . in truth, then, it had to be given up [à la vérité, donc, il a fallu renoncer]. Imminence would not be able to last and one must be alone, as one must know. Translated by Pleshette DeArmitt and Kas Saghafi

Videor

“Videor.” A text to accompany D I S T U R B A N C E (among the jars), 1988, by Gary Hill. A French-language version of this essay appeared in the catalogue for the “Passage de l’image” exhibition, 12 September–18 November 1990, at the Centre Georges-Pompidou in Paris, curated by Raymond Bellour, Catherine David, and Christine Van Assche; see Passage de l’image (Paris: Musée national d’art moderne, 1990), 158–61. The piece was written after Derrida had participated as one of the “readers” in Gary Hill’s video installation D I S T U R B A N C E (among the jars), which was featured in the exhibition, and translated by Peggy Kamuf in Resolutions: Contemporary Video Practices, ed. Michael Renov and Erika Suderburg (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 73–77. Also published in Art + Performance: Gary Hill, ed. Robert C. Morgan (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 20–26. Other translations: Brazilian, Spanish, Italian. Born in 1951 in Santa Monica (California), Gary Hill is one of the major video artists of our time. Trained as a sculptor, he began working with audio and video in the early 1970s, creating installations and performances together with choreographers and poets. His intermedial works explore the physical dimension of language, the enigmas of synesthesia and perception, as well as issues related to ontological space and audience participation. The notion of translation is prevalent in his work, which conceives of language as a “performative.” Gary Hill refuses to define his work as videography, preferring to think of himself as an artist who probes the specifics of his privileged medium—tape—through installations that open new ways of spatially interpreting images. Several solo exhibitions have showcased Gary Hill’s work: at the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain in Paris; at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; at the Centre Georges-Pompidou; at the

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Figure 7: Gary Hill, Disturbance Install 1 and 2, 1998, Museum of Contemporary Art, Montreal. Photo: Richard-Max Tremblay. © 2019 Gary Hill / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Guggenheim Museum SoHo in New York; at the Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Basel; at the Museu d’Art Contemporani in Barcelona, and at the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, to name but a few. His work has garnered numerous distinctions, such as the Golden Lion at the Biennale of Venice (1995), the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship Award (1998), the Kurt-Schwitters-Preis (2000), as well as honorary doctorates from the Academy of Fine Arts in Poznan (Poland, 2005) and the Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle (2011).

— . . . So one would say. It seems to me, at least, that this is the case: quite singular operations, more and more numerous, put to “work” the new “video” power, the possibility that, in an apparently empirical fashion, is called “video.” But I say “it seems to me that . . .” since I am not sure I have at my disposal an adequate concept for what today goes by the name video and especially video art. It seems to me that we will have to choose from among three rigorously incompatible “specificities.” To go quickly by using

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common names, let us say that these are (1) the specificity of video in general; (2) that of video art; (3) that of such works, or the putting-to-work of a general technique that is called “video.” Whether it is shared by these three possibilities, or whether it is proper to each of them, the aforesaid specificity would suppose the determination of an internal and essential trait. Now, despite the upheavals in progress, the use of a different technique or of new supports . . . —But which ones exactly? What is a support for video? —I am still wondering what these things have in common: for example, video grafted onto the ordinary use of television, surveillance video, and the most daring research, called “video art,” which still remains confined in rather narrow circuits, either public or private, and whose “pragmatic” conditions have nothing in common with the other finalizations of video. The possibility of multiple monitors and of a freer play with this multiplicity, the restructuration of the space of production and performance, the new status of what is called an actor, a character, the displacement of the limit between the private and the public, a growing independence with regard to public or political monopolies on the image, a new economy of relations between the direct and the nondirect, between what is carelessly said to be “real” time and “deferred” time, all this constitutes a bundle of considerable transformations and stakes. If, however, video can play such a visible role here, at a new rhythm, it is neither the sole nor the first technique to do so, and this, at least for video art, constitutes an external determination. Once again, it seems to me therefore ( mihi videor) that there is no essential unity among these things that seem to resemble each other or that are assembled together under the name of video. —But perhaps the video event, among others, reveals precisely the problematic fragility of this distinction between an internal determination and an external determination. That would already be rather disturbing . . . —So why then do you say, quite rightly, “among others”? In any case, we would agree, I think, that giving up specific identity doesn’t hurt anyone, and perhaps it’s better that way. —On the contrary, it always hurts a lot, that’s the whole problem . . . —Why should it still be necessary to try to identify? Especially in this case, why should one have to zero in on the irreducible property of an “art”? Why try to classify, hierarchize, even situate what one still likes to call the “arts”? Neither opposition (major/minor, for example) nor a genealogy ordered with reference to the history of supports or techniques seems pertinent any longer in this regard, supposing that they ever were. And if  the very concept of the “beaux-arts” were thereby to find itself

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affected in the dark core of its long life or its nine lives, would that be such a serious loss? —One could say that my uncertainty in this regard—it has a long history but it keeps growing, it is both uneasy and joyful—has been encouraged by the experience of the “video” simulacrum into which I have seen myself, modestly, swept along for a little while now, ever since I was given the chance to participate, or rather to figure, in Disturbance by Gary Hill. Better still, ever since I seemed to see (videre videor, as Descartes would say)1 my simulacrum do no more than pass by there, risk a few passing steps that would be led elsewhere by someone else, I didn’t know where. Narcissism set adrift. I owe this chance not only the way one owes a chance but the way one is obliged by another to be involved in an experience, without knowing it, without foreseeing it—an experience that combines in such an inventive fashion luck with calculation and tukhê (chance) with anankê (necessity). But, for that very reason, I was in no position to talk, and, finally, I had no desire to do so. The blind passerby was hardly even an extra; as to what may be said about that, others have done so with better results than I might even attempt, in particular Jean-Paul Fargier in “Magie blanche.”2 On the other hand, concerning that which cannot be said about it and which remains encrypted in the bodily contact with another simulacrum, with a text that, as I was told and as I believed up until the last minute, was “apocryphal” (the more or less improvised choices that I dictated to myself, almost without seeing—only once—in truth, let be dictated to me like the truth of oracular symptoms in the space of my own familial, tattered gnostic, these raveled fragments of the Gospel according to Thomas that Gary Hill put into my hands, the interrupted premeditations and the sheer chance of improvisation, the hasty crossing of repetitions or rehearsals in the course of an irreversible scene, which is to say unrehearsed, live, direct but without direction, in a direct that was to get carried away with itself, from itself in the course of a simulacrum of performance or presentation that would reveal that there is not and never has been a direct, live presentation, not even, as Virilio ventures to put it in a very fine text, a “presentation [of an] electrooptical milieu”),3 concerning that which, therefore, cannot be said about it and that regards only me and mine, I will say nothing. And for lack of time, I will also reduce to silence a whole possible rhetoric on the subject of, precisely, “video silence,” of video “mystique,” in the sense that Wittgenstein speaks of “mystique” when he says that concerning that about which one cannot speak, one must remain silent. Here, what one cannot “say” other than by showing it, or rather by putting on a quasi-presentation in video on the subject of video, must be silenced. One must put up or shut up, that

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is, do it or be quiet, take into account, as Gary Hill does, what happens to language through the “video” event. —Ah well, but a moment ago you were saying that you did not see yourself as capable of speaking of an identity—already identifiable, already assured—of the “video” event . . . —Not yet, one must take into account what happens to language (partitioned or distributed, cut, strung or tacked together, delinearized, weaved, palindromanagrammatized in more than one language and passing like a serpent across seven monitors at the same time) through the “video” event . . . —But are you sure there is only one monitor, right here, and one line? What do you think you see? — . . . anything but mutism, a certain “being silent” of this writing— new but very impure and all the newer for that—which stages discourses or texts that are thought to be of the most “interior” sort. Is it just by chance that Gary Hill solicits, among others, gnostic texts or the writings of Blanchot? One never sees a new art, one thinks one sees it; but a “new art,” as people say a little loosely, may be recognized by the fact that it is not recognized; one would say that it cannot be seen because one lacks not only a ready discourse with which to talk about it, but also that implicit discourse that organizes the experience of this art itself and is working even on our optical apparatus, our most elementary vision. And yet, if this “new art” arises, it is because within the vague terrain of the implicit, something is already enveloped—and developing. —But someone who was neither an actor, nor an extra, just barely a passerby mobilized by a new interplay of the aleatory and the program, couldn’t he say something about the way in which “video art” affects the essential status of its interpreters (I do not say its actors, even less its characters; one would say they are just barely its human subjects)? Whoever appears or sees himself appear in a video work of art is neither a “real person” nor a movie or stage actor nor a character in a novel. —Are you talking about video art or about the art of Gary Hill? —As this was my first video passion (passion in the sense that, seeing myself passing by reading in front of a camera against an absolutely white studio background that made me think, I don’t know why, of the cemetery in Jerusalem seen from the Mount of Olives, I was all the more gravely passive in that I did not know what Gary Hill would do with what I saw myself doing without seeing myself, with me and mine, with my words, the words that I borrowed, selected, recomposed, repeated, nor what he would do with my passing steps whose rhythm was all I could calculate, not the

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trajectory, and in fact this image was swept along by a well-understood path of necessity, from one aleatory moment to the next, there where I could in no way have foretold or foreseen it would go, but passion also in the sense that right away I loved it, that is to say, as always when one loves, I right away wondered why I loved that, what or whom I loved exactly), I will say only a few words very quickly on the question that, like everyone, I have asked myself and am still asking: if it is an “art,” and an absolutely new one, especially with regard to the analogues that are painting, photography, cinema, and television, and even the digital image, what would compose this irreducible difference, that very thing? What is going on there? What went on with me? What happened to the passerby that I was, using my body, my passing steps, my voice as no art, no other art, so one would say, would have done? It seems to me. Difficult. I tried out all the possible analyses—forgive me if I do not repeat them here—but nothing worked; I could always reduce the set of components of this “art” to some combination of givens older than that, video “properly speaking” as art “properly speaking.” So, one could say that the question is badly put. —Let us suppose Gary Hill to be exemplary here . . . —No, not exemplary, otherwise you are going to end up with the same classic problematic that you want to avoid; no, not exemplary, but singular, idiomatic, his work, each of his works is found to be singular and sweeps the general technique called video along in an adventure that renders it irreplaceable, but irreplaceable among other irreplaceables, other unique effects of signature, even if it puts to work many other things, many other “arts” that have nothing to do with video . . . —All right, but you are still insisting on the “work,” on the shape of its unity, on the idiomatic singularity of the signature, as if it were selfprotecting and self-legitimating, in an internal fashion, whereas today events called “video” can lay bare symptoms that are far more disturbing and provocative: for example, those that lead us to think the singularity of “works” and “signatures” beginning with the very thing that institutes them and threatens them at the same time. Supposing that there is in effect, so it seems, as an effect and as the simulacrum on the basis of which we are speaking, some work and some signature, let us then start out from this reminder: Gary Hill was to begin with a sculptor, and a sculptor who was first of all tuned into sonority, indeed to the singing of his sculptures, in other words, to that unheard-of technical prosthesis that, at the birth of an art, grafts an ear onto an eye or a hand, right away making us doubt the identity, the name, or the classification of the arts. But he is also one of the few, I do not say the only “video artist” who is now working, even if he has not

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always done so, with discourses, many discourses (this is a “new” visual art that—and it is our first enigma—appears to be one of the most discursive), and not only with discourses but also with textual forms that are heterogeneous among themselves, whether literary or not (Blanchot, the Gospels, for example), that seem to be altogether at odds with such a working, with what one thought “video” art had to be, especially if, as seems to be the case, they are anything but the simple pretext assumed by the videogram. —This obvious fact [ évidence] perhaps calls for the following hypothesis—I indeed say hypothesis, maybe even fiction: The specificity of a “new art”—or, in general, of a new writing—is not in a relation of irreducible dependence (by that I mean without possible substitution or prosthesis) and especially of synchrony with the emergence of a technical generality or a new “support.” One would say that the novelty remains to come, still to come with regard to a technical mutation that, by itself, could give rise to the most mechanical repetition of genres or stereotypes, for example narrative, novelistic, theatrical, cinematographic, or televisual . . . —So it would take time, a kind of latency period, to render the new support, the new technique indispensable, irreducible . . . —No, not a homogenous period of latency, but the history of an active, vigilant, unpredictable proliferation that will have displaced even the future anterior in its grammar and permitted in return a new experience of the already identifiable “arts,” and not only the “arts,” another mode of reading the writings one finds in books, for example, but of so many other things as well—this without destroying the aura of new works whose contours are so difficult to delimit and that are delivered over to other social spaces, other modes of production, of “representation,” archiving, reproducibility, while giving to a technique of writing in all its several states (shooting, editing, “incrustation,” projection, storage, reproduction, archiving, and so on) the chance for a new aura . . . —But there would have to be another name for that, other names for all these things, it seems to me . . . —I wouldn’t say that that is indispensable; one would have to see. It seems to me that an old name can always name anew: see how Gary Hill makes secret names and dead tongues resonate on his seven monitors . . .4 Translated by Peggy Kamuf

The Ghost Dance An Interview by Mark Lewis and Andrew Payne

“The Ghost Dance: An Interview with Jacques Derrida by Andrew Payne and Mark Lewis,” trans. Jean-Luc Svoboda, in Public (Toronto) no. 2 (1989): 60–66. Also in French, 68–73. Other translations: Brazilian, Spanish, Italian. This interview with Jacques Derrida took place during the Toronto Semiotics Conference in June 1987 and was conducted together with United Media Arts Studies (Toronto); it was presented in the video journal Diderot #3, published by UMAS.

mar k le wi s an d an dr e w pay n e : We understand, Professor Derrida, that you recently participated in the making of a film. As representatives of a collective of writers and artists concerned with some of the problems of thinking theory with practice, and also, as the name Public Access suggests, with the equally complex question of art’s community or constituency, we would be interested in how you understand the general currents in your writings to be consonant with film or video production. jac q ue s de r r i da: Let me refute the rumors and point out that I simply played a part in a film, that I acted in the movie Ghost Dance.1 As it happens, I did speak a lot about ghosts in the seminar I gave at the University of Toronto, but I had absolutely no involvement as far as the script is concerned, or with the production. I was just an actor playing the role of a philosophy professor asked by an anthropology student if he believes in ghosts. It was a rendezvous with a student in a Parisian café, and then, later, another scene that was wholly improvised, in an office much like this, when in answer to the student’s question “Do you believe in ghosts?,” I improvised on things related, as it happens, to the cinema context.2 I don’t want to relay exactly what I said in the film, but (since it concerns what we’re doing now) generally, I tried to explain to her that, con-

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trary to what we might believe, the experience of ghosts is not tied to a bygone historical period, like the landscape of Scottish manors, etc., but on the contrary, is accentuated, accelerated by modern technologies like film, television, the telephone. These technologies inhabit, as it were, a phantom structure. Cinema is the art of phantoms; it is neither image nor perception. It is unlike photography or perception. And a voice on the telephone also possesses a phantom aspect: something neither real nor unreal that recurs, is reproduced for you, and in the final analysis, is reproduction. When the very first perception of an image is linked to a structure of reproduction, then we are dealing with the realm of phantoms. So that’s what it was all about. But I was simply an actor, and not at all the author of a film. m. l. and a. p.: It has become something of a commonplace to say that we inhabit an age that is “post-literate.” This moment of displacement or departure, this “posting” of the letter, has been both welcomed (as in the case of McLuhan) and condemned (as a specularization or evacuation of history, discourse, and the political). Your work would seem both to approach these pronouncements—you write at times of the Book’s dissemination in a generalized practice of writing—and to qualify the epochal logic that informs them. To what extent could we speak, today, of an end of literacy, of the Book . . . ? j. d.: In fact, at the very beginning of my work, I discussed the relationship between writing and speech and the book or the end of the book, and what was actually happening at the time I was writing. But, since you are quoting McLuhan,3 from the very beginning I did not feel I could share his optimism or agree with the concepts he used to describe what was unfolding. First, because I don’t believe one can simply contrast writing with speech or image or, let’s say, audiovisual structure. And that’s why I tried to propose, to develop, a concept of writing or of text that was not simply contrasted with speech or image. I think that speech and image are in fact texts. They are writing. And therefore, the distinction was not between writing and speech, but between several types of text, several types of inscriptions, reproductions, traces. In accordance with this point of view, what happens after “the end of the book” is not the advent of an immediate transparent speech, but the introduction of other textual structures, other telewriting systems with all the attendant political problems that creates. I don’t believe it is enough to leave behind the period of writing to embark upon a period of speech, that is, of transparent immediate speech. Of course, I am simplifying McLuhan’s outline—it isn’t exactly like that—but his optimism did reflect this ideology.

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Having said that, when I talked about “the end of the book” I also didn’t want to suggest the disappearance of books, or advocate the acceleration of the process. On that level, I try to be both lucid about what’s currently happening and, at the same time, conservative. m. l. and a. p.: How could we speak, if at all, of the relation of specific technical innovations (say, the advent of TV media) both to your speculations on the question of “tekhnê” as well as to that displacement of the regime of the book you describe? j. d .: I think what we should do is not resist the spreading of these new writing techniques: images, television, telecommunications, computers, etc. Personally, I try not to resist, even in my teaching or in the discourses I engage in on these subjects, and even in the texts that I write. La Carte postale for example, is itself profoundly shaped by this experience of telecommunications, which, incidentally, began to influence language and writing before the advent of television or the telephone. Thus, I would say, do not resist this in fact irresistible movement, but, at the same time, try to cultivate the book, cultivate a book culture that should not simply be considered outmoded but instead should be reinscribed in the new configuration. m. l. and a. p.: What would this imply for us with respect to a politics of the image, or more important perhaps, our image of a politics? j. d.: If I wanted to resume this quasi-political attitude, I would say: “Yes, let’s develop, as fast as possible and as much as possible, all the potential of new technology, even in writing, even in teaching.” And that’s why— even though, facing the camera now, I personally feel uncomfortable—I don’t feel I have to say “No” to cameras. I think that camera, television, and video should be brought into the university setting. And not only should we not slow down the movement, but we should also work toward making their entry into universities as general, as sophisticated, and as cultivated as possible. But at the same time, I don’t think it should be done to the detriment of the forms of other media and of the book medium in particular. I think that what is happening now, and what would interest me personally, is a culture that could graft or create a new body in a way that the book would not disappear but that its predominance would be a thing of the past. m. l. and a. p.: What of the logic inherent in the text? j. d .: It’s finished. Its hegemony is finished, but the book is not dead. On the contrary, it seems clear that to graft a book culture on a non-book culture would not simply give rise to live speech but would instead be capable of refining other types of image production, other types of sound production, other types of cinematographic or videographic writing. This new body has no recognizable form at present.

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Still, there are those who resist the new body, saying that it is simply monstrous, while others say cinema, video, etc., must absolutely be developed everywhere, but without changing the forms that rule, order, command, direct reproduction. (And this is where I am personally tempted to resist the new technologies, and where my response takes on a slightly conservative tone.) They are the ones who would insist, for example, that we should see the author’s head: “Let’s have no more authors taking refuge in the aristocratic privacy of their ivory towers. We have to see their heads.” All very good, but in what manner are we going to see their heads? “Well, we’ll take an ID photo and put it on the back of the book.” In other words, they want to reproduce the same old ideology simply by tacking on new technologies. Or they’ll say, video has to be introduced into the seminar, but what will they do? They’ll place a camera there and then let the seminar unfold the same way it did yesterday. In that case I say I’d rather there be no camera. I think if the camera is to enter universities, the entire space has to be changed. Those responsible for education, teachers as well as students, have to realize the fact that the machine is there and not simply go on talking as before, merely admitting the presence of an archival machine that simply inscribes what’s there without transforming the space. I think the codes have to be changed. Personally, since you are filming me, I will speak only for myself. In my public relations with these machines, I went through an extremely negative period. I have been publishing for twenty-five years now, and for the first twenty years I forbade all photographs. I refused all recording and interviews, and I practiced a sort of ethic: in the light of what I was writing, I did not want reproductions of myself. This didn’t mean, as far as I was concerned, that I was against photography—I have always been for it, and been very interested in it. But I was opposed to the codes of representation that ordered certain kinds of head shots. That is, editors would say: “Right, we’re going to take photos of you and the newspapers will publish a picture of you writing with a pile of books in the background.” And I would say: “No, I reject these codes.” Then there came a time when I was able to explain this resistance in my writing, for example in The Post Card or elsewhere.4 Often I was surprised: photos of me continued to appear using the old codes. I still haven’t mastered the problem. But as I’ve said, at least I try to explain that I am not against these technologies but that they are only interesting if their reproductive work transforms the entire space. m. l. and a. p.: Could you speak a little about the Minitel communi-

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cation system in France? It seems to us that this system raises a number of these issues. j. d.: I know the Minitel is greatly admired throughout the world. A computer is connected with many other terminals through the telephone. You have to pay for each call and it’s very expensive. That’s why many people can’t use it. The Minitel connects you with many agencies in the city: you can buy seats in the cinema, make reservations at hotels or the railway stations, and be connected with other people for—anything. So there is a sexual network, which is, of course, a political problem. The Minitel is an important phenomenon, and it reveals all kinds of new problems for political organization. Just a few weeks ago, I was in contact with some people from Seattle who set up a network they called The Invisible Seattle. Anyone with a word processor, a computer, could interact with the network. And they organized projects, without knowing each other, literary projects for example. They assigned themselves the task, a contract: to write a novel together on the computer. And then they published under the name Ins Omnia because the communication would occur at midnight. They had what they called a room, and the room was the chosen theme everybody had to write about. Later they extended this network to several cities so as to interact with various underground communities. Their original idea was to produce a new kind of literature integrating these technologies. They told me that having decided to write a novel together, they thought naively that the novel would assume an absolutely unheard-of form, compared with classical models. Then they discovered they had written a nineteenth-century realist novel with these extraordinary machines. And that’s exactly what I was explaining earlier. If you’re not careful, it’s very easy to reproduce strictly classical, stereotypical forms with these new machines. And so now they are mindful of that. They do literacy research on literary forms and ask themselves how—in this new techno-social situation—they can write new texts, texts with a new structure, instead of reproducing Balzac novels. This is an interesting problematic that brings the application of new technologies to old forms and a reflection on a transformation of forms and images. m. l. and a. p.: How does either state or private ownership of these technologies guarantee different forms of production? And to what extent do these new media problematize the old opposition between private interest and public custodianship? Can we in fact rely on a simple notion

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of disinterestedness to manage the diverse possibilities for expressions of difference? j. d.: I cannot suggest a solution to this problem. It’s terribly difficult because if the state is granted hegemonic authority over the development of those things, as soon as it’s no longer profitable, the state can no longer manage it. And, consequently, either it becomes constraining and repressive, or it abandons it. Or it can sell it to a private structure whose profit motive can lead it to the reproduction of old forms. All American soap operas, of course—and it’s probably the same all over the world—are highly marketable, and reproduce scripts, situations, techniques, and styles that are very, very archaic. Whereas, on the other hand, a state-controlled entity that is supposedly disinterested can encourage, up to a point, a higher calibre of production, but there is always the risk of state control. In France, we are facing the problem of the privatization of television stations. We’re all aware of the problem, and this phenomenon is a reflection of the problem. Yet there is a feeling that state-run radio or state-run television can maintain, can safeguard a certain level of quality of aesthetic research, at the cost of certain disadvantages endemic to state monopolies: restriction of freedoms and also, at times, stifling of innovation, etc. And further, when privatization occurs, whatever the conditions, one has to consider the rules of the open market and their potentially regressive impact. Therefore, it seems there is no ideal solution. One has to find a political invention that would not be a delimited invention. It is not the same problem for us and for you in Canada. In every case, a solution must be found that would accommodate the adventurism of the market, that would not bow too much before the urgent needs of the market and that would have a degree of public disinterestedness. Here, I think that in each individual case, one has to invent a solution that would be neither private nor public and at the same time both private and public. Obviously, it’s not the same problem for small corporations, for groups such as yours, but first and foremost a problem for television. At the present time, politics in modern industrialized countries are controlled by these choices. When we realize the extent of the role that television plays in a nation’s politics, it’s not just one choice to make among others, it’s a key decision. New structures must be found to avoid the risks of state control, and at the same time, the rhythm of brutal privatization. Translated by Jean-Luc Svoboda

Cinema and Its Ghosts An Interview by Antoine de Baecque and Thierry Jousse

Reprinted from Antoine de Baecque, Jacques Derrida, and Thierry Jousse, “Cinema and Its Ghosts: An Interview with Jacques Derrida,” trans. Peggy Kamuf, Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture 37, nos. 1–2 (Winter–Spring 2015): 22–39. Copyright ©  2015 Wayne State University Press, with the permission of Wayne State University Press. [“Le cinéma et ses fantômes,” interview by Antoine de Baecque and Thierry Jousse, in Les Cahiers du cinéma, no. 556 (April 2001): 74–85. Interview conducted by Antoine de Baecque and Thierry Jousse on 10 July 1998 and by Thierry Jousse on 6 November 2000. Transcribed and formatted by Stéphane Delorme.] Other translations: Brazilian, Spanish, Italian. The interview was preceded by a foreword: When a philosopher admits to having a ‘hypnotic fascination’ with the cinema, is it any coincidence that his thought is acquainted with the ghosts of the silver screen? It is not obvious that a journal such as Cahiers du cinéma would interview Jacques Derrida. Above all because, for a long time, Derrida seemed to be interested only in the phenomenon of writing, in its trace, in speech, in the voice. And then came several books: Memoirs of the Blind, around an exhibition at the Louvre, Echographies of Television, a conversation about that mass medium with Bernard Stiegler that affirmed a new interest in the image. And then too, a film, Derrida’s Elsewhere, directed by Safaa Fathy, and a book, Tourner les mots, co-written with the film’s director, which finally tackled the experience of cinema. That’s all we needed to go and ask some questions of a philosopher who, even though he admits he’s not a cinephile, nevertheless has truly been thinking about the cinematographic apparatus, projection, and the ghosts that

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every normally constituted viewer feels an irresistible urge to encounter. Derrida’s discourse, which resonates in the following interview, is thus that of neither a specialist nor a professor speaking from the height of commanding knowledge, but very simply that of a man who thinks and who goes back to the ontology of cinema while shedding new light on it.

CAHIERS DU CINÉMA:

How did cinema enter your life? jac que s de r r i da: Very early. In Algiers, when I was ten or twelve years old, at the end of the war, then right after the war. It was a vital way of getting out. I lived in a suburb of the city, El Biar. To go to the movies was an emancipation, getting away from the family. I remember well the names of all the movie houses in Algiers, I can see them still: the Vox, the Caméo, the Midi-Minuit, the Olympia . . . No doubt I went to the movies without being very selective. I saw everything, the French films made during the Occupation, and especially the American films that returned after 1942. I would be totally incapable of listing the titles of the films, but I remember the sort of films I saw. A Tom Sawyer for example, certain scenes of which came back to me recently: a cave where Tom is closed up with a little girl. A sexual emotion: I saw that a twelve-year-old boy could caress a little girl. I was about the same age. Of course, a large part of one’s sensual and erotic education comes from movies. You learn what a kiss is at the movies, before learning it in life. I remember that adolescent erotic thrill. I would be totally incapable of citing anything else. I have a passion for the cinema; it’s a kind of hypnotic fascination, I could remain for hours and hours in a theater, even to watch mediocre things. But I have not the least memory for cinema. It’s a culture that leaves no trace in me. It’s virtually recorded, I’ve forgotten nothing, I also have notebooks where I keep reminders of the titles of films from which I don’t remember a single image. I am not at all a cinephile in the classical sense of the term. Instead I’m a pathological case. During periods when I go to the movies a lot, particularly when I’m abroad in the United States where I spend my time in movie theaters, a constant repression erases the memory of these images that nonetheless fascinate me. In 1949, I arrived in Paris, for advanced preparatory school, and the rhythm continued, several shows a day sometimes, in the countless movie theaters of the Latin Quarter, especially the Champo. C . D . C .: What is for you the first effect of film in the state of childhood? You mentioned the erotic dimension, which is certainly essential in the apprenticeship of images. But is it a relation to gestures, a relation to time, the body, space?

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j. d .: If it wasn’t the names of films, or the stories, or the actors that made an impression on something in me, it was surely another form of emotion that has its source in projection, in the very mechanism of projection. It is an emotion that is completely different from that of reading, which imprints a more present and active memory in me. Let’s say that in the situation of a “voyeur,” in the dark, I act out an incomparable liberation, a challenge to prohibitions of every sort. You are there, before the screen, invisible voyeur, permitted all possible projections, all identifications, without the least sanction and without the least work. Perhaps that’s what I get from cinema: a way of freeing myself from prohibitions and especially a way of forgetting work. That’s also why, no doubt, this cinematic emotion cannot, for me, take the form of knowledge, or even real memory. Because this emotion belongs to a totally different register, it must not be work, knowledge, or even memory. As for the impression cinema left in me, I would also underscore a more sociological or historical aspect: for a sedentary little kid from Algiers, cinema offered the extraordinary boon of travel. You could travel like crazy with the movies. Leaving aside American movies, which were exotic and familiar at the same time, French films spoke with a very particular voice, they bristled with recognizable scenery, they showed landscapes and interiors that were impressive for a young adolescent like me, who had never crossed the Mediterranean. So cinema was the scene of an intense learning experience at that time. Books didn’t do the same thing for me. To go to the movies was immediately a guided tour. As for American film, for me who was born in 1930, it represented a sensual, free expedition that was hungry to conquer time and space. American movies arrived in Algiers in 1942, accompanied by what also made them powerful (including as a dream), music, dance, cigarettes . . . Cinema meant first of all “America.” Cinema then followed me during my whole student life, which was difficult, anxious, tense. In this sense, it often acted on me like a drug, entertainment par excellence, uneducated escape, the right to wildness. C . D . C .: Doesn’t cinema allow, more so than the other arts, for an “uncultured” relation between the spectator and the image? j. d .: No doubt. One can say it’s an art that remains popular, even if that is unfair to all those producers, directors, critics who practice it with great refinement or experimentation. It is even the only great popular art. As for me, as quite an avid spectator, I remain, I even plant myself on the side of the popular: cinema is a major art of entertainment. One really must let it have that distinction. Of the great number of films I saw as a student, while I was boarding at Louis-le-Grand, I really only remember Malraux’s L’Espoir, at the film club at the Lycée Montaigne, so you see that’s not very much by way of a “cultivated” relation to old films. Since then, my mode

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of life has taken me away a little from cinema, confining it to specific times when it plays the role of pure feeling of escape. When I’m in New York or California, I see countless American films, both ordinary fare and films that are talked about because I’m very easy to please. That is a time when I have the freedom and the chance to experience again the popular relation to cinema that’s so indispensable for me. C . D . C .: One can imagine that when you are in a movie theater in New York or California, in a space unconnected to your life of academic knowledge, the screen continues to impress on you images that come straight from your childhood or adolescence . . . j. d.: It’s a privileged and original relation to the image that I maintain thanks to cinema. I know that there exists in me a type of emotion linked to images that comes from far away. It does not get formulated in the manner of scholarly or philosophical culture. For me, the movies are a hidden, secret, avid, gluttonous joy—in other words, an infantile pleasure. This is what they must remain, and no doubt it is what bothers me a bit in talking to you because the space of Cahiers signifies a cultivated, theoretical relation to cinema. C . D . C .: But what is interesting is that this relation to cinema, which is certainly different, often depends on the same kind of films. Traditionally, at the base of Cahiers, is American cinema, and not the most prestigious, but B movies, little films, Hollywood directors . . . j. d.: I would say then that Cahiers, out of intellectual dandyism, out of cultivated nonconformism, finds agreement with a series of films to which I surrender out of more childish enjoyment. Everything is permitted at the movies, including this coming together of heterogeneous sorts of audiences and relations to the screen. Within the same person, moreover. There is for example a competition in me between at least two ways of looking at film or even at television. One comes from childhood, pure emotional pleasure; the other, which is more scholarly and strict, deciphers the signs emitted by the images in function of my more “philosophical” interests or questions. C . D . C .: In Echographies of Television, you speak directly about cinema. About images more generally, specifically television, but also about cinema with regard to the film in which you had a role. You connect cinema to a particular experience, that of phantomality . . . j. d.: The cinematic experience belongs thoroughly to spectrality, which I link to all that has been said about the specter in psychoanalysis—or to the very nature of the trace. The specter, which is neither living nor dead, is at the center of certain of my writings, and it’s in this connection that, for me, a thinking of cinema would perhaps be possible. What’s more, the links between spectrality and filmmaking occasion numerous reflections today.

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Cinema can stage phantomality almost head-on, to be sure, as in a tradition of fantasy film, vampire or ghost films, certain works of Hitchcock . . . This must be distinguished from the thoroughly spectral structure of the cinematic image. Every viewer, while watching a film, is in communication with some work of the unconscious that, by definition, can be compared to the work of haunting, according to Freud. He calls this the experience of what is “uncanny” (unheimlich).1 Psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic reading, is at home at the movies. First of all, psychoanalysis and filmmaking are really contemporaries; numerous phenomena linked to projection, to spectacle, to the perception of this spectacle have psychoanalytic equivalents. Walter Benjamin2 realized this very quickly when he connected almost straightaway the two processes: film analysis and psychoanalysis. Even the seeing and the perception of detail in a film are in direct relation with psychoanalytic procedure. Enlargement does not only enlarge; the detail gives access to another scene, a heterogeneous scene. Cinematic perception has no equivalent, but it is alone in being able to make one understand through experience what a psychoanalytic practice is: hypnosis, fascination, identification, all these terms and procedures are common to film and to psychoanalysis, and this is the sign of a “thinking together” that seems primordial to me. What’s more, a screening session or séance is only a little longer than an analytic one. You go to the movies to be analyzed, by letting all the ghosts appear and speak. You can, in an economical way (by comparison with a psychoanalytic séance), let the specters haunt you on the screen. C . D . C .: You said that you could write about a very specific aspect of film, which is to say . . . j. d .: If I were to write about film, what would interest me above all is its mode and system of belief. There is an altogether singular mode of believing in cinema: a century ago, an unprecedented experience of belief was invented. It would be fascinating to analyze the system of credit in all the arts: how one believes a novel, certain moments of a theatrical representation, what is inscribed in painting, and of course, which is something else altogether, what film shows and tells us. At the movies, you believe without believing, but this believing without believing remains a believing. On the screen, whether silent or not, one is dealing with apparitions that, as in Plato’s cave, the spectator believes, apparitions that are sometimes idolized. Because the spectral dimension is that of neither the living nor the dead, of neither hallucination nor perception, the modality of believing that relates to it must be analyzed in an absolutely original manner. This particular phenomenology was not possible before the movie camera because this experience of believing is linked to a particular technique, that of cinema. It

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is historical through and through, with that supplementary aura, that particular memory that lets us project ourselves into films of the past. That is why the experience of seeing a film is so rich. It lets one see new specters appear while remembering (and then projecting them in turn onto the screen) the ghosts haunting films already seen. C . D . C .: if there were several levels of phantomality . . . j. d.: Yes. And certain filmmakers try to play with these different temporalities of specters, like Ken McMullen, the director of a film, Ghost Dance, in which I had a role. There is elementary spectrality, which is tied to the technical definition of cinema; and within the fiction, McMullen puts on stage characters haunted by the history of revolutions, by those ghosts that rise up again from history and from texts (the Communards, Marx, etc.). Cinema thus allows one to cultivate what could be called “grafts” of spectrality; it inscribes traces of ghosts on a general framework, the projected film, which is itself a ghost. It’s a captivating phenomenon, and, theoretically, this is what would interest me in cinema as object of analysis. Spectral memory, cinema is a magnificent mourning, a magnified work of mourning. And it is ready to let itself be imprinted by all the memories in mourning, that is to say, by the tragic or epic moments of history. It is thus these successive periods of mourning, linked to history and to cinema, that today “put in motion” [ font marcher] the most interesting characters. The grafted bodies of these ghosts are the very stuff of film plots. But what often comes back in these films, whether European or American, is the spectral memory of a time when there was as yet no cinema. These films are “fascinated” by the nineteenth century, for example, the legend of the West in Eastwood’s Westerns, the invention of cinema in Coppola, or the Commune in Ken McMullen’s film. In the same way, cinema is at work more and more frequently in the references made in books, paintings, or photographs. No art, no narrative can neglect cinema today. Nor can philosophy, moreover. Let’s say that it weighs heavily with the weight of its ghosts. And these ghosts are, in very diverse and often very inventive ways, incorporated by the “competitors” of cinema. C . D . C .: Why is cinema the most popular art form, and is it still? j. d.: To answer this question—the great question—one must combine several types of analysis. First an “internal” analysis of the cinematic medium that would take into account the immediacy of emotions and apparitions such as they are imprinted on the screen and in the minds of spectators, in their memories, their bodies, their desires. Next an “ideological” analysis that notes how this spectral technique of apparitions was very quickly tied into a worldwide market of gazes that allowed any reel

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of printed film to be reproduced in thousands of copies liable to touch millions of viewers throughout the world, and to do this quasi-simultaneously, collectively, since if cinema were a strictly individual or even domestic form of consumption, this wouldn’t work. This conjunction is unprecedented because in a very brief time it unites the immediacy of apparitions and emotions (unlike what any other representation can propose) with a financial investment that no other art can equal. To understand cinema, one has to think the ghost together with capital, the latter being itself a spectral thing. C . D . C .: Why does cinema “work” only thanks to the community of vision, the projection room? Why do specters appear to groups rather than to individuals? j. d.: Let’s begin by understanding this from the point of view of spectators, of perception and projection. Each viewer projects something private onto the screen, but all these personal “ghosts” combine into a collective representation. One must thus advance very cautiously with this idea of community of vision or of representation. Cinema, by its very definition— that of projection in a theater—calls up collectivity, communal spectacle and interpretation. But at the same time, there exists a fundamental disconnection: in the movie theater, each viewer is alone. That’s the great difference from live theater, whose mode of spectacle and interior architecture thwart the solitude of the spectator. This is the profoundly political aspect of theater: the audience is one and expresses a militant, collective presence, and if the audience becomes divided, it’s around some battles, conflicts, some intrusion of another into the heart of the public. This is what makes me often unhappy at the theater and happy at the movies: the power of being alone in the face of the spectacle, the disconnection that cinematic representation supposes. C . D . C .: It’s your problem with connection? j. d.: I don’t like to know that there is a viewer next to me, and I dream, at least, of finding myself alone, or almost, in a movie theater. So I wouldn’t use the word “community” for the movie theater. I wouldn’t use either the word “individuality,” too solitary. The suitable expression is that of “singularity,” which displaces, undoes the social bond, and replays it otherwise. It is for this reason that there exists in a movie theater a neutralization of the psychoanalytic sort: I am alone with myself, but delivered over to the play of all kinds of transference. And no doubt this is why I love the cinema so much, and why, even though I don’t go often, in a certain way it is indispensable for me. There exists, at the root of the belief in cinema, an extraordinary conjunction between the masses—it’s an art of the masses, which addresses the collectivity and receives collective representations—and the singular. This mass is dissociated, disconnected, neutralized. At the mov-

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ies, I react “collectively,” but I also learn to be alone: an experience of social dissociation that moreover probably owes a lot to America’s mode of existence. This solitude in the face of the ghost is a major test of the cinematic experience. This experience was anticipated, dreamed of, hoped for by the other arts, literature, painting, theater, poetry, philosophy, well before the technical invention of cinema. Let’s say that cinema needed to be invented to fulfill a certain desire for relation to ghosts. The dream preceded the invention. C . D . C .: In a recent book on Maurice Blanchot,3 you return to a question dear to you and that you already addressed, with regard to the image, in Echographies: the status of testimony. It is likewise a central question for cinema: what cinema may be used for, what it can believe in. Cinema testifies, attempts to provide proof . . . j. d.: In Western law, the filmed document does not have the value of proof. There exists, in our Western idea of belief, an irreducible mistrust of the image in general and the filmed image in particular. This can be interpreted as a form of archaism, the idea that only perception, speech, or writing in their real presence have the right to belief, are credible. This legal code has never been adapted to the possibility of filmed testimony. Conversely, one can also say that this juridical mistrust of the filmed image takes account of the modernity of the cinematic image, the infinite reproducibility and the editing of representations: the always possible synthesis that links belief to illusion. An image, and what is more in a film, is always liable to interpretation: the specter is an enigma, and the ghosts who parade past in the images are mysteries. One may, one must believe them, but this has no probative value. Consider the Rodney King affair in Los Angeles, where the whole framework of the accusation was based on a videotape recorded by chance by a witness of the beating of the black man by the police. The witness could furnish only these images; he had seen through the eye of the camera, and this tape came to be at the center of abundant, never-ending discussions and interpretations. If the witness had seen and reported the facts, his word, in a certain manner, would have been more probative. The image of the facts, while it corresponded to a state of society and aroused a kind of revolt, in particular in the black community, was paradoxically less worthy of belief on the part of the justice system and white authority. More fundamentally, it is the question of the mark or imprint that is posed by this mistrust: the genetic imprint is more credible, more accredited than the cinematic imprint. C . D . C .: Speaking of film as imprint, what do you think of a film like Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah?4 j. d.: It is a testimony-film. But it confers on the acts of testimony a

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truly major role since it systematically refuses to use archival images so as to encounter the witnesses—their speech, their bodies, their gestures—in the present. It is thus also a great film of memory, which restores memory against representation and against, of course, reconstitution. The present prevents representation, and in this sense, I think that Lanzmann illustrates in the best way possible what the trace can be in film. Shoah is constantly seizing imprints, traces; the whole force of the film and its emotion depends on these ghostly traces without representation. The trace is the “that-took-place-there” of the film, what I call “survivance.” For all of these witnesses are survivors: they lived that and say so. Cinema is the absolute simulacrum of absolute survivance. It recounts to us what we cannot get over, it recounts death to us. By its own spectral miracle, it points out to us what ought not to leave any trace. It is thus doubly trace: trace of the testimony itself, trace of the forgetting, trace of absolute death, trace of the without-trace, trace of the extermination. It is the rescue, by the film, of what remains without salvation, salvation for the without-salvation, the experience of pure survivance that testifies. I think that the viewer is seized hold of in the face of “that.” This form that has been found for survivance is indisputable. It is certainly an illustrious illustration of the talking cinematograph. C . D . C .: What is it in Shoah that seems to you specifically cinematographic? j. d.: This presentation without representation of testimonial speech is striking because it is “film.” Shoah would have been much less powerful and credible as a purely audible document. The presentation of the trace is not a simple presentation, a representation, or an image: it takes on a body, matches gesture with speech, recounts and inscribes itself in a landscape. The ghosts have survived, they are re-presentified, they appear in the whole of their speech, which is phenomenal and fantastic, that is, spectral (of the revenants-survivors). Before being historical, political, archival, the power of Shoah is thus essentially cinematographic. Because the cinematic image allows the thing itself (a witness who has spoken, one day, in some place) to be not reproduced but produced once again “itself there.” This immediacy of the “itself there,” but without representable presence, produced with each viewing, is the essence of cinema and of Lanzmann’s film. C . D . C .: This manner of presenting the unrepresentable, in Shoah, has likewise rendered suspect any reconstitution and any representation of the extermination. How do you explain that? j. d.: What appears by disappearing in Shoah, this absence of direct or reconstituted images of what “it” was, of what is being spoken about, puts us into relation with the events of the Shoah, that is, the unrepresentable

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itself. Whereas all the films—whatever may otherwise be their strengths or their faults, which is not the question—that have represented the extermination can put us into relation only with something reproducible, reconstitutable, that is, with what the Shoah is not. This reproducibility is a terrible weakening of the intensity of memory. The Shoah must remain at once within the “it has taken place” and within the impossible that “it” has taken place and is representable. C . D . C .: The force of Shoah has a lot to do with the recording of the voices. This is something to which you are very sensitive. You have, for example, recorded readings of texts, Feu la cendre (Cinders)5 and “Circumfession,”6 where you participate entirely in your own voice. j. d.: Shoah is much more than a recording of people speaking . . . But, to answer your question, yes, the recording of speech is one of the major phenomena of the twentieth century. It gives living presence a possibility, which has no equivalent and no precedent, of “being there” once again. The greatness of cinema, of course, is to have integrated voice recording at a certain moment of its history. This was not an addition, a supplementary element, but rather a return to the origins of cinema allowing it to be still more fully achieved. The voice, in cinema, does not add something: it is cinema because it is of the same nature as the recording of the world’s movement. I don’t believe at all in the idea that one must separate images— pure cinema—from speech: they are of the same essence, that of a “quasipresentation” of an “itself there” of the world whose past will be, forever, radically absent, unrepresentable in its living presence. C . D . C .: Another specificity of cinema concerns montage. What do you think of this technique that allows one to assemble, reassemble, disassemble? In its very matter, cinema has no doubt gone furthest in the use of reflection on narrativity. Can one establish a link between the concept of “deconstruction” that you forged and the idea of montage in cinema? j. d.: There is no real synchronization, but this comparison is important to me. Between writing of the deconstructive type that interests me and cinema, there is an essential link. It is the exploitation in writing, whether it be Plato’s, Dante’s, or Blanchot’s, of all the possibilities of montage, that is, of plays with the rhythms, of grafts of quotations, insertions, changes in tone, changes in language, crossings between “disciplines” and the rules of art, the arts. Cinema, in this domain, has no equivalent, except perhaps music. But writing is, as it were, inspired and aspired by this “idea” of montage. Moreover, writing—or let us say discursivity—and cinema are drawn into the same technical and thus aesthetic evolution, that of the increasingly refined, rapid, accelerated possibilities offered by technological renewal (computers, internet, synthetic images). There now exists, in a certain way, an

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unequaled offer or demand for deconstruction, in writing as well as in film. The thing is to know what to do with it. Cutting and pasting, recomposition of texts, the accelerating insertion of quotations, everything you can do with a computer, all this brings writing closer and closer to cinematic montage, and vice versa. The result is that at a moment when “technicity” increases more and more, film is paradoxically becoming more “literary” and vice versa: it is obvious that writing, for some time now, has shared somewhat a certain cinematographic vision of the world. Deconstruction or not, a writer is always an editor [monteur]. Today he or she is that even more so. C . D . C .: Do you yourself feel like a filmmaker as you write? j. d .: I don’t believe it’s an exaggeration to say that, consciously, when I write a text I “project” a sort of film. That is my project and I project it. What interests me most about writing is less, as one might say, the “content” than the “form”: the composition, the rhythm, the sketch of a particular narrativity. A parade of spectral powers producing certain effects that are fairly comparable to the progression of a film. It is accompanied by speech, which I elaborate as if on a separate track, however paradoxical that may seem. It is cinema, unquestionably. When and if I take pleasure in writing, that is what gives me pleasure. My pleasure is not, above all, to tell “the” truth or the meaning of the “truth”; it is in the mise en scène, whether that be through writing in books or through speech in teaching. And I am very envious of those filmmakers who, today, work on montage using hypersensitive machines that allow one to compose a film in an extremely precise way. That is what I am constantly looking for in writing or speech, even if, in my case, the work is more artisanal and even if it’s my weakness to believe that the “effect” of meaning or the “effect” of truth still makes for the best cinema. C . D . C .: I would like to talk about the film Derrida’s Elsewhere by Safaa Fathy, in which you are both subject and actor. It seems to me that this experience led you to think about the functioning of the cinema machine (as concerns filming and montage) and about cinema in general. j. d .: There were several periods in this experience, which I would be tempted to call an “apprenticeship film” the way one says an “apprenticeship novel” or “Bildungsroman.” Beyond everything I was able to learn, understand, or approach indirectly, nothing equals this inflexible experience that leaves little room for the body to withdraw. I managed to understand many things about cinema in general, about the technology, the market (because there were some production problems between ARTE and Gloria Films). In this sense, it was an “apprenticeship film.” On the other

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hand, you alluded to Tourner les mots,7 where I refer to myself as the Actor. While writing this text, I played with capitalizing the words “Actor” and “Author”; it was a game, but a serious game; I had to play what was supposed to be my own character, who is himself but one character (each of us has several social characters). So it was a matter for me of playing as Actor several of my characters, which had been chosen by the Author, who made very many choices that I had to take into account. For example, the Author, Safaa Fathy, made the decision to remove me from French space; she deliberately chose to show me elsewhere by reconstituting some more or less fantasized genealogies—in Algeria, in Spain, in the United States. I had to learn to overcome my own inhibitions about exposing myself in front of the camera and to obey the Author’s choices. In a final period, after the filming and editing (which I had nothing at all to do with), each of us separately wrote the texts that are collected in Tourner les mots. That allowed me to say a certain number of things that do not replace the film but that play with it. C . D . C .: The text redistributes the film in another dimension and a different order; there is a connection inasmuch as the two concern and complete each other. j. d.: The film and the book are at once connected to each other and radically independent. I try to show how, in a certain number of its image sequences, the film depends on some French idiom, some untranslatable idiom, as for example the word “ailleurs” [elsewhere]. In this text, I pose the question of the French language insofar as it determines, from within, the flow of images and insofar as it must cross the frontier, since we’re talking about a film coproduced by ARTE and destined immediately to be shown in non-French-speaking European countries. What was going to happen with the translation? In principle, words are translatable (although here the experience is daunting at every step), but what links images and words is not, and thus involves some stakes that are quite original. One must accept that, in its cinematic specificity, a film is linked to untranslatable idioms and that translation must take place without losing the cinematic idiom that links the word to the image. C . D . C .: Is there not another problem that perhaps you felt, within the disjunction between seeing and speaking? j. d.: Yes, this is one of the most interesting risks of the film. That is what the book’s title stresses. “Tourner les mots” means to avoid words, to go around them, allow the cinematic to resist the authority of discourse; at the same time, it was a matter of turning words, that is, of finding sentences that were not sentences for interviews, courses, lectures, sentences already favorable for a cinematic frame; finally, one has to hear “tourner,” one has

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to understand how to tourner in the sense of shooting or filming words. And how to film words that become images that are inseparable from the body, not only from the body of the one who says them, but from the body, from the iconic ensemble, of what nevertheless remain words, with their sonority, tone, tempo of words? These words may sometimes be snatched up during an improvisation or else read out, because there are a few passages read by the actor or readable on a street sign. The places are never identified; they melt into each other; they share the common features of Southern California, Spain, Algeria, coastal, Mediterranean places; and the only moment when one can identify them by a proper name is something that is read silently on a street sign. It’s an experience that seeks to be properly cinematic and yet does not sacrifice the discourse that obeys the law of film. It is often a question in this film of the theme of address, destination, the indetermination of the addressee. Who addresses what to whom? What counts in the image is not merely what is immediately visible, but also the words that inhabit the images, the invisibility that determines the logic of the images, that is, interruption, ellipsis, the whole zone of invisibility that presses on visibility. And the technique of interruption in this film is very savvy—in this regard, I often speak and so does Safaa Fathy of anacoluthon. This interruption of the image does not interrupt the effect of the image; it extends the force to which visibility gives momentum. The interrupted sequence either continues at another moment of the film or else does not continue and it is up to the addressee, what is called the spectator, to orient him- or herself, to let things thread their way, to follow the stitches or not. Consequently, the body of the image qua image is shot through with invisibility. Not necessarily the sonorous invisibility of words, but another invisibility, and I believe that anacoluthon, ellipsis, interruption form perhaps what is proper to this film. What can be seen in the film has less importance no doubt than the unsaid, the invisible that is cast like a throw of the dice, relayed or not (it’s up to the addressee to answer) by other texts, other films. It’s a film about mourning (the death of cats, the death of my mother), and it’s a film in mourning for itself. In every work, there is such a sacrifice: nevertheless, in the writing of a text or a book, even though one must also throw out, sacrifice, exclude, the constraints are fewer, they are less external; when one writes a book, one does not have to obey, as is the case here, such a harsh, rigid commercial or mediatic law. That’s why the book was a kind of breathing space. C . D . C .: What you say about your experience of the film relates to more general concepts of cinema and television, such as the question of the specter.

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j. d.: The theme of spectrality is presented as such in the film. As are mourning, sexual difference, addressing, inheritance. Spectrality came back regularly, even as an image, because one sees the specter of my mother, a phantom cat, a Siamese cat who resembles the dead cat like a twin. This theme is treated both discursively and in images. And, elsewhere, in Echographies of Television, I had broached this question of the spectral dimension of the televisual or cinematic image, the question of virtualization. It has political stakes, which also shows up in Spectres de Marx (Specters of Marx). All of this forms an inextricable network of motifs that are filmed the way one films cinema itself, since cinema is an example of what is in question here. In other words, it is as if spectral images came and said to you: we are spectral images (but without speculating on the academicism of authority, of the specular self-referentiality). How does one film a specter that says: I am a specter? Along with, naturally, the somewhat troubling or even sinister aspect of the afterlife. For one knows that an image can survive, like a text. One could see these images not only after the death of my little brother, my cat, my mother, and so on, but after my own death. And this would work in the same manner. It has to do with an effect of intrinsic virtualization that marks any technical reproducibility, as Benjamin would say. It is a film on technical reproducibility: one sees both nature in its wildest state, the ebb and flow of waves in California, Spain, or Algeria, and machines for reproducing, recording, archiving. C . D . C .: The ghost was thought about at a certain moment in film theory, but today this idea goes against the dominant conception of the image, namely, that there is supposedly a consistency of the visible in which one ought to believe. j. d.: In a spontaneous ideology of the image, one often forgets two things: technicity and belief. Technicity, namely, where the image (news reporting or film) is supposed to put us face to face with the thing itself, without tricks or artifacts; people want to forget that technology can absolutely transform, recompose, artificialize the thing. And then there is the very strange phenomenon that is belief. Even in a fiction film, a phenomenon of belief, of “pretend as if,” has a specificity that is very difficult to analyze: one “believes” a film more. One believes a novel less or in another way. As for music, that’s something else again, it does not imply any belief. As soon as there is novelistic representation or cinematic fiction, a phenomenon of belief is carried by the representation. Spectrality is an element in which belief is neither assured nor disputed. That is why I believe one must connect the question of technicity with that of faith, in the religious and fiduciary sense, namely, the credit granted to an image. And to the phantasm. In Greek,

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and not only in Greek, “phantasma” designates the image and the revenant. The “phantasma” is a specter. C . D . C .: What do you think of the filmed images of the liberation of the camps in relation to written texts? j. d.: Shoah is a text of language as much as it is a corpus of images. They are “filmed words” [mots tournés], in a certain manner. Filmed speech is not speech captured as such on filmstock; it is speech that is interpreted, for example interrupted, restarted, repeated, put into a situation. To make a work (for the archive is also a work) accessible is to submit an interpretation to an interpretation. C . D . C .: Was the power of the image greater than the text by Robert Antelme—The Human Race8—which at the time did not have much impact? j. d.: Or even now. It is a very important testimony, but it did not have the power of distribution of a cinematic work. I don’t want to have to choose between the two. I don’t believe that one can take the place of the other. Moreover, there are many images in The Human Race. It is also a film-book in a certain way. Shoah is a text-film, a body of words, embodied speech. The time it takes to discover testimonies, the unconscious path that leads to the archives is something that deserves reflection. There is a (technical and psychic) time for the political lifting of repression. I was recently rereading (for something I would be talking about elsewhere)9 Sartre’s Reflections on the Jewish Question, which was written after the war and some pages of which were written in 1944. The way he talks about the camps, very briefly, is rather strange. Did he know about them or not? After the war, there was no discussion of what happened at Auschwitz. The name “Auschwitz” (not to mention the name “Shoah”) were inaudible, unknown, or silenced. A psychoanalysis is necessary of the political field: of the impossible mourning, of repression. Benjamin is once again a necessary reference here: he linked the technical question of cinema and the question of psychoanalysis. Blowing up a detail is something both the movie camera and psychoanalysis do. By blowing up the detail, one is doing something else besides enlarging it; one changes the perception of the thing itself. One accedes to another space, to a heterogeneous time. This is true for both the time of the archives and of testimony. C . D . C .: Do you think the image is an inscription of memory or a confiscation of memory? j. d .: Both. It is immediately an inscription, a preservation, either of the image itself at the moment it is taken, or of the memory act that the image speaks of. In the film Derrida’s Elsewhere, I evoke the past. There is both the

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moment in which I am speaking and the moment of which I am speaking. This already makes for two memories implicated in each other. But since this inscription is exposed to cutting, selection, interpretive choice, it is both a chance and a confiscation, a violent appropriation by both the Author and myself. When I speak about my past, whether voluntarily or not, I select, I inscribe, and I exclude. I don’t believe there are archives that only preserve; this is something I try to point out in a short book, Archive Fever. The archive is a violent initiative taken by some authority, some power; it takes power for the future, it pre-occupies the future: it confiscates the past, the present, and the future. Everyone knows there is no such thing as innocent archives. Translated by Peggy Kamuf

The Sacrifice

This text is the transcription of a talk Derrida gave on 20 October 1991 on the occasion of a meeting organized by the journal La Métaphore, titled “L’irreprésentable, le secret, la nuit, le forclos” [The Unrepresentable, the Secret, Night, the Foreclosed ]. It appeared in La Métaphore (Éditions de la Différence, Théâtre National Lille Tourcoing Région Nord–Pas de Calais), no. 1 (Spring 1993), and was jointly published by the journal Lieux extrêmes. It was republished as a postface to Daniel Mesguich, L’éternel éphémère (Paris: Verdier, 2006), 143–54. Born on 15 July 1952, Daniel Mesguich is an all-round theater artist who acts, teaches drama, and directs both plays and operas. After studying drama at the Marseille conservatoire, he enrolled at the Conservatoire national supérieur d’art dramatique in Paris, where he became a teacher from 1983 onward. He began his career as a comedian by interpreting young male leads in classic plays (Hamlet, Platonov) before making his first television and film appearances at the end of the 1970s. A theater  actor before moving to film and television, he has increasingly devoted himself to directing classic and contemporary plays. He founded his first company, the Théâtre du miroir, as early as 1974. After heading the Théâtre Gérard-Philippe in Saint-Denis between 1986 and 1988, he became director of the Théâtre National in Lille, “La Métaphore,” for seven years before founding a new company, “Miroir et Métaphores.” He has also directed operas by Prokofiev and Verdi and written many articles on drama, as well as essays and translations of plays by Shakespeare and Euripides. Besides L’éternel éphémère (Lagrasse: Verdier, 2006), Mesguich is notably the author of Le Passant composé (with Antoine Spire; Lormont: Éditions Le Bord de l’eau, 2004) and Je n’ai jamais quitté l’école (Paris: Albin Michel, 2009), a book of interviews with

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Rodolphe Fouano. He became the director of the Conservatoire national supérieur d’art dramatique in Paris in 2007.

Philosophy and theater are bound up in a turbulent and insistent affinity: do not these two experiences privilege a certain authority of presence and visibility? An authority of the gaze, an authority of the optical, an authority of the eidetic, of theo¯rein, of the theoretical. This privileging of theory, which is, whether rightly or wrongly, regularly associated with philosophy, is the privileging of seeing, contemplating, gazing. From the Platonic eidos up to the object or modern objectivity, philosophy can be read—not only, but easily—as a history of visibility, of the interpretation of the visible. Here, then, is a destiny that philosophy has shared from its origin, sometimes in a very conflicted fashion, with the visual arts and with a certain theater. But if the invisible has always been at work in the visible, if, for example, the visibility of the visible—that which makes the visible thing visible—is not visible, then a certain night hollows out abyssally the very presentation of the visible. It comes to give place, in self-representation, in self-repetition, to this essentially invisible speech that comes from beneath the visible, like the Jew in Mary Tudor1 under the direction of Daniel Mesguich, who, in place of the prompter,2 came to whisper or “blow” [ souffler] in order to set fire to the visible. It would then be a matter of giving place to the invisible at the heart of the visible, to the nontheorizable at the heart of the theoretical, to the nontheatrical—as in a coup de théâtre—at the heart of theater. Starting with this authority of the gaze, with all that it underpins, we could follow up with a series of analogies between theater and philosophy. In this regard, Daniel Mesguich proposes, as much in his book L’éternel éphémère as in his theater, places of resonance where the relations between theater and philosophy can be heard and thought. First of all, Mesguich is one of those paradoxical inventors who know how to make a scene, “a theatrical volume,” out of the book or out of a book—and constantly, in a complicated fashion, to recommend the book (to themselves). He performs an alliance between theater and the book: against the image, against a certain interpretation of the image. His theater is iconoclastic in this sense; it performs against the image. Or rather against those images that, under a mediatized form, are taking over public space nowadays. Naturally, the book of which he speaks is not a closed totality, but we must already pay attention to the perspectival reversals that this alliance of theater and the book can engender in our idea of the relation between theater and philosophy.

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In L’éternel éphémère, Daniel Mesguich sketches out, in a more easily discernible manner, two partial analogies between theater and philosophy. The first can be heard in the trace of what I was suggesting earlier, that is, of a certain authority of the gaze: Paradox is not in the least contingent in theater; it is—as is required by the impurity of its ingredients—essential and necessary. If philosophy is really a theory of all theories, then it is also a theory of itself, as we say. If theater is really a staging of all stagings, then it is also a staging of itself.3

Daniel Mesguich emphasizes this paradox that unites theater and philosophy—while losing both vertiginously—by which each tries to think and represent itself, to metaphorize itself. Philosophy in and of philosophy, theater in theater, theater exhibiting theater and thus cloaking [ dérobant] its own visibility, burning and consuming it, so to speak. The second of these analogies would concern the comparative orders of the philosopher and the man of theater: the philosopher, the writer, the painter, the sculptor, even the filmmaker leave a work behind. They can afford not to be “men of their time.” The theater, which plays, if you like, between journalism and a lasting work, does not allow us—or else so indirectly that it becomes negligible—to speak “to tomorrow” [à demain]. Like the philosopher, the man of the theater is not a man of his time. But neither is he a man of the work. Because he is merely an ear listening [ n’est qu’écoute] to the work of others, he remains on the edge of the work: he is after it and before it.4

Here, we would need to agree on the term “work” [ œuvre], to hear the distance this word produces in itself depending on whether it designates the act of putting into work, the working [ l’œuvrer], or the opus that results, remains, or derives from it. For we might be tempted to say the contrary: the philosopher is not as such a man of the work, and, conversely, the man of the theater puts the work into work—the work that does not exist apart from its being staged [ mise en scène], which is to say, put into work [ mise en œuvre]. As for me, concerning theater and philosophy, and a certain divorce whose repercussions will have been, perhaps, the entire history of the West, of its philosophy and of its theater, I would like to retain metaphorically, “here-now,” just a single focal point, just one scene or one act in this

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long drama. I would like to do so on account of one of the most thoughtprovoking theses in Daniel Mesguich’s book, namely the question of sacrifice. Since Nietzsche, at least, it has often been repeated that philosophy began with the end of a certain tragedy. As if Socrates and Plato had driven out Sophocles, Aeschylus, and Euripides, just as they had “driven the poet from the city.”5 Thus, philosophical discourse would supposedly have killed the scene and the very energy of the tragic; it would have pacified it, which amounts to the same thing. I cannot engage in this immense debate here. I would just like at once to narrow and complicate it around the motif of sacrifice. It will help us get back in part to one of the titles of this gathering: “The Night, the Secret, the Foreclosed.” The term “foreclosed” indicates not only the excluded, the dissociated, what is set apart, put outside, or cannot return, but also often the sacrificed, the scapegoat, what must be put to death, expelled, or set aside, like the absolute stranger who must be thrown outside so that the inside of the city, of consciousness, or of the self can be identified in peace. One must drive out the stranger in order for belonging, identification, and appropriation to be possible. In this sense, sacrifice is constitutive of tragic space. And one might think that in its war with theater, philosophical discourse put an end to tragedy, or in any case repressed it, thus inaugurating comedy or the novel, as has often been said. Or else, what is more complicated but can in no way be ruled out, it sacrificed sacrifice, which is to say, economized sacrifice. To put an end to sacrifice is, however, not so simple. One can put an end to sacrifice by sacrificing sacrifice, by making it undergo a mutation or a supplementary interiorization, so much so that some might be tempted to think that the sacrificial structure remains nonetheless dominant in the most dominant discourse of the philosophical tradition. Far from having put an end to sacrifice, or precisely because it believed it put an end to it in Greek tragedy, philosophy would have only carried within itself, in another form, the sacrificial structure. Now, on this point, Mesguich proposes two theses. First, tragedy does not take place in theater, but it is put into play. Here, one should take up the distinction he makes between two sorts of events: one, as taking-place, and the other, as putting into play. Daniel Mesguich writes this: Tragedy Tragos, he-goat, and ôidê, song. Was tragedy the beautiful song that accompanied the ritual sacrifice of a goat at the festivals of Dionysus, or the terrible song of this goat the moment a weapon pierced it? Or else the impure concord of these two songs?

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For the Greeks, it was but a symbol; for the goat . . . Tragedy is when the one being tortured really yells “NO!,” while others, the spectators, hear only the melodious side of the “NO!,” dance to this “music,” or applaud. True tragedy never takes place in the theater. In theater, tragedy is put into play.6

Tragedy would supposedly not take place in theater, it would not be the thing of theater, the present of theater; in any case, it would not be the event as taking-place. The other thesis—and each thesis determines a type of theater, a theatrical school—maintains that there would supposedly be an enormous difference between sacrifice and theater. This theatrical thesis, the coup de théâtre of this thesis, interests me because it carries out a kind of chiasmatic reversal with philosophy. Previously, we were considering philosophy as the end of tragic sacrifice; it would thus remain more sacrificial than is usually said; now, on the contrary, it is theater thus interpreted, putting sacrifice into play, that finishes off sacrifice itself. The sacrifice that was attributed to theater now goes over to the side of philosophy, and the roles are thus reversed. Daniel Mesguich approaches this subject in an interesting way, in a passage entitled “Even the Lamb”: The actor who offers himself is, however, not a Christ who, fulfilling “with his body the lapses in the (written) law,” accomplishes it, completes it at last, terminates it. In theater, the body infinitely provisionally works its way into the gaps of writing: for the actor, it is not finished, no one dies, it was just for laughs; one will have to come back to it, incessantly. Theater is “an erotic confrontation,” but not a final, suicidal, or Christlike one, “between the body of the Son and the law of the Father.” The actor, not as expiatory victim or scapegoat, but as the one who plays the victim, plays in front of everyone with the law. The one who apes the goat. In theater, at the end, Isaac, Abraham, and the lamb pick themselves up and take a bow.7

This suspension of sacrifice, this putting into play in place of what takes place, presupposes a strange institution, which at once assures the putting into play, puts itself into play and de-institutionalizes itself, each time, each day, at each première. This is one of the differences from philosophy, at least with the philosophy that, since the nineteenth century, has defined the concept of the Western University. The question of the institution, which is indissociable from all those we have just noted, is also considered by Mesguich: “Theater, like the University, maintains [tient] a discourse, proposes an interpretation, but, unlike the University, never holds to it, or sticks to it [ne s’en

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tient pas là], but subscribes to it only provisionally. For a certain University, this is the ultimate crime.”8 Further on, Mesguich will evoke a double bind, the double law that ties the theatrical putting into play to the institution and therefore to public authorities. One must both guard against the institution and guard it; one must guard memory but ceaselessly put back into play the setup [ érection] it constitutes. The institution is entwined with memory, with what is guarded; it holds time back, admittedly, but it is also what is fossilized or reduced, simplified, condensed, hardened, and erected. There are several ways of thinking the unrepresentable in theater. It is first of all night, the visibility of the visible. Visibility is nocturnal, the diaphanous cannot be seen, it is that through which one sees, that which burns the visible. There is, however, another way of thinking the unrepresentable, not simply as what, making representation possible, does not present itself, but as what is forever excluded, marginalized, censored, suppressed, or repressed. We must not forget that the repressed (in a political sense) or the censored (in the sense of unconscious repression) undergoes only a topical displacement; “censorship,” in the psychoanalytic sense of the term, does not annihilate memory; it displaces from one place to another, it keeps in reserve, it metaphorizes and metonymizes, but it does not destroy. Now we might ask ourselves whether there does not exist a radical destruction of memory, a fire that would come to incinerate memory without leaving any traces. Then the unrepresentable or the unpresentable would no longer be what is excluded or prevented from being there, simply displaced or deported, but would be what is unpresentable because it is absolutely burnt by fire. In L’éternel éphémère, Mesguich proposes what he calls a “spectacle of repression” in every sense of the term, political as well as psychical, a spectacle that would not only lift this repression but also deliver a presentation, a putting into presence [ mise en présence] or a representation of repression. That appears paradoxical and impossible, but it is a theater of paradox that Mesguich offers us. In theatrical representation, the nonrepresentable, the unrepresentable, because it is repressed, would come to be recalled [ viendrait se rappeler]. What is at issue is, in a sense, a theater of repression. But what if the art of theater was as much that of veiling as of unveiling [therefore of truth as well as non-truth, or of the truth of non-truth]? And what if it was also to a spectacle of repression that the City was invited?9

Repression at work or recalled in his work; the term “City” emphasizes that what is at stake in this monstration without monstration of repression

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is truly political. This staging of repression is not a mere lifting of repression, a mere liberation, a laying bare of what is unpresentable. At issue is a paradoxical presentation of the unpresentable “as such.” The phenomenological “as such” must undergo an essential modification here. There is, in Mesguich’s work, an interpretation of theatrical temporality, that is to say, an interpretation of the present or of what is not aligned with the present, an appeal to a kind of theatrical instant that, in a certain way, does not belong to temporality. This relation to time is described in various ways throughout L’éternel éphémère. One is often tempted to think theater as the art of what, doubtless prepared by rehearsals [ répétitions], properly takes place only once. That is, in the same moment, a first and a last time, which gives it its double face, at once matutinal, oriental, or archaeological, and autumnal, melancholic, occidental, crepuscular, or eschatological. One of the most provocative aspects of Mesguich’s theater is—contrary to prevailing doxa—to think that theater has, as its essence, a certain repetition. Not the repetition as rehearsal that prepares the première, but a repetition that divides, that hollows out and conjures up the unique present of the first time. Presentation not as the representation of a model present elsewhere, as an image would be, but presence a first and unique time as repetition. Far from weakening it, this structure of repetition, on the contrary, intensifies the experience of the irreplaceable first time, of the unique event produced each time that the theatrical act is put to work onstage by a staging and is produced. This strange experience of repetition is memory; yet everything there appears to be new, inaugural, unanticipatable; almost as surprised and surprising as an event. It is the event of repetition that we have to think in theater. How can a present in its freshness, in its irreplaceable rawness of the “here-now,” be a repetition? What must the time of experience and the time of theater be for that to be possible? In language borrowed from Lévi-Strauss, in which the raw or “crude” [ le cru] can sometimes be heard as cruelty [ cruauté ], Daniel Mesguich describes things thus: The only raw thing, in theater, is that it takes place before you; anything else is just a rehash. Theater gives the past back to the present.10 By the same token, it causes us to hear all that, in what we took to be the present, was a repetition. Theater holds out to us [nous tend ], in what happens for the first time, what had already happened. And, with this gift, with this present held out [tendu], with this offer in tension, it makes a raw and already cooked spectacle.11

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And elsewhere in a passage entitled “Cruelty Does Not Exist”: Never is there any theater if it is produced only once. Theater is always a serial affair—even if actors perform the play only once. Its essential repetition vibrates in each performance. All the performances, all its past and future themselves, sing in every performance. Each of them is a fugue, suite and variations, a reprise, a vanishing line before the one that precedes it, behind the one that follows it. One and only one theatrical manifestation—bacchanal, rawness [crudité ]: cruelty—would imply totality, plenitude, irreversibility. One and only one theatrical manifestation would not be theater: it would take place.12

To think theater is then to avoid all cooked-up [ cuits] discourses, that is to say, to sacrifice nothing of what makes up our unique and singular presence, while still presenting memory, alterity, simulacrum, repetition, the repetition that constitutes it and that de-presents it by representing it in advance. To think on the stage [ plateau] signifies this unbelievable space where knowledge cannot decide what the present is—what is present onstage under its cloak of visibility. This is similar to Mary Tudor and Jane Talbot in Victor Hugo’s work, who are incapable of making out who it is they saw or thought [cru] they sent to death. Victor Hugo’s entire play, as we were able to admire last night under the direction of Daniel Mesguich, is also the metaphor for theater itself. As if the outside of theater, theater’s referent—not what it says or shows of Politics, Religion, History, Love, etc.—were structured like a theater and thus already a repetition or rehearsal, whose return en abyme13 onstage neither prevents nor attenuates the tragic singularity of the acute and unique first time. The other way of formulating the question of theatrical time in Mesguich’s work emerges in a particular lexicon through the categories of the furtive and of urgency. Everything has to be done very quickly in theater, the actor is in a hurry as if he were stealing, as if he were in a situation of transgression and fraud; he is a thief, and that forms part of theatrical time. The category of the furtive or of the clandestine signifies that theater’s essential instant does not allow for its integration into general temporality; it is stolen from time, and it is also a moment of the law’s presentation and therefore of the law’s transgression. It is an abnormal moment that exposes the law as repression. It is always necessary to give the impression of hurriedness, of urgency . . . , a lifting of tombstones, an excavation of the mother tongue . . .14 . . .

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I always have the tendency to think that theater is like a snapshot [instantané ]; this snapshot is deployed or analyzed in two hours or in four, perhaps, it doesn’t matter, but it doesn’t have a true duration, only effects of duration . . . ?15 . . . . . . That the actor plays fast, that he seems in a hurry, also indicates that he does not have the right to be there, that for him the stage is not an authorized place, that he is there fraudulently.16

On the contrary, philosophy would be, according to this hypothesis, the patient attention pedagogical discourse pays to presentation, to identification, to the institution, etc. For my part, I would argue rather for a theatrical dimension in philosophy in order to blur a little the opposition, however chiasmatic, between theater and philosophy. There are in philosophical thought, in pre-institutional philosophical thought, instants that resemble this furtive, clandestine, unauthorized, and mad urgency, instants that marginalize philosophy. I believe that there are coups de théâtre in philosophy, instants that resemble what Kierkegaard described when he said: “the instant of decision is madness.”17 Those instants belong indissociably to theater and to philosophy, to philosophy in theater or to theater in philosophy. There is not one theater but several theaters, there are works that, in relation to repression, identification, or belief in theater, work [ font œuvre] differently. Just as one will always be able to interpret—and this remains infinitely suspended—the putting into play of sacrifice, of identification, of belief, of repression, or of foreclosure as sacrificial or identificatory escalations [ surenchères], as sacrifices of sacrifice, likewise nothing will ever be able to assure us that these economies are not at the same time put into play. In L’éternel éphémère, Mesguich cites a very beautiful sentence by Mannoni with which I would like to conclude: “A wolf’s mask does not frighten us the way a wolf does, but the way the image of the wolf we have inside us does.”18

And Mesguich continues: In theater, we neither believe nor disbelieve, we never see or hear directly: we watch or we listen to the child or the “fool” inside us who believes.19

Even if what Mannoni says is powerful and true, a question remains. No one believes in the wolf mask. When we go to the theater, we are not fooled, we know it is an illusion or a simulacrum. Now the power of the

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emotion or of identification is due to the fact that even if we do not believe in the wolf behind the mask, we believe in the interior psychical reality that this mask awakens in us, and consequently, the emotion is right to believe in what thus really lies inside us. There is a kind of interiorization, through psychoanalytic discourse, of this credit that we bring to theater. But what is it to believe? That is the question being posed, the question staged or set on fire by theater. Mesguich’s commentary brings another dimension that nevertheless does not betray psychoanalysis: we never see or hear directly, we neither believe nor disbelieve, and, at that moment, to watch the child or the fool who believes is to watch identificatory memory and absolute separation at the same time. We keep (watch over) [re-garde] the point of departure and the distribution [ partage], both as what is shared, in the sense of participation, and as what is dissociated. The suspension between these two aspects of partage remains absolutely indefinite and irreducible. What is an act of faith in theater? Why must we believe in theater? We must [ Il le faut]. Why must we?

Marx Is (Quite) Somebody

First published in Jacques Derrida, Marc Guillaume, and Jean-Pierre Vincent’s book Marx en jeu (Paris: Descartes & Cie, 1997), 9–28, “Marx, c’est quelqu’un” is the transcription of an improvised talk at the Théâtre des Amandiers on 15 March 1997, a fringe event alongside the performances of the show Karl Marx Théâtre inédit, directed by Jean-Pierre Vincent, in 1997.

Let’s begin with this assertion at once massive and ambiguous: Marx is (quite) somebody. He was somebody, he is somebody, and Karl Marx Théâtre inédit, a show by Jean-Pierre Vincent presented at the Théâtre des Amandiers in Nanterre, reminds us that Karl Marx is quite somebody. What does that mean? From the auditorium, one could, one had to wonder, more than ever: who bears the name of Marx? Who bears it legitimately? Or illegitimately, like this bastard child of Marx’s who, at the end of the play, is forever calling for his father, speaking in his name, invoking his name, and forever committing suicide, pretending to commit suicide in his name. Who bears [ porte] the name of Marx, but also what does the name of Marx bear with it? Not only what is at stake [l’enjeu] in it—that’s the title of today’s session—that is to say, not only the play, being in play [ l’être en jeu], played at the theater, but also how broad is the reach [ portée] of this name, its theatrical or political scope, that is, and how large Marx’s brood [ portée], the multiplicity of his offspring, as one might say about rabbits.1 No matter how much one repeats that he’s dead, it’s undeniable that Marx, this corpse, was and still is a prolific breeder, that he has billions of young, more or less legitimate, that mourn for him, whether they know it or not, whether they claim it or claim to follow him, even if sometimes they clamor or proclaim that one must no longer claim to follow him. Therefore, the pressing, all-

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important question for us is not only “Who is Marx or who was Marx?” but “Who bears today, in 1997, the name of Marx and what does this name bear with it?” What then does to bear [porter] mean here, to bear a name, a family name or a forename, and to bear a mask of Marx, sometimes a body as well, a headless body, as you’ll see in the play, a decapitated body? Or decapitalized? Like the giant statue, mute and spectral, the inordinately big monument, the decapitated monument, guillotined if you like, the polled tall tree of which only the legs and feet can be seen and which from the height of its stature, of its superego, watches over all the speeches of the last act. Well, never has Marx’s proper name sounded so strange to me as in this place, and never, as a result, has it appeared to me to make so unavoidable for us the question: But then who on earth is this Marx? Marx in himself or Marx for you? For us? Who then is this cumbersome, interminable Marx, this indefatigable Marx of whom we know that he is dead in a certain way? But what does “Marx is dead” mean? What does “Marx” mean? Who is Marx and what does it mean, what do we call by this name? Who calls us by this name? Today, in this singular moment of history that we are living through, is this a legitimate question? Does this question disturb and trouble public order, political order, theatrical order or not? A certain order—and that has been very well recalled by Viviane Forrester and Marc Guillaume2—today seems at once to call and forbid the name of Marx, that is to say, to conjure up and to conjure away [conjurer] this name, to make it at once inevitable and illegitimate. To begin with, while continuing the speech or acting as the spokesperson of this illegitimate son of Marx’s, therefore playing in my own way Marx’s illegitimate heir in distress, whom you will see or have seen dying more or less in the last scene, I would like to ask again this question of legitimacy that, I believe, together with that of the contretemps, of mourning, runs through or transfixes the whole show. In other words, the question is: what is just and what is legitimate? Just and legitimate do not necessarily mean the same thing. Who are Marx’s just or legitimate heirs today? Marc Guillaume spoke earlier of the non-Marxist viruses to which the most virulent heritage of Marx’s name is entrusted, as if Marx’s legitimate, normal heirs were as wary of these illegitimate viruses that today bear Marx’s word as the traditional conservatives, the anti-Marxists  .  .  . I underline this word “virus,” which is most precious here, because the definition of a virus is to be an organism that is neither living nor dead. It is spectral. What has Marx’s name legitimized in the history of the world and of politics? What does

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staging this question, showing it, making it at once visible-invisible, that is to say, spectral, mean today? Let’s come back, if you don’t mind, here, where we are, and we are in a public place called a theater, located in the Paris suburbs, on a specific date, at a most singular moment of this country’s history. So I return to the question of right: what does one have the right to say and show here, legitimately to say and show, the right to do and at the right time? What does it mean to have the right to say and show, the right to do while acting out legitimately, at the right time, in time, at the theater? And what then does the act, acting out, appearance on a stage mean? In time or at the wrong time [ à contretemps]? This question of legitimacy and of the right time, of what is just, not to say legitimate, and comes just at the right time, not to say at the opportune moment, at the expected moment, we’re asking it here, now, at the theater, in a theater. In principle, within the framework of this session, we are not doing theater. But we are in a theater in order to speak about theater as well and about the relation between theater and its outside, about the relation between theater and the world, between theater and so-called real history, politics, economics, etc. Although right now we’re not acting, here, in the conventional sense, this is rather theatrical. Not only because we are on a stage, in front of an audience, but because all this is public speech, a scenario with a set duration, roughly the usual length of a usual play, a staging, a structured visibility with an eye to a show and to a more or less mediatized broadcasting. And although almost none of us—I say almost—is an actor in the strict, professional sense of the term, we are all actors, each in his or her own way, publicly known actors, well-known actors and figures, among other things for speaking out in politics, for the political role written or laid down [inscrit ou prescrit] on their score. So although this is taking place between two performances, during the intermission as one says, in memory of Karl Marx Théâtre inédit or as an opening to Karl Marx Théâtre inédit, the session continues,3 we are at the theater, we act [ faisons du théâtre], we act theatrically within a theater, as Hamlet or Shakespeare rightly says: “The play’s the thing,” that’s what it’s all about; the play’s the trap wherein to catch, trap conscience,4 “the play within the play,”5 theater within the theater; therefore the thing is the theater and theater within the theater, the very thing. And the political thing too, we’ll come to that. Now Hamlet, whose specter, his specter, namely, himself as specter—how many Hamlets have been born since Shakespeare? How many Hamlets have been played, begotten, resurrected, repeated/rehearsed since Shakespeare?—thus Hamlet in his specter, the specter of himself and his specter, namely, the one

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that haunts him—just as for Marx there is his specter, Marx’s specter and the specter that haunts Marx—that of his father, Hamlet’s father, supposedly visible-invisible, that speaks to him, summons him, challenges him, sets him in motion, well, Hamlet’s specter designates or signifies theater within the theater as political thing. What is at stake in theater within the theater, in this reflexive fold, far from shutting us inside the snug confines of the inside, in specularity, in speculation, in the abyssal play of mirrors, is quite on the contrary for us to be thrown out into politics. We are outside, already. Hamlet is also a political play through and through—as you know; it’s all about the king’s power, power conflicts, power inheritance, war, foreigners—foreigners, France’s problem today—about a crime that is also a usurpation at the head of the state, a political crime, etc. Therefore, theater within the theater is a political thing through and through, but also a family thing—which the play shows very well. Karl Marx is somebody, he has a family, an odd one yet a family. I think Ernest Jones,6 developing some propositions from Freud and Rank about Hamlet and filiation, is the one who put forward a hypothesis for which he is solely responsible and which matters to us here, namely, that each time there is (a) “play within the play,”7 theater within the theater, we’re dealing with jealousy or Oedipal voyeurism. A child hidden in the play, behind the curtains—the play within the play—a child looks on and secretly dreams about the parental couple. Then how can this theater within the family theater introduce us to the political thing, remind us directly yet inevitably of it? That is one of the questions that the unheard-of [ inédit] event Karl Marx Théâtre inédit asks us and forces us to ask ourselves since Jean-Pierre Vincent, by inscribing his play within Shakespeare’s play within the play, in turn delving, and we along with him, into the great tradition of the bottomless abyss of Shakespearean heritage, each time renewed by events, unheard-of theatrical productions, the Shakespearean heritage that dominates our entire memory, has chosen to intertwine two threads [ fils] within the same braid, as it were. Which threads? On the one hand, the political. What of Marx today? Who bears Marx’s name today? Who can inherit from it legitimately or illegitimately? What makes up today the theater of political space, of power and global world order, of so-called globalization, of capital—of the new form of capital—of labor, of course, of what is still called by this word, this old word “labor,” when the word or the thing is becoming ambiguous, since the collapse of certain self-proclaimed Marxist-communist models? What of the word “communism,” for example, which Helene8 in the play, Marx’s servant, the mother of Fred,9 Marx’s illegitimate son, seems today, being struck by

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amnesia, no longer capable of pronouncing and remembering—there is a moment in the play when Helene says: “What’s that word, remind me of that word”; the word “communism” no longer comes back, can no longer get out of her mouth or come back to her memory. What of the word “communism,” what of this language that used to flap like a revolutionary flag, and the class struggle, and the proletariat, and the Internationale, and the workers and labor, even? Therefore, what does the revolution, also, become and especially, and that’s theater within the theater, what does the imagery of revolutionary theater become? Must we give up revolution, give up the call of justice that is called “revolution” or this interruption in the ordinary course of history that is called “revolution”? What does it become, how to give it up, when a certain revolutionary imagery has become obsolete and outdated? Does that mean that when a certain revolutionary theater has ended, the idea of a revolution no longer has any meaning? And Marx has devoted most powerful pages to this idea of a revolutionary theater. So, on the one hand, in one hand [d’une part, d’une main], the political thread. In the other hand, Jean-Pierre Vincent considers and suggests that we consider the question of the family and first of all of Marx’s family. Marx somebody, Marx who is (quite) somebody, old Marx, murdered, whose specter comes back at the beginning of the play like a half-blind or blinding cyclopean beacon, when he comes and cries out for revenge, or appeals to justice, but to a justice that is no longer mere resentment or mere revenge. Thus, he comes back, revenant that he is, he returns and calls his son [ fils], his sons, for he has more than one and they are not equally legitimate, his sons without secure filiation, his disaffiliated sons. He comes back and begs them to do justice, to bring justice, to make justice come at last. Before coming back to this knot between Marx’s sons and daughters— for Karl Marx Théâtre inédit is strangely unheard-of in the history of theater and in the treatment of Marx’s heritage through the determining, spectacular role it gives to woman, first of all to the Ophelias and daughters of Marx, to the many daughters and women in this political theater, which is some provoking, ironic way of tackling the question of parity today in France and of playing and acting it out, which thereby also makes of this coup de théâtre a political coup, a political act—before coming back to the knot between the familial and the political, the private and the public, the secret and the open daylight of the political stage, I would like, in order to pay tribute to the event, the theatrical work of the Théâtre des Amandiers, of Jean-Pierre Vincent, of Bernard Chartreux, of actors and actresses, I would like to say how according to me this experience, this experiment, this experimentation, which like any experimentation is at once inventive, daring,

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fruitful, and thereby risky, taking the risk of illegitimacy, the risk of going against the trend and against the time [ à contre-courant et à contretemps] of what dominates the current theatrical as well as political field, I would like to say a few words, beginning with a few preliminary generalities, about how this experimentation deals with the relation today between theater and politics, more precisely deals with an original repoliticization of the theater, the one that is perhaps needed today and whose experimental attempt by Vincent seems to me to provide an exemplary testimony. I’m not going to develop again the huge, canonical question of theater and politics. I will only try to signal toward what perhaps happens today at the intersection of what these indicative names, these proper and common nouns—Marx, the political, the specter, theater—designate. This question of theater and politics is a huge question that I’m leaving aside in its classical form because it would keep us for ages. To go quickly and save time, I’ll pause on the word “représentation” (representation, performance), at the crossroads of political life and theater. Nobody will dispute, I think, that the social bond and the political bond today are ailing, from an ailment that is more than a crisis, a representation ailment [ mal de la représentation]. The point is not to engage in antiparliamentarism, I’d be the last one to do so, or to forget that the crisis in parliamentary representation is not exactly new. It started, at least, just after the First World War when media, the press, radios began competing ruthlessly against parliamentary forms of debate, of deliberation, even of political decision in its relations to public opinion, to polls, etc. Let’s not forget therefore this dramatic history of formal parliamentary representativity about which Marx told us some very interesting things, not all of which are outdated, just as in fact he did—as Marc Guillaume reminded us—about press and technology, about current teletechnologies. But we must be attentive to the fact that, for reasons too long to analyze, but in particular as a result of the transformation of public space through media power, through the concentration as well as the market of media power, the traditional effort of parliamentary representation, but also partisan, professional, whether corporate or trade unionist, representation, has entered an at once dangerous and irreversible mutation. Now in this new situation of social and political representation, theater, which has also been suffering for a long time from a certain representation ailment, an ailment with a thousand symptoms on which some, I among others, wrote a lot in the past, is destined to play, it seems to me, a double, ambiguous role. Which it is playing here. On the one hand, and especially when it is public, theater can have the vocation to give rise [lieu] to political speech and

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action, to political responsibility, to open another space at the moment when this political responsibility no longer finds its inspiration [ souffle], both its speech and its visibility, elsewhere. To give rise to it, by inventing another place, another stage, in an original, wholly new way and without replacing the necessary places, the statutory places, the parliament, assemblies, parties, trade unions, and then also the media. The point is not to replace the media; democracy needs the media. In principle. Even if one must also, from the theater, dispute certain economic and media powers. Therefore, the point is not to replace these necessary places of representation or of information, even where they are faulty or censuring; the point is not to supersede them, to take their place, or to reinstate them within another framework, but to remind them critically of their role, to analyze them as well, publicly, to address them in a disturbing, provoking, unusual manner that forces them, that attempts to force them, to take their responsibilities, that is to say, to respond. And that is done—this is theater’s chance—through not wasting; that is done by intertwining several heterogeneous times within one and the same disjointed, dislocated time “out of joint”;10 by intertwining several speech systems [ régimes de parole], speeches at once real, even realistic, and fictional, even lyrical and poetic. Let me take one example: I took part in this very place, a few weeks ago, in a meeting devoted to the “undocumented” [ sans-papiers].11 During that evening, we heard accounts from the “undocumented” themselves and also songs, poems, analyses, and this happened in a theater, here, just as it happened in other theaters, just as similar actions continue at the Cartoucherie. Consequently, the theaters were accepting this political responsibility at the same time as they were responding to their theatrical vocation. These were accounts, song, poetry, fiction, and I believe that today there are many who—perhaps the “undocumented” to begin with—turn toward theatrical space in order to find not only a place, sometimes a habitat, but also a chance to speak, a chance to be heard. It is precisely because these “undocumented” without citizenship, without status, without name, without place—and there are many privatives [“sans”] in this country: homeless, undocumented, jobless, etc.—are not heard, are not represented; it is because there is a crisis that is more than a crisis of citizenship that the theater can respond to its vocation, by opening this place, provided that, naturally, it does not simply turn into some covered playground for meetings and continues to live up to its theatrical vocation. But on the other hand, this new theatrical provocation, which we are awaiting and which comes from here in particular, must not bend to the order of traditional representation, that is to say, what used to be called

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political theater, which had a message, a sometimes-revolutionary content to deliver, without changing the form, the time, and the space of the theatrical event. The stage, the time, the order of time must be changed, and this is what happens in Karl Marx Théâtre inédit, in which the violence of the construction is precisely concerned with time, the disarticulation of time, with the fact that not everything can be gathered in a homogenous present. And this in Hamlet’s reinvented tradition and of what Hamlet says when he says that the time is “out of joint,” thereby designating at once temporality and this time, this world off its hinges [ sorti de ses gonds] and therefore disjointed. The point here is to make something happen in/to the present, by changing the order and time. Karl Marx Théâtre inédit perhaps makes something happen in/to the present. What does “to make something happen in/to the present” mean? This means that something will be made to happen through theater, not by representing, imitating, putting onstage a political reality that takes place elsewhere, if need be to deliver a message or a doctrine, but by making politics or the political come into the structure of the theater, that is, also by dislocating the present, by making us aware that a present cannot be gathered. There is no synchrony; this is a play about anachrony, dyschrony. Therefore, to make something happen in/to the present. Through theater or as theater. A friend of mine, who is also the English translator of Spectres de Marx, was saying to me, reminding me, in fact telling me, that Beaumarchais, a great author of French drama who besides campaigned a lot for American independence, at some point took or stole stones from the deconstructed Bastille to make a theater. He took stones from the dilapidated political thing to make a completely new theater, and it is this idea that matters to me here. Today there are stones, there are the stones from the Berlin Wall, what does one do with the heritage of the collapsed Berlin Wall, what does one do with Marx? What theater can be built with that? It is this derelict [désaffecté ] present but a present also affected by the theatrical event that matters to me here. This event is also that which comes, as the word itself says, which comes while coming back, in the spectral form of that which comes back. That is to say, according to the logic of a repetition that will disturb the order of time, that will disturb the linear succession of the “nows.” What interrupts the order of time, the ordinary course of history, what is called “revolution,” this caesura that all of a sudden, sometimes discreetly, sometimes spectacularly, comes and disturbs the order of time, is the theater about which I am talking. Disarticulated theater that disturbs, “out of joint.” This question of disarticulation, at the center of Karl Marx Théâtre inédit, and of Hamlet’s “out of joint,” is essential. Karl

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Marx Théâtre inédit proposes a sequenceless sequence of heterogeneous, discontinuous times that I won’t say reflects but rather gives us to think that today history—political history, economic history in particular—is made up of heterogeneous times. We do not inhabit the same time. There is no synchrony between globalization, homogenization, homohegemony, which attempt to impose the same order and therefore the same contemporality. Men and cultures live different times; these times do not join up, and this disarticulation is one of the motifs in Karl Marx Théâtre inédit. We’re also dealing with a spectral decomposition of specters, of this conceptless concept of specter. What is a specter? What does “specter” mean? First of all, it is something between life and death, neither living nor dead. One of the questions today, one of these ageless questions but one that is acute and has its sharp actuality, is the question of life. What is the living today, what is the difference between living and dead in the time of bioengineering . . . The question of specters is therefore the question of life, of the limit between the living and the dead, wherever it arises. But I’d like to analyze not the decomposition of specters, the theatrically staged decomposition of the specter, but the decomposition of the concept of specter. This concept has itself a specter and consequently several dimensions that can all be found in Karl Marx Théâtre inédit. First of all, the specter is the theater. The theater has always been the place of the greatest spectral intensity. The theater is the place of the visibility of the invisible; one does not know what is visible, what is not visible, what is in flesh and blood, what is not. As its very word already suggests, the theater has an obvious relation with visibility: the visibility of the visible is invisible, the voice is not visible either, therefore the theater has always been, in its essence, spectral. Besides, the word “phantasma” in Greek, which means “specter,” indeed designates this indecision between the real and the fictional, between what is neither real nor fictional, what is neither simply individual or character or actor—and this reminds us also of the question of the phantasm in politics. It is decisive, it concerns decision. Thus, in the play, the specters are at the same time real, phantasmatic, and with referents, those of Marx, Stalin, Lenin, or Chirac come back in person. Therefore, the first theme is theater itself, theater about theater as spectrality, as an element of spectrality. Second, the work of mourning in politics. When we say, “Marx is dead,” this oft-repeated formula, what do we say? When somebody dies and the announcement of their death is repeated more than one day—normally when a newspaper announces somebody’s death, they do so one day and afterward no more is said about it—when we repeat again and again, this

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means that something else is happening, that the dead person is not so dead. To say, “Marx is dead” echoes formulas like “God is dead,” which has been spoken about since Hegel but also since Christ and Luther; Christ too is “God is dead,” and that has been and is still going on. Therefore, “Marx is dead,” this sentence, this slogan whose analysis after all this play is conducting, is a symptom, the symptom of a work of mourning in progress, with all its phenomena of melancholy, of maniacal jubilation, of ventriloquism— the corpse comes and speaks instead of anybody—and in the play Marx’s voice can be seen coming back from all sides. What it seemed to me necessary to do today is to transport into politics, with the necessary transformation, with the necessary translation, the psychoanalytic concept of work of mourning, which in general concerned the individual, the family. What can a political, even geopolitical work of mourning signify when the whole earth sets about recalling through the mouth of politicians, in the rhetoric of media, that Marx is dead, that communism is dead, that the model of the capitalist market is the only model? Put differently, what happens, what is this the symptom of? How to analyze the political symptom of this work of mourning under way in left-wing as much as right-wing symptomatology? Therefore, the second interest—whose trail you will find in Karl Marx Théâtre inédit—is the analysis of the work of mourning under way around Marx’s name. And around all that can be associated with it. The third feature that is related to the concept of the specter—Marc Guillaume was already speaking about it—concerns the virtualization of the very heritage and also the question of legitimacy. Who are the Marxists today, what does “to inherit” mean? Heritage is not a good, a wealth that one receives and that one puts in the bank; heritage is an active, selective affirmation that can sometimes be more reanimated and reaffirmed by illegitimate heirs than by legitimate heirs; put differently, political commitment today involves the question of knowing what will be done with this heritage, how it will be put to work. Obviously, this heritage is a virtual heritage, it is not a capitalized or localized good like a corpse buried somewhere. Heritage is “a phantasmatics,” in all the senses of this word, a virtual phantasmatics, also in the sense of a certain disaffiliation, of reaffiliation from disaffiliation. The fourth theme tackled by the play is that of teletechnological virtuality, which invades our world, and decisively for politics, through television and other electronic information media. The teletechnological machinery that Marx had already anticipated in his own way occupies a decisive place in the acting of this play and constructs its space. In any case, it structures social space by articulating and disarticulating it at once. Sometimes in real

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time and sometimes in prerecorded time. It is a play on what is called “actuality” or what I dubbed “artifactuality,”12 the facticity of actuality that poses the huge problem, the huge mystification of what is called “live broadcasting” in today’s news. And finally, the capital question. That is to say, the still-new question of—“will the word come to me?”—not communism but capital. This question is very new; it is concerned with the capitalistic formation of surplus value, in its new forms. Contrary to what is said, it is not about a return to Marx: Marx is dead, we know that. Marx is somebody, he is dead. Nor is it about applying, replicating, reapplying such and such a theorem of Marx’s to economics—even though there is a lot to learn from him there—but about remembering a certain lesson, a certain way of not being taken in so easily about capital and of seeing what is happening today that is new, unprecedented, the unprecedented theater of capital today. There is such a thing. Obviously, capital no longer plays the part it used to play in the nineteenth century; only idiots do not know this. But it plays a part. And it does so by using better than ever a certain spectrality, a certain teletechnological speculation. From one second to the next, the world stock exchange can dramatically change the conditions of millions of workers, force factories to close down. This very morning, I read the account of a discussion between Alain Minc and Viviane Forrester,13 in which, in the name of a certain economic realism, Minc recalled that to close down factories was a matter of economic necessity in order to secure work elsewhere. That is well-known, although the way the Renault factories in Belgium were closed down was a little diabolical from the point of view of social deliberation, so strange that they were then forced to backtrack. Nevertheless, even if there’s nothing diabolical about it, this is a fact and another realist analysis that the moment workers mobilized in Belgium, but also in France, to the point of alerting certain European powers, it was indeed necessary to back down and take other things into account. If Minc’s analyses had been left to operate without reacting, it would have gone through without a hitch. Therefore, there’s lots to do, there’s lots to do as to and against a certain form of capitalistic abuse, and this is not an outdated question even if it needs adapting to a new situation, bearing in mind shiftings of gears, world speculations, etc. In other words, the question that is asked, not asked only theoretically but embodied [mise en corps] theatrically, is also: what to do with this somebody that Marx was, with Marx’s discourse today in relation to new capitalism, in relation to the novelty of capitalism and to the new political stakes of capitalism?

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To conclude, Marx is (quite) somebody, but who? Nobody can say “I, Marx” except at the theater, phantasmatically, according to the specter, the phantasma. Giving the floor back to him is out of the question, of course; he, Karl Marx himself, is no longer there to take it, but it can be given in his name, the time of a time “out of joint,” a disjointed time, the time of an anachrony, at the wrong time [à contretemps]. The art of the contretemps is also an art of the political, an art of the theatrical, the art of giving the floor at the wrong time to those who, in times like these, do not have the right to speak.

The Survivor, the Surcease, the Surge1

This short text appeared in La Quinzaine littéraire, no. 882 (1–15 August 2004): 15–16, in the section titled “Pour qui vous prenez-vous?,” “Who do you think you are?” (literally: “Whom do you take yourself for?”), a survey carried out by Bertrand Leclair with a hundred authors.

“To take oneself for,” what an expression! What does it mean to “take oneself for”? How are we to take our bearings [s’y prendre] when confronting the phrase “to take oneself”? And when you say “take yourself for,” isn’t there the suspicion from the very first that you are “taking yourself for what you are not in reality”? For somebody else, in short? “To take oneself for” insinuates in advance the idea of a substitution, of a mistaken identity: fantasy, ploy, lie—to oneself or to others: “Now who does he think he is?” This was an exclamation published by Ponge, in a short scathing pamphlet of the 1970s, in response to I forget which arrogant young writers who had taken him to task [s’en étaient pris à lui] or who had claimed to “denounce” him: “Now whoever do those people think they are?”2 Ponge said if memory serves me right. In the Algeria of my childhood (but perhaps this can also be said elsewhere, in the South of France), a popular expression already filled me with admiration. Its economy is so sure and efficient! To make fun of somebody pretentious, one used to say: “celui-là, il se prend” (that one really thinks a lot of himself) or else “il se croit” (he really believes he is something). Will I dare claim (yes, I will) that I have never managed to “take myself” or “believe myself” to be something? But for you to believe me, I will argue this point a bit. I’m avoiding a first temptation (of a loosely sociologizing nature): to turn the question on you. Who therefore do you, in La Quinzaine, take

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me for? For you surely must have taken me for somebody after all (a “writer”—“Writers reply to us,” you say—a questionable but fairly wellknown writer, perhaps, credible or accredited, worthy of featuring in La Quinzaine): not just anybody, in short. I thank you for this. You would not have asked this question to just anybody, let alone offered to publish it. As a result, this allows me in any case to avoid speaking about what matters above all for me, in public life and my publications. You suppose all of this to be known, and therefore I will say nothing else about it. First confession: I have too much of a tendency to think I am merely what one takes me to be, to take myself where I am taken, as I am taken [ pris], taken aback [ surpris], understood [ compris] by others, and therefore to see myself and change my own image according to the one that is reflected to me: in my families, where I have more than one face already, at male and female friends’, from one individual to another, from the baby to the old man, in the professional environments and numerous institutions to which I belong, in the broad or narrow audiences of philosophical, literary, political culture, in France, in Paris or abroad. Many images, therefore. And here the differences between Parisian France, the provinces, and the rest of the world are huge, as I can testify. Their analysis would greatly exceed the four pages you are granting me for this abyssal question. I have “too much of a tendency,” as I was saying, to take myself the way I am taken and as I am taken. I am taken before taking myself. I try at all costs, but in vain, to escape this reflection, within myself, of the image the other sends back to me, to resist it, to orient the analyses toward what in me has nothing to do with my “faces,” with the public image people have of me or, for many self-interested reasons, would have or have others believe about me. This resistance began very early, from when I was a teenager; a sensitive, refined reader could find traces of this in everything I do, say, or write. When I was fourteen, I believed I recognized myself (hence my admiration for him!) in Gide, who claimed to be “proteiform”3 (it is from him I learnt who Proteus was). I filled in whole intimate exercise books around this question: why am I that changeable, different, even totally other according to the image that is given of me—or to the one that, like a photograph, is taken of me? Who is this “I,” who is or remains another, beyond the one who is thus “taken,” captive (not captivated but captured ), defined, determined, by all? No self-portrait, nobody [ personne] behind the persona. But so much impatience in the face of the “roles” and the characters! This anxious question has never kept quiet within me. I have never answered it, in life and in texts, as one says, except through strategies of compromise: to take by surprise (to jump, to make somebody jump with surprise) when someone thinks I can be taken and

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identified, but also to assume the responsibility to correspond, albeit by correcting it in such and such a way, to the “best” of what is believed that I am and must be, in accordance with the image that is desired of me. In short, I take myself for somebody else who first of all “responds,” feels summoned to respond—this instant, for example (in the sense of moral, legal, political, philosophical responsibility—which, carried as far as possible, often dictates to me, upping the ante in a surge [surenchère et sursaut] of hyperbole, to defy moral, legal, political, philosophical norms, and to respond off the topic; but also in the sense of what is called “responsiveness,” this kind of sensitive and affective predisposition to spontaneously say “yes”). This could be verified in my life and in many reflective texts in which “yes” and the “response” are major themes. This can be demonstrated also in the fact that I have never said or written anything, published anything in any case, that was not first desired, asked for, ordered, enjoined, provoked, etc., by others. Although I take myself for somebody who has never dreamt of doing anything but write (rather than teach) and who has never felt capable of doing anything else whatsoever, professionally and statutorily, I have never published anything spontaneously, of my own accord. Only dreamt of doing it one day—but I suppose that this dream must have left traces in my publications. A paradoxical yet intelligible correlative to this compulsion to “respond,” a most unusual ability to not respond, to respond by silence. Since my childhood, I have remained capable—as my parents knew only too well—of opposing a stubborn silence, which would not yield under any torture, to whoever does not seem worthy of my response. Silence is my most sublime, my most peaceful, yet my most undeniable declaration of war or scorn. It sometimes happens that, as an additional trick, I let this silence be heard through chatter and deliberately conventional words. With age and “experience,” with the multiplicity of places, environments, assessment criteria, I am learning transaction little by little: to trick and resist an image that is reflected back to me here through another that comes back to me from elsewhere. What says a lot is that I would never have agreed to respond in four pages to such a question if it had not come from those whom I myself take, rightly or wrongly, for friends (Maurice Nadeau and La Quinzaine littéraire, which, so you say, pretends to be so naïve as to believe that they “reverse the deal” and make it possible to escape the “cultural media . . . perceived above all as spaces for promotion, a promotion of works that often enforces personal promotion”).4 Come on, dear friends, do you believe that those who reply to you will forget their “personal promotion,” whatever they say, and even “self-critically,” as you suggest to them?

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Here is my response, therefore, upping the ante in three words. These three hyperbolic words in “sur-” ( survivant, sursis, sursaut) resemble me perhaps. I will politely do my utmost, as always, not to use media for “personal promotion” purposes. 1. Survivor. I have written a lot on a “survival” that was neither life nor death but, before them, the trace or spectrality. Let us leave it at that. Today, like everybody else, I am a survivor in remission [en sursis], perhaps a little more threatened than others (“age,” as one says, or “illness”). But I loathe and dispute the image that is being spread more and more when, in the press, someone tries or pretends to “take me” for a “survivor,” even the sole survivor of a generation that besides was not exactly mine (Lacan, Althusser, Deleuze, Foucault, Lyotard, the “thought of May ’68,”5 you know). It is true, in a sense, but in another sense, if you gave me the space to do so, I would demonstrate in what ways this is wrong and basically, like a death drive, pernicious. Just like the common image, in so many newspapers, of “the-most-translated-or-the-most-read-philosopher-abroad-especially-inthe-USA”: erroneous and perverse; here again, another way of expelling me or of attempting to limit my readership, like that of an undesirable imam in the culture of his country. It is the least informed, or the most incompetent, media that massively spread these clichés of resentment. What would those who decide, write, operate [évoluent], or evaluate in the press respond in return if somebody (not me, of course) asked them: “Now whoever do you think you are?” 2. Surcease. Consequently, in the time remaining, I accumulate contradictions economically, as always: the most self-critical and the most megalomaniacal. The list would be too long: for example, not only would I be already “passé,” I would belong to a generation of “dead people,” but I am downright skeptical when it comes to survival, no matter how short, of what I will leave upon my death. Conversely, some signs lead me to believe, and at the same time, that I have barely begun writing and that, with few exceptions, one has barely begun reading me—or that for me, as my friend Althusser used to say, the future lasts a long time.6 3. Surge [ sursaut]. In these very contradictions, I have always found my way of “bouncing back,” or my escape, my “takeoff” before the jump, at least I suppose so, and the strength to go on, to foil all the mirrors held out to me. To keep my childhood and my desire alive. With the feeling, at once disillusioned and mad with hope, that I have not begun yet . . .

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Author’s Note. I already find it hard to recognize myself, in order to subscribe to them, in each of the images I have just exposed. Rather I feel exposed and, once more, that I am letting myself be taken: by another for another. I have allowed myself to be photographed (a snapshot or a photo booth picture), or to be caught [ surprendre] by a radar that assesses and penalizes speed without giving you time and space to speak and assert your rights, as it should be. However, I sign with sincerity what you may have just read. Not as the symptom of a “truth,” my truth, but rather as a prayer, the one about which Aristotle so rightly said that it is “neither true nor false.”7 20 May 2004

Notes

The Spatial Arts 1. In a recent exchange with Laurie Volpe, we were informed that the cassette files were transferred to digital files but that, even with new technology, they were unusable owing to extremely poor sound quality (email to Ginette Michaud, dated 31 July 2017). (Ed.) 2. Jacques Derrida and Christopher Norris, “Jacques Derrida, in Discussion with Christopher Norris,” in Deconstruction: Omnibus Volume, ed. Andreas Papadakis, Catherine Cooke, and Andrew Benjamin (New York: Rizzoli, 1989), 72. 3. Peter Eisenman (1932–), American architect and theoretician with whom Derrida worked on the Parc de la Villette (Paris) garden in 1988, a project whose textual kernel would soon become Kho¯ra (trans. Ian McLeod, in On the Name, ed. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 89–130). See also Chora L Works: Jacques Derrida and Peter Eisenman, ed. Jeffrey Kipnis and Thomas Leeser (New York: Monacelli Press), 1997. (Ed.) 4. See Peter Brunette and David Wills, Screen/Play: Derrida and Film Theory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989). (Ed.) 5. Jacques Derrida, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). 6. See Jacques Derrida, “Circumfession,” in Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida, Jacques Derrida, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). The parasite and the virus—neither living nor dead—are present in Jacques Derrida’s work as early as “Plato’s Pharmacy,” in Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (London: Continuum, 1981), 67–186, and Glas, trans. John P. Leavey Jr. and Richard Rand (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986); they are also tied to the logic of spectrality; cf., among others, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 2006), “Marx & Sons,” trans. G. M. Goshgarian, in Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx, ed. Michael Sprinker (London: Verso, 1999), 213–69, and Echographies of Television, with Bernard Stiegler, trans. Jennifer Bajorek (Cambridge: Polity, 2002), as well as to the problem of auto-immunity that spans the entirety of Derrida’s late texts. See also Jacques

258 | no t e s to page s 7 – 2 4 Derrida, “A Silkworm of One’s Own,” in Veils, with Hélène Cixous, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 17–92). (Ed.) 7. Jacques Derrida, “Rhetoric of Drugs,” in Points . . . : Interviews, 1974–1994, ed. Elisabeth Weber, trans. Peggy Kamuf and others (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 228–54. 8. Jacques Derrida, “+ R (Into the Bargain),” in The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 156. 9. Jacques Derrida, Signéponge/Signsponge, trans. Richard Rand (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984). 10. Jacques Derrida, “Right of Inspection,” trans. David Wills, Art & Text 32 (1989): 19–97; rpt. Monacelli Press (1998). 11. “You lead me to believe this photographic masterpiece merely develops a lexicon, as if it were ‘revealing’ what exists invisibly in certain powerful words” (Derrida, “Right of Inspection,” 14). (Ed.) 12. Derrida, “Right of Inspection,” 14. (Ed.) 13. Jacques Derrida, “Point de folie—Maintenant l’architecture,” trans. Kate Linker, Architectural Association Files 12 (1986): 4–19; retranslated as “No (Point of) Madness— Maintaining Architecture,” trans. Kate Linker, in Psyche: Inventions of the Other, vol. 2, ed. Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), 87–103. 14. Jacques Derrida, “Maddening the Subjectile,” trans. Mary Ann Caws, Yale French Studies 84: “Boundaries: Writing & Drawing” (1994): 154–71; revised as “To Unsense the Subjectile,” trans. Mary Ann Caws, in Jacques Derrida and Paule Thévenin, The Secret  Art  of Antonin Artaud, trans. Mary Ann Caws (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 59–157. 15. Jacques Derrida, “What Remains by Force of Music,” trans. Peggy Kamuf, in Psyche: Inventions of the Other, vol. 1, ed. Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), 81–89. 16. Jacques Derrida, “Of an Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy,” trans. John P. Leavey Jr., Oxford Literary Review 6:2 (1984): 3–37; first published in Semeia 23 (1982): 63–97. 17. Jacques Derrida, “Fifty-Two Aphorisms for a Foreword,” trans. Andrew Benjamin, in Deconstruction: Omnibus Volume, 69; republished in Psyche 2, 126. 18. Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). 19. Derrida, “Fifty-Two Aphorisms for a Foreword,” 69; also in Psyche 2, 126 (translation slightly modified ). (Ed.) 20. In English in the text.—Trans. 21. Jacques Derrida, “A Letter to Peter Eisenman,” trans. Hilary P. Hanel, in Assemblage: A Critical Journal of Architecture and Design Culture 12 (August 1990): 7–13. 22. Daniel Libeskind (1946–), architect. See Jacques Derrida, “Response to Daniel Libeskind,” followed by a “Discussion” with Daniel Libeskind, Jeffrey Kipnis, and Catherine Ingraham, in Research in Phenomenology 22:1 (1992): 88–94 and 95–102. (Ed.)

no t e s t o pag e s 2 6 – 33 | 259 23. Gregory Ulmer, Teletheory: Grammatology in the Age of Video (New York: Routledge, 1989). 24. Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc, trans. Sam Weber and Jeffrey Mehlman (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988). 25. Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott, ed. Peter Demetz (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 277–300. [Jacques Derrida alludes here to “Prénom de Benjamin,” a keynote address delivered on 26 April 1990 at the conference “Nazism and the ‘Final Solution’: Probing the Limits of Representation,” organized by Saul Friedlander at the University of California, Los Angeles. See Jacques Derrida, “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority,’” trans. Mary Quaintance, Cardozo Law 11:5/6 (July 1990): 919–1045; rpt. in Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, ed. Drucilla Cornell, Michel Rosenfeld, and David Carson (New York: Routledge, 1992), 3–67, and in Jacques Derrida, Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar (New York: Routledge, 2002), 250–98. (Ed.)]

Thinking Out of Sight 1. The French original title, “Penser à ne pas voir,” can be understood to mean both “to think of not seeing” and “to think to the point of not seeing.” I have opted for a shorter, equally ambivalent formulation elegant enough to be used as the volume’s overall title.—Trans. 2. Although the texts gathered here are all related to visual arts, the French word trait, whose meaning ranges from a stroke or line to a trait or feature, can never be fully abstracted from its philosophical (Heideggerian) or linguistic resonances in Derrida’s texts. For reasons of clarity, “stroke” has been privileged wherever possible, unless the text can be construed to refer more specifically to line drawing (dessin au trait), and the French occasionally added between square brackets to highlight thematic continuity in the original.—Trans. 3. See Maurizio Ferraris, “L’occhio ragiona a modo suo,” Annali. Fondazione Europea del Disegno (Fondation Adami), vol. 1, ed. Amalia Valtolina (Milan: Bruno Mondadori, 2005), 23–48. 4. This refers to the Fondazione Europea del Disegno (Adami Foundation). (Ed.) 5. In English in the original.—Trans. 6. Jacques Derrida is alluding to Valeria Cantoni, who is responsible for organizing the Ekphrasis seminar that takes place each year at the Adami Foundation, and who was then expecting a boy. 7. See Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 128– 29. [Jacques Derrida indicates as a reference in Memoirs of the Blind Andrew Marvell’s “Eyes and Tears,” The Complete Poems, ed. Elizabeth Story Donno (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), 52–54. (Ed.)] 8. Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage

260 | no t e s to page s 33 – 43 Books, 1969), 222, 223, 225. Quoted by Jacques Derrida in Memoirs of the Blind, 123, 126. (Ed.) [A curtailed version of the quotation also appears in “Otobiographies: The Teaching of Nietzsche and the Politics of the Proper Name,” trans. Avital Ronell, in The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation, ed. Christie V. McDonald (New York: Schocken Books, 1985), p. 18.—Trans.] 9. Also in English and in italics in the original.—Trans. 10. Here Jacques Derrida is referring to Valerio Adami. 11. See Jacques Derrida, “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow),” in The Animal That Therefore I Am, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet, trans. David Wills (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 1–51. 12. Also in English in the original, as in the next occurrence.—Trans. 13. See Martin Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 8: Was heißt Denken? (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2002); What Is Called Thinking?, trans. J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper & Row, 1976 [1968]). (Ed.) 14. See Martin Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 10: Der Satz vom Grund (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1997); The Principle of Reason, trans. Reginald Lilly, new ed. (Oxford: John Wiley, 1996). (Ed.) 15. See Martin Heidegger, “Wozu Dichter?,” in Holzwege (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1947); “Why Poets?,” in Off the Beaten Track, trans. and ed. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 200–241; and his lecture on the poet Stefan George titled “Dichten und Denken. Zu Stefan Georges Gedicht ‘Das Wort,’” published in “Das Wort,” Gesamtausgabe, vol. 12: Unterwegs zur Sprache (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1985), 205–25; “Words,” trans. Joan Stambaugh, in On the Way to Language, trans. Peter D. Hertz (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 139–56. (Ed.) 16. See Heidegger, Principle of Reason, 47: “We hear, not the ear.” (Heidegger’s emphasis.) (Ed.) 17. In the version published in Annali, one reads “emporte” (i.e., carries away). (Ed.) 18. See Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, corrected ed., trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 3–26. 19. See Jacques Derrida, Voice and Phenomenon: Introduction to the Problem of the Sign in Husserl’s Phenomenology, trans. Leonard Lawlor (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2010), 9. See also Jacques Derrida, Edmund Husserl’s “Origin of Geometry”: An Introduction, trans., with a preface and afterword, by John P. Leavey Jr. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 85–86. (Ed.) 20. Also in English and in italics in the original.—Trans. 21. The German word for “danger” is Gefahr. (Ed.) 22. In the version that appeared in Annali, one reads “à faire” for this and following occurrences. (Ed.) 23. See Aristotle, On the Soul, 418 b, trans. J. A. Smith, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941), 568: “‘by diaphanous I mean what is visible, and yet not visible in itself, but rather owing its visibility to the colour of something else.’ It is thanks to this alone ‘that the colour of a thing is seen’” (translation modified ). Quoted by Derrida in Edmund Husserl’s “Origin of Geometry” 138. (Ed.)

no t e s t o pag e s 4 4 – 61 | 261 24. In the version that appeared in Annali, one reads: “I have nothing to invent on this score.” This is perhaps a mistranscription of the recording. (Ed.) 25. See Jacques Derrida, On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy, trans. Christine Irizarry (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005). 26. Derrida, On Touching, 142ff., 183–215, and 329–30n17. (Ed.) 27. See Hélène Cixous, “Savoir,” in Hélène Cixous and Jacques Derrida, Veils, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 1–16. (Ed.) 28. Note that in Memoirs of the Blind (89), Derrida gives another book title: On Heroes and Tombs.—Trans.

Trace and Archive, Image and Art 1. In English, Derrida’s Elsewhere, dir. Safaa Fathy (La Sept ARTE, Gloria Films, France, 1999), 67 min 57 sec. (Unless otherwise indicated, all the notes in this dialogue are the editors’.) [The first part of the original French title, to which Jacques Derrida refers later, can mean both “from elsewhere” and “besides.”—Trans.] 2. Born in 1958 in El Minya, Egypt, Safaa Fathy is a filmmaker and the author of three poetry collections, including .  .  . et une nuits (Cairo, 1996) and Les Petites Poupées en bois (Cairo, 1998), and of two plays: Ordalie and Terreur (Carnières-Morlanwelz: Éditions Lansman, 2004). She directed the film Derrida’s Elsewhere as well as Nom à la mer (29 mins), a film in which Jacques Derrida reads her poems, and De tout cœur (54 mins), where in three stages he analyzes the motif of the heart (in particular during an exchange with Jean-Luc Nancy). Safaa Fathy was also responsible for the video recordings of a selection of public readings, lectures, panels and discussions, and ceremonies of Jacques Derrida from 2000 until 2004. 3. See Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); also published in Diacritics 25:2 (Summer 1995): 9–63. 4. See Jacques Derrida, Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 5. In English in the text.—Trans. 6. The French word may also refer to a shot in cinema.—Trans. 7. See Jacques Derrida and Safaa Fathy, Tourner les mots. Au bord d’un film (Paris: Galilée and ARTE Éditions, 2000). [The French “tourner” literally means “to turn” (here, to deflect words), but it is also used for “to shoot” a film. See also pp. 225–26 in this volume.—Trans.] 8. Pour garder du temps, vous garder du temps, nous garder du temps: also, a likely pun on “to guard [us/you] against time.”—Trans. 9. In English in the text.—Trans. 10. See, inter alia, Jacques Derrida, “Ja, or the faux-bond II” and “‘Eating Well,’ or the Calculation of the Subject,” in Points . . . Interviews, 1974–1994, ed. Elisabeth Weber, trans. Peggy Kamuf and others (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 52 (re-

262 | no t e s to page s 61– 8 0 ferring to the word’s coinage in Signéponge/Signsponge), 53, 261, 269; Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), 112, 115, 121; and, with Bernard Stiegler, Echographies of Television: Filmed Interviews, trans. Jennifer Bajorek (Cambridge: Polity, 2002), 37, 59, 80, 109, 111. 11. In the original: “l’art de l’‘édition,’ de l’editing, au sens anglais.”—Trans. 12. A visual artist, Michèle Katz made an art book with Jacques Derrida: Le Schibboleth. Pour Paul Celan, with six lithographs and three monotypes by the artist (Nantes: Éditions La Marelle et Éditions du Petit Jaunais (for the lithographs), 2000). 13. A four-tape recording of Jacques Derrida reading alone the whole text of “Circumfession” was done by Michelle Muller (Paris: Des femmes—Antoinette Fouque, 1993); it integrated music pieces (“Le Pont sacré,” Boston Camerata, conducted by Joel Cohen (Erato) and “La Musique de la Bible révélée,” by Suzanne Haïk Vantoura [Harmonia Mundi]), in a “sound staging” [mise en espace sonore] by Marie-Louise Mallet. 14. This refers to the symposium “Qui sont les archives du Collège international de philosophie? (À l’occasion du dépôt des archives du Collège à l’IMEC),” organized by the Collège international de philosophie jointly with the Institut Mémoires de l’édition contemporaine (IMEC), under the convenership of Danielle Cohen-Levinas and Nathalie Léger, which took place on 2 and 3 December 1999 in Paris, at the Collège international de philosophie. Jacques Derrida took part in it, and his paper was entitled “Le futur antérieur de l’archive” (The Future Perfect of the Archive). See infra, p. 262n16. 15. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, corrected ed., trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 61ff. 16. See Jacques Derrida, “Le futur antérieur de l’archive,” in Questions d’archives, ed. Nathalie Léger (Paris: Éditions de l’IMEC, 2002), 41–50. 17. This is rather a reference to “Fors: The Anglish Words of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok,” Jacques Derrida’s foreword to the book by Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonymy, trans. Richard Rand, foreword by Jacques Derrida (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), xi–xlviii. L’Écorce et le noyau, a collection of texts by the same authors, appeared in 1999 with a preface by Nicholas Rand. See The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis, vol. 1, ed. and trans. Nicholas T. Rand (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). 18. The text in question is in fact an earlier section of the same book called “To Speculate—on ‘Freud’”; see The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 257–409.—Trans. 19. Born on 11 March 1945 in Tel Aviv, Nurith Aviv is a French film director whose cinematographic work focuses on the exploration of language. She was the first woman in France to be officially recognized by the Centre national du Cinéma as director of photography.—Trans. 20. In French, “lieu de mémoire,” a concept popularized by French historian Pierre Nora, in an eponymous, three-volume collection (Paris: Gallimard, 1984–92), in English as Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past, ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996–98).—Trans.

no t e s t o pag e s 81– 9 9 | 263 21. William Shakespeare, Hamlet, 1.5. This phrase, quoted in the original by Derrida, is cited and commented on at length in several passages of Specters of Marx, especially pp. 20ff., 96–97, 139–40, and in Le parjure et le pardon, Volume I Séminaire (1997–1998), ed. Ginette Michaud and Nicholas Cotton (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2019), 169–70. 22. The italicized fragment is in English in the original.—Trans. 23. In English in the original.—Trans. 24. See especially Jacques Derrida, “Envois” and “Le facteur de la vérité,” in The Post Card, 121, 137, 195, and 443–44, 489 respectively, and “For the Love of Lacan,” in Resistances—of Psychoanalysis, trans. Peggy Kamuf, Pascale-Anne Brault, and Michael Naas (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 32–35. Emphasis by Jacques Derrida.

To Illustrate, He Said 1. See Jacques Derrida, Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles / Éperons. Les Styles de Nietzsche, trans. Barbara Harlow, intr. Stefano Agosti, drawings by François Loubrieu (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 122–43. This text was initially published by Corbo e Fiore (Venice, 1976), with an introduction by Stefano Agosti and drawings by François Loubrieu, as a quadrilingual edition (French, Italian, English, German). (All the notes in this text are by the editors unless otherwise specified.) See supra, fig. 1, p. 90. 2. Derrida, Spurs, 129–31. [Harlow translates this excerpt as “a sewing-up machine (machine à recoudre) on a castration table.”—Trans.] Jacques Derrida is alluding here to a famous passage from The Songs of Maldoror: “as beautiful . . . as the chance meeting on a dissecting-table of a sewing-machine and an umbrella!” (Lautréamont, Maldoror & The Complete Works, trans. Alexis Lykiard (Cambridge: Exact Change, 1994), 193.) 3. Derrida, Spurs, 37. [Harlow translates it as “[h]owever—it is woman who will be my subject.”—Trans.] 4. Derrida, Spurs. [Harlow translates it as “woman, then, will not have been my subject.”—Trans.] 5. Derrida, Spurs, p. 85. [Harlow translates it as “[m]uch as one might skip over a sensible image in a philosophy book or tear out an illustrated leaf or allegorical representation in a more serious volume . . . . In such a way does one permit oneself to see without reading, to read without seeing.” —Trans.]

Drawing by Design 1. Director of the École Supérieure d’art in Le Havre and sculptor. 2. See Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). The exhibition, curated by Jacques Derrida, was the first in a series entitled “Parti pris” (Bias) and took place in the Louvre from 26 October 1990 to 21 January 1991. 3. See Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).

264 | no t e s to page s 9 9 –117 4. The word was followed by a spelling out of the last five letters, to differentiate it from the homophone “dessin” (see also infra, p. 108).—Trans. 5. See Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, corrected ed., trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 208ff. 6. See Jacques Derrida, “Cartouches,” in the Gérard Titus-Carmel, The Pocket Size Tlingit Coffin catalogue (Paris: Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Georges-Pompidou, 1978); republished in The Truth in Painting, 183–253. 7. See Derrida, “+ R (Into the Bargain),” in The Truth in Painting, 149–82. 8. See Jacques Derrida, “To Unsense the Subjectile,” in Jacques Derrida and Paule Thévenin, The Secret Art of Antonin Artaud, trans. Mary Ann Caws (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 61–157. Jacques Derrida devoted another text to Artaud’s drawings: Artaud the Moma, ed. Kaira M. Cabañas, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017). 9. See Jacques Derrida, “Lignées,” in Mille e tre, cinq, with Micaëla Henich (Bordeaux: William Blake, 1996). Apart from Jacques Derrida, the four other authors called upon in this project were Dominique Fourcade, Michael Palmer, Tom Raworth and Jacques Roubaud. 10. In May 1991, when the lecture was given, “Lignées” was probably completed as the text is dated “April 1991.” 11. A play on “Louvre” and French “ouvrir,” to open. For the whole phrase, roughly meaning “The open where not to see,” see Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind, 33.—Trans. 12. Dibutades or the Origin of Drawing, by Joseph-Benoît Suvée, and Dibutades Tracing the Portrait of Her Shepherd or the Origin of Painting, by Jean-Baptiste Regnault. See Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind, 50–51. 13. Georges Bataille (under pseudonym of Lord Auch), Story of the Eye (Histoire de l’œil; orig. 1928), new ed., trans. Joachim Neugroschel (London: Penguin, 2010 [New York: Urizen Books, 1977]). 14. Derrida quotes these lines by Andrew Marvell, from “Eyes and Tears,” at the end of Memoirs of the Blind (128–29) and in “Circumfession,” in Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida, Jacques Derrida, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 99; he comments on them again in “Thinking Out of Sight,” supra, p. 32. 15. See Woman at the Foot of the Cross, by Daniele da Volterra, in Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind, 125, 127. 16. Jacques Derrida hesitates here. In fact, the Bible talks about goatskins or the “skins of the kids of the goats” (KJV, Genesis 27:16). 17. From Baudelaire, Jacques Derrida cites the poem “The Blind” and a passage from “Mnemonic Art.” See Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind, 47–49. 18. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, ed. Claude Lefort, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1969).—Trans. 19. In this passage Derrida uses both French words “tache aveugle” and “point aveugle” before mentioning the English equivalent for the former.—Trans. 20. Track change. 21. This was followed by a discussion, not transcribed here, with the participants in the seminar.

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Pregnances 1. Colette Deblé, Lumière de l’air (Creil: Éditions Bernard Dumerchez; Paris: L’Arbre Voyageur, 1993), 14. (Ed.) 2. In the original, “chef-d’œuvre capiternel,” with the second (portmanteau) word playing on the Latin origin of chef: caput, capitis (cf. “capital”) + éternel.—Trans. 3. “Pictorial citation cannot be literal, like literary citation, because it depends on the citer’s hand and manner” (Deblé, Lumière de l’air, 15). [See supra, fig. 2, p. 119. (Ed.)] 4. Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. and ed. Charles Martin (New York: Norton, 2004), 109 (book 3, “The Wrath of Juno,” ll. 607–8): “Oh, would that I were able to secede / from my own body.” (Ed.) 5. Ovid, Metamorphoses, 109. (Ed.) 6. A wordplay on the feminine “elles” in French “aquarelles”: watercolors.—Trans. 7. “My painting is made of runs or spray which at once blur the image and constitute it” (Deblé, Lumière de l’air, 34). “Blur” and “constitute,” says she. Founding and dissolving, which says everything about the turbulent work going on in these waters: they found, they make and dissolve, they make the image by unmaking it, they “constitute” it by “blurring” it, they found, print, institute it, give it an outline and bring it out in all its eventfulness through the very to-and-fro gesture that displaces and vibrates the line. In its damp imprint, the body appears and takes place, coming up through her element, the aquatic in-between milieu: here, it is constituting by blurring, elsewhere, as we shall see below, it is erasing and underlining. 8. I permit myself the use of English [“sperm whale” in English in the original.— Trans.] because Colette Deblé often refers to California (“My large pictures come after my trips to California,” Lumière de l’air, 26), and because along its coast can often be seen passing families of whales. 9. Deblé, Lumière de l’air, 28. 10. An allusion to a note by Sigmund Freud: “Psyche ist ausgedehnt: weiss nichts davon,” “written on 22nd August 1938, one year before his death,” and published posthumously in Schriften aus dem Nachlass, 1941, in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 17, p. 152, a passage Jacques Derrida comments on at length in On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy, trans. Christine Irizarry (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 11 and ff. (Ed.) 11. Deblé, Lumière de l’air, 15; emphasis mine [J. D.]. 12. This limited series of 888 washes converted itself into “infinity,” according to the artist. (Ed.) 13. Deblé, Lumière de l’air, 15. (Ed.) 14. Deblé, Lumière de l’air, 23. (Ed.) 15. Ovid, Metamorphoses, 110 (book 3, “The Wrath of Juno,” ll. 645–46): “and when / he cried ‘Farewell!’ ‘Farewell!’ cried Echo back.” (Ed.)

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To Save the Phenomena 1. See Simplicius (6th century), Commentary on Aristotle’s “On the Heavens”: “which hypotheses of regular, circular, and ordered motion are capable of saving the phenomena of the planets?’’ Quoted in the introduction to Plato, Timaeus and Critias, trans. Robin Waterfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), xl. This Neoplatonic formula can already be found in Proclus (5th century). (Unless otherwise indicated, all notes in this text are the editors’.) 2. Or else: they have supposedly signed some rather unbelievable propositions. A more literal translation had to be kept to explain Derrida’s reference to the future perfect in the following sentence.—Trans. 3. “ta phainomena . . . apodôsein” (Aristotle, Metaphysics, book Λ, chap. 8). Tricot’s translation, to which Derrida often resorts, translates the Greek phrase as “to account for the phenomena” [rendre compte des phénomènes] (vol. 2 (Paris: Vrin, 1991 [1940]), 180–81). [None of the available English translations comes close to a literal rendering of the Greek; see, for example, The Complete Works of Aristotle, Revised Oxford Translation, 1-vol. digital ed., ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 3647: “to explain the phenomena.”—Trans.] 4. Instead of “la cendre même”: the very ash, as the ash that economically returns to the self.—Trans. 5. “Embler” is an archaic verb meaning “to steal,” and its reflexive form sounds like the phenomenological “sembler,” to seem, in the following paragraph.—Trans. 6. In English in the original.—Trans. 7. From this point on, this literal motif, in which one can also hear the initials of Salvatore Puglia and of “Sauver les P hénomènes,” as well as a recall of the “S is P” motif of The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond (see infra n. 8), will structure the essay. Its presence in the original will be tacitly indicated by an asterisk in the translation.—Trans. 8. See Jacques Derrida, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), where “S.” and “P.” designate Socrates and Plato, but also “subject” and “predicate,” Shem the penman and Shaun the postman, sword and pen (p. 142), sp (speculate, speculative idealism), p. s. (postal service) (p. 162), in short, the whole “postcarded structure of the letter” (p. 89). 9. Poetry and truth. This phrase will be repeated in “a modest translation, anachronistic and awkward but deliberately distorted” by Jacques Derrida in “Demeure: Fiction and Testimony,” in Maurice Blanchot, The Instant of My Death; Jacques Derrida, Demeure: Fiction and Testimony, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 15. 10. “La poussière m’aime”: literally, dust loves me, but likely also a homophonous pun on la poussière même: the very/selfsame dust.—Trans. 11. L’au-delà dit, which can be understood as “the said beyond,” “the beyond says,” and perhaps also “the beyond(-)said,” hence the syntactically pliable rendering.—Trans. 12. See Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper Collins, 1971), 15–86.

no t e s t o pag e s 136 –14 4 | 267 13. Observons le silence, i.e., also, literally, let’s [visually] observe silence.—Trans. 14. Perhaps a misprint, but rather more likely to be a play on the reversal of the letters S and P disseminated throughout this text. 15. In English in the text.—Trans. 16. A reference to Lenz, a novella fragment written by Georg Büchner in Strasbourg in 1836, featuring Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz, a friend of Goethe’s. In Présages, the work by Salvatore Puglia reproduced in the journal Contretemps in which Jacques Derrida’s text was first published, a child (bottom right-hand corner of the painting) can be seen aiming with his slingshot at a fragment from Lenz (upper left-hand corner).—Trans. 17. Republished in Calligrammes (1918), the poem originally appeared in Sic, no. 12 (December 1916). See “Il Pleut” / “It’s Raining,” in Guillaume Apollinaire, Calligrammes: Poems of Peace and War (1913–1916), bilingual ed., trans. Anne Hyde Greet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 100, 101. 18. In English in the text.—Trans. 19. Also as “lens” in the original, possibly to recall Büchner’s Lenz above.—Trans. 20. In English in the text.—Trans. 21. See supra, fig. 3, p. 130. 22. In English in the text.—Trans. 23. In English in the text.—Trans. 24. Suzanne Doppelt (1956–) is a French photographer, writer, and publisher. 25. Last word in English in the text.—Trans.

Four Ways to Drawing 1. See Louis Aragon, Henri Matisse: A Novel, trans. Jean Stewart, vol. 1 (London: Collins; New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972), 179, 181; emphasis by Henri Matisse. (Unless otherwise indicated, all the endnotes in this text are the editors’.) 2. Aragon, Henri Matisse, vol. 2, p. 84; translation modified. See also Louis Aragon, “Matisse parle” [1947], in Œuvres complètes, vol. 1, ed. Olivier Barbarant (Paris: Gallimard, 2007), 1080. 3. “Le Voyage du dessin,” an allusion to Valerio Adami’s eponymous exhibition. See Jacques Derrida, “+ R (Into the Bargain),” in The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 150–81. 4. “The psyche among friends, the origination of thoughts in conversation and correspondence is necessary for artists. Otherwise we have none for ourselves, but it belongs to the sacred image which we produce.” Friedrich Hölderlin, “Letter to Casimir Ulrich Böhlendorf” (ca. 1802), in Essays and Letters on Theory, trans. and ed. Thomas Pfau (Albany: SUNY Press, 1988), 153–54. [The second sentence in the English translation has been silently corrected. In German: “Die Psyche unter Freunden, das Entstehen des Gedankens im Gespräch und Brief ist Künstlern nöthig. Sonst haben wir keinen für uns selbst, sondern er gehöret dem heiligen Bilde, das wir bilden.” See Friedrich Hölderlin, Samtliche Werke und Briefe, vol. 2, ed. Michael Knaupp (Munich: Carl Hanser, 1992), 922.—Trans.]

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Ecstasy, Crisis 1. Jacques Derrida, Glas, trans. John P. Leavey Jr., and Richard Rand (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 195–96b: “I forgot. The first verse I published: ‘glu de l’étang lait de ma mort noyée.’” (Unless otherwise indicated, all the notes in this interview are the editors’.) 2. See “Four Ways to Drawing,” supra, p. 267n3.—Trans. 3. See Jacques Derrida, “+ R (Into the Bargain),” in The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 149–82. 4. See Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). 5. An allusion to the two interviews with Roger Lesgards and Vonick Morel, which preceded this one in the volume. 6. See supra, fig. 4, p. 147. 7. In English in the text.—Trans. 8. See Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, corrected ed., trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 93: “In a certain sense, ‘thought’ means nothing.” Emphasis in the original.

Color to the Letter 1. The French title, “De la couleur à la lettre,” can be understood in at least three different ways: from color to the letter, some color to the letter (i.e. literally), of color to the letter. I have opted for a noncommittal solution that will hopefully mediate between these possible interpretations.—Trans. 2. I have kept all the titles of Atlan’s paintings in the original, adding a translation between brackets for those titles that were less readily comprehensible in English.—Trans. 3. In one of the texts gathered under the title “Les dits du peintre” (The painter’s spoken words), Atlan notes for example: “The problem of titles is, indeed, irritating. I gave some in the past. I give some again today. It happened to me to be too lazy to look for some. Yet the title is necessary. First, for a practical reason. A canvas is given a title just as a child is given a first name. It is more convenient than a number. It is easier to see later which canvas we’re dealing with. Then, the title gives to the spectator a suggestion, a poetic indication. Let’s not talk about paintings ‘with a subject’ where the problem is solved in advance, or of this somewhat hackneyed, facile, yet tiresome technique of the pseudosurrealist title.” See Jean-Michel Atlan, “Les dits du peintre,” in Atlan, Premières Périodes, 1940–1954 (Paris: Adam Biro, 1989), 192. [All translations from this collection of essays are mine.—Trans.] Therefore, there would be a rhetorical strategy of the title and of the titleless in Atlan. It could give rise to systematic taxonomy (between the symbolic—or motivated—signifier and the arbitrary—or random—signifier, between the descriptive, the denotative, the con-

no t e s t o pag e s 158 –16 0 | 269 notative, metonymy, synecdoche, catachresis, etc.). The “suggestion” or “poetic indication” can play all these games, and very near me, the dreamer won’t hesitate to do so. 4. Quoted infra, n. 6. [Atlan, “Lettre aux amis japonais,” in Atlan, Premières Périodes, p. 204 (Ed.)] 5. “[T]he important thing for a painter was not the vision of reality, but rather the reality of his vision.” “the young painter’s essential task will consist in substituting for the vision of reality the authenticity and the reality of vision.” (Atlan, “Les dits du peintre,” 179) [Derrida’s emphasis. (Ed.)]. “It is in this sense that my work has been said to be that of a visionary.” (Atlan, “Lettre aux amis japonais,” 205; emphasis mine.) 6. KJV, Exodus 20:4, 13. “Tu ne te feras point d’image taillée, ni de représentation quelconque”; “Tu ne tueras point” [La Sainte Bible, trans. Louis Segond (Geneva: Société biblique de Genève, 2010 [1979]), 99. (Ed.)] I am quoting somewhat arbitrarily Segond’s conventional translation. Titled La loi ou le Pentateuque, the translation in the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, edited by Édouard Dhorme (Paris: Gallimard ), introduces the word “idol” and deletes the “cut stone” ( pierre taillée): “Tu ne te feras pas d’idole, ni aucune image . . . Tu ne tueras pas.” [La Bible, vol. 1, trans. Édouard Dhorme et al. (Paris: Gallimard, 1956), 233, 234. (Ed.)] André Chouraqui reintroduces the stone in the guise of “sculpture”: “Tu ne feras pour toi ni sculpture ni toute image . . . Tu n’assassineras pas.” [La Bible, trans. André Chouraqui (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 2003 [1974–96], 152. (Ed.)] This last detail is important, for it distinguishes between the act of killing [le tuer or la tuerie] in general, putting to death in general, from murder [assassinat]. Soon afterward, God will be able to prescribe putting the murderer to death, which would be inconsistent with a general “thou shalt not kill.” I dare to think that these questions of translation are also issues in the relation of painting (Atlan’s in particular) to figuration and nonfiguration, but also to life given or taken. A certain thinking about life (therefore about psyche, vital breath, rhythmical breathing) animates Atlan’s concept of rhythm or dance as well as his constant challenging of the abstraction/figuration couple: “it is rhythm that is at the origin of breath and of life, for it is rhythm that invents forms, that instills into dance this sacred something that also animates painting. . . . The painter is first and foremost a dancer, an “abstract” dancer who rushes into space of his canvas and who does not paint only with his eyes but with the movement of his body and of his muscles. The painter as well as the dancer must capture the essential rhythms, breathe with them. Rhythm, of course, exists for us only through animating matter . . . this pictorial matter is alive too. It is the flesh of the painting.” (Atlan, “Lettre aux amis japonais,” 204.) 7. KJV, Exodus 21:12. “Celui qui frappera un homme mortellement sera puni de mort,” (trans. Segond [p. 100]). “Quiconque frappe un homme et celui-ci meurt, sera mis à mort” (trans. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade [p. 236]). “Frappeur d’homme qui meurt, mourra, il mourra” (trans. Chouraqui [p. 154]). God is known to extend these death sentences well beyond and threatens with them whoever abducts a man in order to sell him, whoever kills or curses his mother and father. 8. KJV, Exodus 20:19. “mais que Dieu ne nous parle point, de peur que nous ne mourions,” (trans. Segond [p. 100]). “que Dieu ne parle pas avec nous, de peur que nous mourions!” (trans. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade [p. 234]). “Qu’Elohîm ne parle pas avec nous, pour que nous ne mourions pas!” (trans. Chouraqui [p. 152]).

270 | no t e s to page s 161–163 9. About such a “temptation” or “murder attempt,” this time on Moses, if not on God, allow me to refer to Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 64ff. 10. KJV, Exodus 20:18–19. “Tout le peuple entendait les tonnerres et le son de la trompette; il voyait les flammes de la montagne fumante. À ce spectacle, le peuple tremblait, et se tenait dans l’éloignement. Ils dirent à Moïse: Parle-nous toi-même et nous écouterons; mais que Dieu ne nous parle point, de peur que nous ne mourions” (trans. Segond [p. 100]). “Or tout le peuple voyait les tonnerres et les feux, le son du cor et la montagne fumante: le peuple le vit et ils tremblèrent et ils se tinrent au loin. Alors ils dirent à Moïse: ‘Parle avec nous, toi, et nous t’écouterons; mais que Dieu ne parle pas avec nous, de peur que nous mourions!’” (trans. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade [p. 234]). “Tout le peuple voit les voix, les torches, la voix du shophar, la montagne fumante. Le peuple voit. Ils se meuvent et se tiennent au loin. Ils disent à Moshè: ‘Parle, toi, avec nous et nous entendrons. Qu’Elohîm ne parle pas avec nous, pour que nous ne mourions pas!’” (trans. Chouraqui [p. 152]). 11. KJV, Exodus 20:20, 21. “Ne vous effrayez pas, car c’est pour vous mettre à l’épreuve que Dieu est venu . . . et bien que le peuple restât dans l’éloignement” (trans. Segond [p. 100]). “Ne craignez pas, car c’est afin de vous éprouver que l’Elohim est venu et c’est afin que sa crainte soit en face de vous pour que vous ne péchiez plus!” “Le peuple se tenait au loin” (trans. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade [p. 234]). “Ne frémissez pas. Oui, c’est pour vous éprouver qu’Elohîm est venu, et pour que son frémissement soit sur vos faces, afin que vous ne fautiez pas.” “Le peuple se tient au loin” (trans. Chouraqui [pp. 152–53]). 12. KJV, Exodus 20:22–23. “Tu parleras ainsi aux enfants d’Israël. . . . Vous ne ferez point des dieux d’argent et des dieux d’or” (trans. Segond [p. 100]). “Iahvé dit à Moïse: ‘Ainsi tu parleras aux fils d’Israël. . . . Vous ne ferez pas à côté de moi des dieux d’argent et des dieux d’or, vous n’en ferez pas pour vous” (trans. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade [p. 234]). “Tu diras ainsi aux Benéi Israël. . . . Vous ne ferez pas, avec moi, des Elohîm d’argent et des Elohîm d’or, vous ne les ferez pas pour vous” (trans. Chouraqui [p. 153]). 13. Of course, force is deployed and the event of these works is inscribed beyond any thematics. And first of all, their colors, not to say their strokes. But the danger of thematicism fatally threatens any discourse, whether it dreams or not, on this painting, especially if titles are taken as pretexts. Fatally because no discourse will ever free itself from all thematization. Each word, each concept conjures up something of a theme. However, one can still use trickery [ruser], one can pretend to yield to thematicism in order to do something else, something wholly different. Something nonthematizable. As if one spoke about color to the letter, about its forms and its force to the letter. As if, without mimicry, speech took on some color, became color—or as if color, with a “still small voice,” spoke up. By dint of [à force de] writing and composition. Up to the reader, then, to see, to hear, and to do his or her part. Up to him or her to risk the countersignature. 14. Kahina died in the eighth century in the Aurès Mountains, the cradle of the Algerian War. This armed (perhaps Jewish) “soothsayeress” belonged to the Berber tribe of the Jarawa. She routed the Arabs near Tébessa, in the Constantine Province, and then reigned over the whole country. In order to adopt a young Arab, Hassan, and have him accepted

no t e s t o pag e s 163 –16 9 | 271 by her tribe, it is said that Kahina had feigned, as a simulacrum of childbirth, to bring him out of her own belly, from beneath her ample dress. 15. KJV, [First] Book of Kings, 19, 11, 12, 13. Once again, we have cited, in the following order, translations by Segond (“un murmure doux et léger”), the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (“le son d’une brise légère”), and Chouraqui (“un silence subtil”). [“Une voix de fin silence” (La Bible. Traduction œcuménique, trans. Bibli’o—Société biblique française [Paris: Cerf, 2010 [1975]], 431.)—Ed.] 16. Allow me to refer here to the analysis I devote to this elsewhere: “The Colossal” (in the “Parergon” essay), in The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 119–47. 17. Immanuel Kant, “Of the Evaluation of the Sizes of the Things of Nature, Necessary to the Idea of the Sublime,” § 26, in Critique of Judgment, quoted by Jacques Derrida in “Parergon,” in The Truth in Painting, 125. (Ed.) 18. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. James Creed Meredith, rev. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007 [1952]), 104. (Ed.) [Trans.—The inserted German words are Derrida’s.] 19. See Jacques Derrida, “Kho¯ra,” trans. Ian McLeod, in On the Name, ed. Thomas Dutoit, trans. David Wood et al. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 89– 127. For this “Platonic” detour, I rely for my authority on what Kenneth White reports in his fine study devoted to Atlan’s life, precisely titled “Une Atlantide picturale, essai de biographie” (in Jacques Polieri, Atlan. Catalogue raisonné de l’œuvre complet [Essai de biographie par Kenneth White, catalogue conçu et rédigé par Jacques Polieri, établi par Denise Atlan, Camille Atlan et Jacques Polieri] (Paris: Gallimard, 1996), 47): “As early as his philosophy class, Atlan became interested in Plato, the image . . . and in Atlantis” [All translations from this collection of essays are mine.—Trans.] See also p. 122. The catalogue also appeared in parallel in English as Atlan. Catalogue raisonné of the complete works [A biographical essay by Kenneth White, preface by Alain Bonfand, catalogue conceived and written by Jacques Polieri, compiled by Denise Atlan, Camille Atlan, and Jacques Polieri], trans. Ann Sautier-Greening and Pénélope Brawn. 20. Plato, Timaeus 22d, in Timaeus and Critias, trans. Robin Waterfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 10. [The square-bracketed elements are Derrida’s; I have translated between chevrons an omission in the English translation present in Derrida’s French version.—Trans.] 21. At least as a curiosity, this passage from Timaeus (25cd )—on deadly silence, the unspeakable silence that follows the cataclysm—can be compared with the one from the Book of Kings that was quoted above to make the “still small voice” resonate: “‘Some time later appalling earthquakes and floods occurred, and in the course of a single, terrible day and night the whole fighting-force of your city sank all at once beneath the earth, and the island of Atlantis likewise sank beneath the sea and vanished. That is why the sea there cannot now be navigated or explored; the mud which the island left behind as it settled lies a little below the surface and gets in the way.’” [Plato, Timaeus and Critias, pp. 13–14. (Ed.)] 22. See supra, fig. 5, p. 157. (Ed.) 23. Atlan, “Les dits du peintre,” in Atlan, Premières Périodes, 192. (Ed.)

272 | no t e s to page s 171–18 5 24. See Atlan, Premières Périodes, 25, 181. 25. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 299. 26. Emmanuel Levinas, “Substitution,” in Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991), 112. I analyze these passages and this “logic” in Adieu. To Emmanuel Lévinas, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 45ff. 27. Emmanuel Levinas, “Atlan et la tension de l’art,” in Atlan, Atlan, Premières Périodes, 20–21. 28. Emmanuel Levinas, “Subjectivity and Vulnerability,” in Humanism of the Other, trans. Nidra Poller (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 62–65. 29. Levinas, “Subjectivity and Vulnerability,” 63. Emphasis mine. 30. Levinas, “Subjectivity and Vulnerability,” 64, 75 for * (n. 6 in the text). 31. Jacques Polieri, “Atlan le naissant, Atlan le magique,” in Atlan, Atlan, Premières Périodes, 26. 32. Atlan said one day: “My poems come before my painting only by a few months. What touched me in poetry was the litany and rhythm side of things. I went from poetry to painting like a dancer who would discover that dance reveals him more than verbal incantations.” (Quoted by Kenneth White, in Polieri, Atlan, 73.)

The “Undersides” of Painting, Writing, and Drawing 1. I have deliberately chosen rare and/or obsolete cognates for the last two words in the title (suppôt, “henchman,” and supplice, “torture”) to keep the rhythmic alliteration in the original.—Trans. 2. The expression “en dessous” is spelled with and without a hyphen in the typescript, which we have faithfully transcribed. (Unless otherwise indicated, all the notes in this text are the editors’.) 3. This person’s name could not be identified. 4. See Jacques Derrida, “Parergon,” in The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 15–147, especially 37–82. 5. Derrida’s reference here is to Walter Benjamin’s famous 1935–36 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” (second version), trans. Edmund Jephcott and Harry Zohn, in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin, trans. Edmund Jephcott et al. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008), 19–35.—Trans. 6. See, inter alia, Jacques Derrida, Glas, trans. John P. Leavey Jr. and Richard Rand (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 206a-211a, and “A Silk-Worm of One’s Own,” in Hélène Cixous and Jacques Derrida, Veils, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 85. 7. See, inter alia, Jacques Derrida, “The Word Processor” [1996], “Paper or Me, You

no t e s t o pag e s 18 5–19 6 | 273 Know . . . (New Speculations on a Luxury of the Poor)” [1997], in Paper Machine, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 19–32, 41–65; and “Manquements—du droit à la justice (mais que manque-t-il donc aux ‘sans-papiers’?)” [1996], in Jacques Derrida, Marc Guillaume, and Jean-Pierre Vincent, Marx en jeu (Paris: Descartes, 1997), 73–91, especially 82–85. 8. Jacques Derrida had probably planned to read xeroxed extracts during his lecture or brought the book(s) from which he wished to quote. These documents have not been found in the file deposited at the IMEC. 9. On these issues, see Jacques Derrida, Artaud the Moma, ed. and afterword by Kaira M. Cabañas, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017).

Aletheia 1. In English in the original. All other English words and phrases in the original French edition will be marked with an *.—Trans. 2. Junichiro¯ Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows, trans. Thomas J. Harper and Edward G. Seidensticker (Stony Creek, CT: Leeteny Island Books, 1977). In French Éloge de l’ombre, trans. René Sieffert (Paris: Publications Orientalistes de France, 1977). While benefiting from the English translation of this work, we have tried to translate the references to the French translation of Tanizaki as literally as possible. For ease of comparison, we have provided in the footnotes the pagination of the French edition followed by that of the English translation.—Trans. 3. Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows, 32/ 9. 4. Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows, 52/ 18. 5. Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows, 69/ 26. 6. Junichiro¯ Tanizaki, Chijin no ai, also known as A Fool Known, is translated into English as Naomi (New York: Knopf, 1985).—Trans. 7. Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows, 77/ 30. 8. Heraclitus’s famous aphorism “nature loves to hide,” fragment X (D. 123) in The Art and Thought of Heraclitus: An edition of the fragments with translation and commentary, ed. Charles H. Kahn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 33. (Ed.) 9. See Paul Celan, “Aschenglorie,” in Atemwende (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1967), 68; in English as “Ash-aureole,” in Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan, trans. John Felstiner (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001), 261. (Ed.) 10. See Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 82ff. (Ed.) 11. See Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981). On this text, see Jacques Derrida, “The Deaths of Roland Barthes,” trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas, in Continental Philosophy I: Philosophy and Non-philosophy since Merleau-Ponty, ed. Hugh J. Silverman (London: Routledge, 1988), 259–96; republished, with changes, in Psyche: Inventions of the Other, vol. 1, ed. Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford Uni-

274 | no t e s to page s 19 6 – 2 0 9 versity Press, 2007), 264–98, and in The Work of Mourning, ed. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 31–67, especially 48 and ff. for this passage. (Ed.) 12. In the original Japanese edition.—Trans. 13. See supra, fig. 6, p. 191. (Ed.) 14. Discussed repeatedly in “The Spatial Arts,” supra, pp. 3–30.—Trans.

Videor 1. René Descartes, “Second Meditation” [in Meditations on First Philosophy / Meditationes de prima philosophia: A Bilingual Edition, ed. and trans. George Heffernan (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990), 106. (Ed.)] Quoted by Jean-Luc Nancy, who writes in the course of his analysis: “The videor is the illusion that, through an unheard-of twist or perversion, anchors certainty in the deepest abyss of illusion. The place of the videor is indeed the painting, the portrait, the most factitious and most faithful of faces, the most blind and most clear-sighted eye.” Ego Sum: Corpus, Anima, Fabula, trans. Marie-Eve Morin (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), 46. 2. Jean-Paul Fargier, “Magie blanche,” in Gary Hill, Disturbance (among the Jars) (Villeneuve d’Ascq: Musée d’art moderne, n.d.). (Ed.) 3. Paul Virilio, “La lumière indirecte,” Communications 48: “Video” (1988): 45ff. The point would be to engage a close discussion around the very interesting but very problematic notions of “telepresence,” of “present telereality in ‘real time’ that supplants the reality of the presence of real space.” Already problematic with regard to video in general (the principal, even unique object of Virilio’s analysis), these concepts would be even more so, it seems, with regard to the putting to work of “art” video, as well as the type of simulacrum that structures it. 4. See supra, fig. 7, p. 202. (Ed.)

The Ghost Dance 1. Ghost Dance, dir. Ken McMullen, Looseyard Productions for Channel 4, Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen (ZDF), Great Britain and West Germany, 1983, 94 mins. In the film, Jacques Derrida played himself alongside female actress Pascale Ogier, who died on 25 October 1984, soon after the film was shot. (Unless otherwise indicated, all the notes in this text are the editors’.) 2. See Jacques Derrida, “Spectrographies,” in Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler, Echographies of Television: Filmed Interviews, trans. Jennifer Bajorek (Cambridge: Polity, 2002), 113ff. 3. Marshall McLuhan (1911–80), Professor of English Literature and communication theorist, is one of the founders of contemporary media studies. Among his best-known works are The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (Toronto: University of

no t e s t o pag e s 2 0 9 – 2 2 8 | 275 Toronto Press, 1962), Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw Hill, 1964) and The Global Village: Transformations in World Life and Media in the 21 st Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). 4. See also, inter alia, Jacques Derrida, “‘There is No One Narcissism’ (Autobiophotographies),” in Points . . . Interviews, 1974–1994, ed. Elisabeth Weber, trans. Peggy Kamuf et al. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), pp. 196–215.

Cinema and Its Ghosts 1. See Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny, trans. David McLintock (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003). (Unless otherwise indicated, all the notes in this interview are the editors’.) 2. See Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” (second version, 1935–1936), trans. Edmund Jephcott and Harry Zohn, in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin, trans. Edmund Jephcott et al. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008), especially p. 37: “It is through the camera that we first discover the optical unconscious, just as we discover the instinctual unconscious through psychoanalysis.” 3. Jacques Derrida, Demeure: Fiction and Testimony, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000). 4. Shoah, dir. Claude Lanzmann, 1983, 613 mins (France), 503 mins (United States). 5. See Jacques Derrida, Cinders, trans. and ed. Ned Lukacher (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991). A CD was made from the original volume: Jacques Derrida, Feu la cendre, lu par l’auteur et Carole Bouquet (Paris: Des femmes—Antoinette Fouque, 1987). The whole recording of the text (76 mins) was done by Michelle Muller in 1987. 6. Jacques Derrida, “Circumfession,” in Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida, Jacques Derrida, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). See “Trace and Archive,” supra, p. 262n13, for details of the audio recording of Jacques Derrida’s solo reading of the whole text. 7. See Jacques Derrida and Safaa Fathy, Tourner les mots. Au bord d’un film (Paris: Galilée and ARTE Éditions, 2000), 14–16. 8. Robert Antelme, L’Espèce humaine (Paris: Gallimard, 1957), translated into English as The Human Race, trans. Jeffrey Haight and Annie Mahler (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998). On the occasion of its publication in 1947, this far-reaching testimony on experience in concentration camps went almost unnoticed until it was reissued ten years later, with a foreword by the author. Dedicated to the memory of Antelme’s sister Marie-Louise, the book retraces the life of a kommando (Gandersheim) in the German concentration camp Buchenwald. 9. This refers to the international symposium “Judéités: questions pour Jacques Derrida,” which took place at the Centre communautaire de Paris, from 3 to 5 December 2000. See Jacques Derrida, “Abraham, the Other,” in Judeities: Questions for Jacques Derrida, ed.

276 | no t e s to page s 2 2 8 – 238 Bettina Bergo et al., trans. Bettina Bergo and Michael B. Smith (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), 1–35, especially 19–28. Jacques Derrida had also dedicated several pages to Sartre in his letter to Claude Lanzmann dated 22 May 1996; see “‘Dead man running’: Salut, salut. Notes for a Letter to Les Temps Modernes,” in Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews, 1971–2001, ed. and trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 257–92, especially 258–64.

The Sacrifice 1. Victor Hugo’s Marie Tudor, directed by Daniel Mesguich (Théâtre national de Lille, 1991) and on tour (1991–93). (Unless otherwise indicated, all the notes in this text are the editors’.) 2. Derrida uses the Anglicism prompteur as a synonym for souffleur, which designates the person who, as it were, “blows words,” i.e., cues actors in a theater.—Trans. 3. Daniel Mesguich, L’éternel éphémère (Paris: Lagrasse, Verdier, 2006), 112. Emphasis and italics are by Daniel Mesguich throughout in the original. [All translations from Mesguich’s texts are my own.—Trans.] 4. Mesguich, L’éternel éphémère, 137. 5. See Plato, The Republic, vol. 2, books 6–10, trans. Paul Shorey (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann, 1935), X, 607a.—Trans. 6. Mesguich, L’éternel éphémère, 118. 7. Mesguich, L’éternel éphémère, 32. The interpolated citations, not referenced in Daniel Mesguich’s text, are excerpted from psychoanalyst Daniel Sibony’s Entre-deux. L’origine en partage (Paris: Seuil, 1991), 89; new ed. with a new preface by the author in 2003. In Sibony’s book, the words “fils” (son) and “père” (father) are in lowercase. 8. Mesguich, L’éternel éphémère. 9. Mesguich, L’éternel éphémère, 91. 10. Rend le passé au présent, i.e., also perhaps “renders the past in the present.”—Trans. 11. Mesguich, L’éternel éphémère, 19. 12. Mesguich, L’éternel éphémère, 54. 13. “abyme” is in italics in the original.—Trans. 14. Mesguich, L’éternel éphémère, 46. 15. Mesguich, L’éternel éphémère, 45. 16. Mesguich, L’éternel éphémère, 47. 17. Cited by Jacques Derrida as early as “Cogito and the History of Madness” (1963), in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge, 2001), 36. [Although the aphorism is rendered as “the moment of decision is foolishness” in the authoritative translation of Søren Kierkegaard’s Philosophical Fragments, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), 52, we have resorted to the usual, literal English translation of Derrida’s French translation of Kierkegaard’s sentence.—Trans.] 18. Octave Mannoni, “Le théâtre du point de vue de l’imaginaire,” in Un si vif étonne-

no t e s t o pag e s 238 – 250 | 277 ment. La honte, le rire, la mort (Paris: Seuil, 1988), 17; quoted in Mesguich, L’éternel éphémère, 115. 19. Mesguich, L’éternel éphémère, 115.

Marx Is (Quite) Somebody 1. In French, “comme on dit une portée de chats,” literally: as one says about a litter of cats—Trans. 2. Here and in what follows in his talk, Jacques Derrida is referring to the presentations that were given before his. See Marc Guillaume, “Décomposition spectrale,” in Jacques Derrida, Marc Guillaume and Jean-Pierre Vincent, Marx en jeu (Paris: Descartes, 1997), 29–51. (Unless otherwise indicated, all the notes in this text are the editors’.) 3. “La séance continue” was also Freud’s phrase, famously left in French in his writings, with which he described psychoanalytic as an ongoing process. Derrida resorted to it on other occasions, for instance in The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 36, 178, 329.—Trans. 4. William Shakespeare, Hamlet, 2.2, l. 600ff. [Also translated into French by Derrida, as is the following reference.—Trans.] 5. Shakespeare, Hamlet, 3.2. 6. See Ernest Jones, Hamlet and Oedipus (London: Victor Gollancz, 1949). 7. In English in the original, followed by French translations.—Trans. 8. Written “Hélène” in the text. 9. Frederick Lewis Demuth (1851–1929), natural son of Helene Demuth, a servant in Marx’s household. 10. In English, here and subsequently in the text. [See also supra, “Trace and Archive, Image and Art,” n. 21.—Trans.] 11. See the transcription of this “improvised talk” that took place on 21 December 1996 at the Théâtre des Amandiers, during a demonstration in support of the “undocumented”: “Manquements—du droit à la justice (mais que manque-t-il donc aux ‘sans-papiers’?),” in Marx en jeu, 73–91. 12. See “Artifactuality” and “Artifactuality, Homohegemony,” in Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler, Echographies of Television: Filmed Interviews, trans. Jennifer Bajorek (Cambridge: Polity, 2002), 1–27 and 41–55. 13. Viviane Forrester (1925–2013) was a writer and literary critic for the newspaper Le Monde and the author of L’Horreur économique (Paris: Fayard, 1996), a highly successful essay (Prix Médicis, 1996). Alain Minc is an economist and political adviser who authored inter alia Le Nouveau Moyen Âge (Paris: Gallimard, 1993). La Mondialisation heureuse (Paris: Plon, 1997) is his response to Viviane Forrester’s essay. A debate, organized by the association Le Nouveau Monde 92, had gathered Jacques Derrida and Alain Minc in 1994, in which Marx was discussed at length. See also Penser ce qui vient. Actes du débat organisé le 18 janvier 1994 au Grand Amphithéâtre de la Sorbonne, chaired by Jean Poperen, talks by Jacques Derrida and Alain Minc (Paris: S.P.M., 1994).

278 | no t e s to page s 252 – 256

The Survivor, the Surcease, the Surge 1. I have deliberately chosen rare and/or distantly related terms for the last two words in the title (sursis: reprieve, and sursaut: start, jump) to keep the alliteration in the original.—Trans. 2. This is the tract from February 1974 titled “Mais pour qui donc se prennent maintenant ces gens-là?” (four-page 16º booklet), through which Francis Ponge replies to Marcelin Pleynet, who had taken him to task, and breaks up for good with the Tel Quel journal. (Unless otherwise indicated, all the notes in this text are the editors’.) 3. “Proteus, in its varying inconsistency, is the least existing of the gods.” (Gide’s words, quoted by Maria Van Rysselberghe in Les Cahiers de la Petite Dame. Notes pour l’histoire authentique d’André Gide (1929–1937), vol. 2 (Paris: Gallimard, 1974), 70. [Translation mine.—Trans.] 4. Quotations excerpted from the letter sent to Jacques Derrida and other writers, which is reproduced in this issue of La Quinzaine littéraire, p. 3. 5. An allusion to Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut, La Pensée 68. Essai sur l’antihumanisme contemporain (Paris: Gallimard, 1985), published in English as French Philosophy of the Sixties: An Essay on Antihumanism, trans. Mary H. S. Cattani (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990). About this book, see Jacques Derrida and Élisabeth Roudinesco, For What Tomorrow: A Dialogue, trans. Jeff Fort (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 8, and Learning to Live Finally: The Last Interview, An Interview with Jean Birnbaum, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Houndmills, Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 25, 29. 6. A reference to Louis Althusser, L’Avenir dure longtemps; followed by Les faits. Autobiographies, ed. Olivier Corpet and Yann Moulier Boutang (Paris: Stock, 1992), published in English as The Future Lasts a Long Time, trans. Richard Veasey (London: Chatto & Windus, 1993). 7. This refers to a passage in Aristotle’s Peri hermêneias, often commented by Jacques Derrida in his last texts, in particular about the distinction between apophantic (apophantikos) and semantic (sêmantikos) logos. See Aristotle, Organon, vol. 1, Hermeneutica (De Interpretatione), ed. Th. Waitz (Leipzig: Sumtibus Hahnii, 1844), chap. 4, 17a.1, cited by Derrida in his seminar The Beast and the Sovereign, vol. 2 (2002–2003), ed. Michel Lisse, Marie-Louise Mallet, and Ginette Michaud, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 216, 219.

Bibliography on the Arts and Architecture

Ot he r t ext s b y Jac q u e s De r r i da o n t h e arts and architect ur e not r e pr i n t e d i n t h i s vo l u m e . (N.B.: References are listed in chronological order; texts preceded by an “A” specifically pertain to architecture.) (A) Books and Catalogues “La parole soufflée” and “Le théâtre de la cruauté et la clôture de la représentation,” in L’Écriture et la différence (Paris: Seuil, 1967), 253–92 and 341–68; rpt. Paris: Seuil, 1979. [“Le théâtre de la cruauté et la clôture de la représentation,” first published in Conference Derrida and Parma, April 1966, and in Critique 230 (July 1966): 595–618.] [“La parole soufflée” and “The Theater of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation,” in Writing and Difference, trans. with introduction and additional notes by Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978; London: Routledge & Keegan Paul, 1978), 169–95 and 232–50.] [Translations: Italian, Portuguese, German, Japanese, Spanish, Czech (partial), Swedish, Polish (partial), Slovak (partial), Lithuanian, Russian, Polish, Bulgarian, Romanian, Korean, Brazilian (partial), Chinese, Greek, Ukrainian, Croatian.] “Economimesis,” in Sylviane Agacinski et al., Mimesis des articulations (Paris: AubierFlammarion, 1975), 55–93. [“Economimesis,” trans. Richard Klein, Diacritics 11, no. 2 (1981): 3–25; rpt. in The Derrida Reader: Writing Performances, ed. Julian Wolfreys (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), 263–93.] [Translations: Serbian, Italian.] “+ R (par-dessus le marché),” first version published in the series Derrière le miroir 214 (Paris: Éditions Maeght, May 1975), 1–23; rpt. in La Vérité en peinture (Paris: Flammarion, 1978), 169–209, and in Adami (written for the exhibition dedicated to the artist, Centre Georges-Pompidou, Paris, 4 December 1985–10 February 1986)

280 | Bibl io gr a ph y on t h e A rt s a n d A rchit e c t u r e (Paris: Éditions du Centre Georges-Pompidou and Musée national d’art moderne, 1985), 178–84. [“+ R (Into the Bargain),” in The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 149–82.] [Translation: Spanish.] “Cartouches,” in the catalogue Gérard Titus-Carmel, The Pocket Size Tlingit Coffin, exhibition by Gérard Titus-Carmel, The Pocket Size Tlingit Coffin et les 61 premiers dessins qui s’ensuivirent, Centre Georges-Pompidou, Paris, 1 March–10 April 1978 (Paris: Éditions du Centre Georges-Pompidou and Musée national d’art moderne, 1978); rpt. in La Vérité en peinture, 211–84. [“Cartouches,” in The Truth in Painting, 183–253.] “R E S T ITUT IO NS de la vérité en pointure,” in Macula 3: “Martin Heidegger et les souliers de Van Gogh” (1978): 11–37; rpt. in La Vérité en peinture, 291–436. [“Restitutions of Truth to Size,” Research in Phenomenology 8 (1978): 1–44; rpt. in The Truth in Painting, 255–382.] La Vérité en peinture (Paris: Flammarion, 1978). [The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). Includes “Passe Partout,” 1–13; “Parergon,” 15–147 (first published in October 9 (1979): 3–40); “+ R (Into the Bargain),” 149–82; “Cartouches,” 183–253; “R e st i tu t i on s,” 255–382. Excerpts published in Art & Design 4:3–4, “The New Modernism: Deconstructionist Tendencies in Art” (1988): 19–25.] [Translations: Italian, Serbo-Croatian, German, Japanese, Spanish; partial translations: German, Italian, Spanish, Finnish, Hungarian.] “Ce qui reste à force de musique,” Digraphe 18–19, special issue devoted to Roger Laporte (April 1979): 165–74; rpt. in Psyché. Inventions de l’autre (Paris: Galilée, 1987), 95– 103; rpt. in Psyché. Inventions de l’autre, vol. 1 (Paris: Galilée, 1998), 95–103). [“What Remains by Force of Music,” trans. Peggy Kamuf, in Psyche: Inventions of the Other, vol. 1, ed. Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), 81–89.] “Les morts de Roland Barthes,” Poétique 47 (Paris: Seuil, September 1981): 269–92; rpt. in Psyché, 273–304; rpt. in Psyché, vol. 1, 273–304, and in Chaque fois unique, la fin  du  monde, ed. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Paris: Galilée, 2003), 59–97. [“The Deaths of Roland Barthes,” trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas, in Jacques Derrida: The Work of Mourning, ed. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 31–67; also in Psyche 1, 264– 98; early version of the translation in Continental Philosophy 1 (1987): 259–96; rpt. in Philosophy and Non-philosophy since Merleau-Ponty, ed. Hugh J. Silverman (New York: Routledge, 1988; Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1997), 259–96.] [Translations: Spanish, German, Brazilian, Italian.]

Bib l io g r a p h y on t h e A rt s a n d A rc h i t e c t u r e | 281 “Lecture,” in Marie-Françoise Plissart, Droit de regards (Paris: Minuit, 1985), i–xxxvi; rpt. Brussels: Les Impressions nouvelles, 2010, i–xlviii. [Right of Inspection, trans. David Wills (New York: Monacelli Press, 1998). First published in Art & Text 32 (1989): 19–97.] [Translations: German, Japanese, Korean.] “Des tours de Babel,” in Difference in Translation, bilingual edition, ed. Joseph F. Graham (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 165–207, followed by an appendix (in the French version), 209–48; and in L’Art des confins. Mélanges offerts à Maurice de Gandillac, ed. Annie Cazenave and Jean-François Lyotard (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1985), 209–37; rpt. in Psyché, 203–35; rpt. in Psyché, vol. 1, 203–35, and in Semeia 54 (1991): 3–34 [“Des tours de Babel,” trans. Joseph F. Graham, in Difference in Translation, ed. Joseph Graham (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 191–225; also in Psyché 1, 191–225, and in Jacques Derrida: Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar (New York: Routledge, 2002), 102–34.] [Translations: German, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian.] “Préjugés—Devant la loi,” in Jacques Derrida, Vincent Descombes et al., La Faculté de juger (Paris: Colloque de Cerisy and Minuit, 1985), 87–139. [“Before the Law,” trans. Avital Ronell and Christine Roulston, in Jacques Derrida: Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (London: Routledge, 1992), 181–220. An earlier version of the essay was translated by Avital Ronell and published as “Devant la loi,” in Kafka and the Contemporary Critical Performance: Centenary Readings, ed. Alan Udoff (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987). Part of the French text first published as “Devant la loi,” in Philosophy and Literature, ed. A. Phillips Griffiths (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 173– 88. The extended text was published as “Préjugés: Devant la loi” in the conference volume.] [Translations: German, Swedish, Italian, Spanish.] et al., Épreuves d’écriture, written for the exhibition “Les Immatériaux” by Jean-François Lyotard and Thierry Chaput, 28 March–15 July 1985, at the Centre GeorgePompidou; catalogue Les Immatériaux (Paris: Éditions du Centre GeorgesPompidou, 1985). Partial publication in the Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger 2, special issue “Derrida” (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, April– June 1990): 269–84, and in Jacques Derrida, Les Arts de l’espace. Écrits et interventions sur l’architecture, ed. Ginette Michaud and Joana Masó, in collaboration with Cosmin Popovici-Toma (Paris: Éditions de la Différence, 2015), 21–24. [Translation: Italian.] “Forcener le subjectile,” in Paule Thévenin, Antonin Artaud. Dessins et portraits (Paris: Gallimard, 1986), 55–108. [“Maddening the Subjectile,” trans. Mary Ann Caws, Yale French Studies 84: “Boundaries: Writing & Drawing” (1994): 154–71; revised as “To Unsense the Subjectile,” trans. Mary Ann Caws, in Jacques Derrida and Paule Thévenin, The Secret Art of Antonin Artaud, trans. Mary Ann Caws (Cambridge: MIT Press,

282 | Bibl io gr a ph y on t h e A rt s a n d A rchit e c t u r e 1998), 59–157. Also in an excerpted German-English bilingual edition as “Forcing the Subjectile,” trans. Kirsten Kramer, in Paper Art 6—Dekonstruktivistische Tendenzen / Deconstructivist Tendencies (Ausstellungskatalog, Leopold-HoeschMuseum, Düren), ed. Dorothea Eimert (Ostfildern: Cantz, 1996), 52–61.] [Translations: German, Spanish, Japanese, Italian, Portuguese.] Schibboleth—Pour Paul Celan (Paris: Galilée, 1986); rpt. Paris: Galilée, 2003. [“Shibboleth: For Paul Celan,” trans. Joshua Wilner, rev. Thomas Dutoit, in Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan, ed. Thomas Dutoit and Outi Pasanen (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 1–64. Wilner’s translation first appeared in Word Traces: Readings of Paul Celan, ed. Aris Fioretos (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 3–72; a shorter version of this translation was published in Midrash and Literature, ed. Geoffrey H. Hartman and Sanford Budick (New York: Yale University Press, 1986), 307–47.] [Translations: German, Swedish, Japanese, Dutch, Romanian (partial), Italian, Polish, Spanish, Russian, Chinese.] A “Point de folie—Maintenant l’architecture,” bilingual ed., trans. Kate Linker, in Bernard Tschumi, La Case vide. La Villette (1985) (London: Architectural Association, Folio VIII, 1986), 4–19; rpt. in Psyché, 477–93 (rpt. in Psyché. Inventions de l’autre, vol. 2 (Paris: Galilée, 2003), 91–105.) [“No (Point of) Madness—Maintaining Architecture,” trans. Kate Linker, in AA Files 12 (Summer 1986): 65–75; rpt. in Psyche: Inventions of the Other, vol. 2, ed. Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), 87–103.] [Translations: Arabic (partial), Japanese, Dutch, Portuguese, Russian, Italian, German, Bulgarian.] “L’aphorisme à contretemps,” in Psyché, 519–33; rpt. in Psyché, vol. 2, 131–44. [First published in Roméo et Juliette (Paris: Papiers, 1986), written for a production of Romeo and Juliet by Daniel Mesguich at the Théâtre Gérard-Philippe de Saint-Denis.] [“Aphorism Countertime,” trans. Nicholas Royle, in Psyche 2, 127–42; first published in Jacques Derrida: Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (London: Routledge, 1992), 414–34.] A “Pourquoi Peter Eisenman écrit de si bons livres” (1987), in Psyché, 495–508; rpt. in Psyché, vol. 2, 107–19. [“Why Peter Eisenman Writes Such Good Books,” trans. Sarah Whiting, in Psyche 1, 104–16; first published in English for the Japanese journal Architecture and Urbanism, ed. Toshio Nakamura (Tokyo, Autumn 1988): 113–24; and in Threshold: Journal of the School of Architecture 4 (University of Illinois at Chicago, Spring 1988): 99–105.] [Translation: Spanish.] A “Cinquante-deux aphorismes pour un avant-propos,” in Psyché, 509–18; rpt. in Psyché, vol. 2, 121–30). [Originally published as a preface to Mesure pour Mesure: Architecture et philosophie, a

Bib l io g r a p h y on t h e A rt s a n d A rc h i t e c t u r e | 283 special issue of the Cahiers du CCI (Paris: Éditions du Centre Georges-Pompidou and Centre de création industrielle) in 1987 (“a first report of the work done between 1984 and 1986 at the initiative of the Collège International de Philosophie and the Centre de Création Industrielle”).] [“Fifty-Two Aphorisms for a Foreword,” trans. Andrew Benjamin, in Deconstruction: Omnibus Volume, ed. Andreas Papadakis, Catherine Cooke, and Andrew Benjamin (New York: Rizzoli, 1989), 67–69; rpt., slightly modified, in Psyche 2, 117–26.] Feu la cendre, lu par l’auteur et Carole Bouquet (Paris: Des femmes—Antoinette Fouque, 1987). [Reading recorded (76 min) by Michelle Muller.] [Cinders, trans. Ned Lukacher (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991).] “Chôra,” in Poikilia. Études offertes à Jean-Pierre Vernant (Paris: Éditions de l’École des hautes études en sciences sociales, 1987), 265–96; rpt. as Khôra (Paris: Galilée, 1993). [“Kho¯ra,” trans. Ian McLeod, in On the Name, ed. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), 87–127.] [Translations: Russian, German, Brazilian, Italian, Romanian, Russian, Polish, Greek, Turkish.] A Jacques Derrida and Peter Eisenman, “Œuvre chorale,” trans. Jayne Merkel, in ParcVille Villette, ed. Isabelle Auricoste and Hubert Tonka (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, Série Architecture 5, 1987), 30–35; rpt. Paris: Éditions du Demi-Cercle, 1989. “In memoriam: de l’âme,” in Mémoires—Pour Paul de Man (Paris: Galilée, 1988), 13–19; rpt. in Chaque fois unique, la fin du monde, 101–6. [“In Memoriam: Of the Soul,” trans. Kevin Newmark, in Memoires for Paul de Man (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), xv–xx; also in Jacques Derrida: The Work of Mourning, 69–75. First published in Yale French Studies 69 (1985): 323–26.] [Translations: German, Spanish, Italian, Chinese, Polish (partial).] Mémoires d’aveugle. L’autoportrait et autres ruines (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 1990). [Jacques Derrida was the curator of the eponymous exhibition presented in the Hall Napoléon of the Louvre, 26 October 1990–21 January 1991.] [Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). A selection published as “Memories of a Blind Man,” Art International 14 (Spring/Summer 1991): 82–87.] [Translations: German, Japanese, Polish, Italian, Portuguese.] Qu’est-ce que la poésie?, with Wanda Mihuleac, quadrilingual ed. (Berlin: Brinkmann & Bose, 1991); rev. ed., in collaboration with W. Mihuleac (Paris: Signum, 1997). [“Che cos’è la poesia?,” in Points . . . Interviews, 1974–1994, ed. Elisabeth Weber, trans. Peggy Kamuf et al. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 288–99. First published in Poesia 1:11 (November 1988): 5–10; rpt. in Po&sie 50 (Autumn 1989): 109–12 [trans. into Italian by Maurizio Ferraris]; trans. Peggy

284 | Bibl io gr a ph y on t h e A rt s a n d A rchit e c t u r e Kamuf, first appeared in A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds, ed. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 221–37.] Circonfession lu par l’auteur (Paris: Des femmes—Antoinette Fouque, 1993). [A solo reading of the whole text by Jacques Derrida (4-tape boxed set, 5-CD boxed set), recorded by Michelle Muller, with music pieces (The Sacred Bridge, The Boston Camerata, conducted by Joel Cohen [Erato], and La Musique de la Bible révélée, by Suzanne Haïk Vantoura [Harmonia Mundi]) in a sound staging by Marie-Louise Mallet.] [See also “Circumfession,” in Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida, Jacques Derrida, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 3–315.] Back cover in Colette Deblé, Lumière de l’air (Creil: Éditions Bernard Dumerchez; Paris: L’Arbre Voyageur éditeur, 1993). “À force de deuil” (1993), in Chaque fois unique, la fin du monde, 175–204. [Lecture given at the Centre Georges-Pompidou in Paris, 28 January 1993, on the occasion of the publication of Louis Marin’s Des pouvoirs de l’image. Gloses (Paris: Seuil, 1993).] [“By Force of Mourning,” trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas, in Jacques Derrida: The Work of Mourning, 139–64; first published in Critical Inquiry 22:2 (Winter 1996): 171–92; rpt. in Signature Derrida, ed. Jay Williams (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 326–49.] [Translation: German.] Échographies—de la télévision. Entretiens filmés, with Bernard Stiegler (Paris: Galilée and Institut national de l’audiovisuel (INA), 1996). [Echographies of Television: Filmed Interviews, trans. Jennifer Bajorek (Cambridge: Polity, 2002).] [Translations: Italian, Greek, Spanish, Korean, German, Romanian.] “Demeure, Athènes. Nous nous devons à la mort,” photographs by Jean-François Bonhomme, in Athènes à l’ombre de l’Acropole, bilingual ed., Greek trans. Vanghélis Bitsoris (Athens: Olkos, 1996); rpt. as Demeure, Athènes, photographs by J.-F. Bonhomme (Paris: Galilée, 2009). An excerpt from Demeure, Athènes is quoted in Catherine Malabou and Jacques Derrida, La Contre-Allée. Voyager avec Jacques Derrida (Paris: La Quinzaine Littéraire–Louis Vuitton, 1999), 197–99 (short quotations also on pp. 89, 125). [Athens, Still Remains, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010). An excerpt was first published in Catherine Malabou and Jacques Derrida, Counterpath: Traveling with Jacques Derrida, trans. David Wills (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 103–108.] [Translations: German, Japanese.] “Lignées,” in Mille e tre, cinq, with Micaëla Henich (Bordeaux: William Blake & Co. Édit., 1996). [Prepublication in Noise 17 (Paris: Éditions Maeght, 1992): pp. 24–29 (drawings 822– 33 by Micaëla Henich, text by Jacques Derrida); also, with texts by Dominique Fourcade, “Vergissmeinnicht” (drawings 1–9 by M. H.), pp. 211–20, and by

Bib l io g r a p h y on t h e A rt s a n d A rc h i t e c t u r e | 285 Jacques Roubaud, “200 Flèches” (drawings 201–9 by M. H.), pp. 221–30, in Le Genre humain 24–25: “Fini & Infini” (Paris: Seuil, 1992): pp. 231–40 (drawings 801–9 by M. H.); and twelve drawings in Nioques 5 (Paris: Éditions La Sétérée, June 1992) with a text by Jacques Derrida.] Erradid, with Wanda Mihuleac (Paris: Galerie La Hune Brenner, 1996). Chora L Works: Jacques Derrida and Peter Eisenman, ed. Jeffrey Kipnis and Thomas Leeser (New York: Monacelli Press, 1997). [The conversation of Jacques Derrida with Jeffrey Kipnis titled “Afterword” has been translated into French by Cosmin Popovici-Toma and published as “Postface à Chora L Works. Entretien avec Jeffrey Kipnis,” in Les Arts de l’espace, 312–34.] “Comme s’il y avait un art de la signature . . . ,” in Michel Servière, Le Sujet de l’art (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1997), 5–7; rpt. in Chaque fois unique, la fin du monde, 171–73. [“As if there were an art of the signature,” trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas, in Jacques Derrida: The Work of Mourning, 135–37.] [Translations: German, Italian, Japanese, Spanish.] Enlouquecer o Subjétil [Forcener le subjectile], with paintings, drawings, and textual cutups by Lena Bergstein, Portuguese trans. Geraldo Gerson de Souza, rev. Anamaria Skinner (São Paulo: AE / Ateliê Editorial Ltda, Imprensa Oficial do Estado, Fundação Editora da UNESP, 1998). Donner la mort (Paris: Galilée, 1999). [Derrida comments on Rembrandt’s etchings.] [The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); later reedited as The Gift of Death, Second Edition, and Literature in Secret (2008).] [Translations: Spanish, Italian, Japanese, Slovenian, Hebrew, Dutch, Estonian, Korean.] Or, with Wanda Mihuleac (Paris: Signum, 2000). Tourner les mots. Au bord d’un film, with Safaa Fathy (Paris: Galilée and ARTE Éditions, 2000). [Includes “Lettre sur un aveugle. Punctum caecum,” 71–126.] [Translations: Italian (partial), Japanese, Spanish, German.] Le Schibboleth. Pour Paul Celan, with six lithographs and three monotypes by Michèle Katz (Nantes: Éditions La Marelle and Éditions du Petit Jaunais (for the lithographs), 2000). [One hundred signed copies, on Velin Royal paper from Lana, monotypes on Japico Japanese paper, case bound by the Ateliers Dermont-Duval, 32 x 25 x 2 cm.] “Fuser en bombe: Artaud plastiqueur des musées d’art plastiques,” in Plasticité, ed. Catherine Malabou (Paris: Léo Scheer, 2000), 71–95; rpt. in Artaud le Moma. Interjections d’appel (Paris: Galilée, 2002). “Tête-à-tête,” in the catalogue Camilla Adami, French-Italian bilingual ed. (Milan: Edizioni Gabriele Mazzotta, 2001), 5–15; rpt. in Travioles 7–8 (Paris: Winter–Spring 2002): 84–96; and in the catalogue Camilla Adami. L’ange déchu, exhibition 27 March–16 May 2004, texts by Vincent Crapanzano, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-Jacques Lebel, preface by Robert Bonaccorsi (La Seyne-sur-Mer: Villa Tamaris centre d’art, 2004), 39–59.

286 | Bibl io gr a ph y on t h e A rt s a n d A rchit e c t u r e “[Untitled ],” in La connaissance des textes. Lecture d’un manuscrit illisible (Correspondances), with Jean-Luc Nancy and Simon Hantaï (Paris: Galilée, 2001), 143–56. [Translation: Hungarian.] Artaud le Moma. Interjections d’appel (Paris: Galilée, 2002). [Artaud the Moma, ed. Kaira M. Cabañas, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017).] [Translations: German, Italian.] [14 untitled fragments], in Frédéric Brenner, Diaspora. Terres natales de l’exil. vol. 2, Voix (Paris: Éditions de La Martinière, 2003), 17, 19, 21, 35, 51, 63, 65, 67, 81, 83, 91, 101, 103, 110–11. [Diaspora: Homelands in Exile, vol. 2: Voices, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Harper Collins, 2003), 17, 19, 21, 35, 51, 63, 65, 67, 81, 83, 91, 101, 103, 110–11).] A Jacques Derrida. Adesso l’architettura, ed. Francesco Vitale, Italian translation of the texts in French under the supervision of F. Vitale; Italian translation of the texts in English under the supervision of Hosea Scelza (Milan: Libri Scheiwiller, 2008). Copy, Archive, Signature: A Conversation on Photography. Interview by Hubertus von Amelunxen and Michael Wetzel, trans. Jeff Fort, ed. Gerhard Richter (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010). Pensar em não ver. Escritos sobre as artes do visível (1979–2004), ed. Ginette Michaud, Joana Masó, and Javier Bassas, trans. into Brazilian by Marcelo Jacques de Moraes, rev. João Camillo Penna (Florianópolis: Editora da UFSC (Press of the Federal University of Santa Catarina), 2012). Artes de lo visible (1979–2004), ed. Ginette Michaud, Joana Masó, and Javier Bassas, trans. into Spanish by Joana Masó and Javier Bassas (Castellón: Ellago Ediciones, 2013). Penser à ne pas voir. Écrits sur les arts du visible (1979–2004), ed. Ginette Michaud, Joana Masó, and Javier Bassas (Paris: Éditions de la Différence, 2013). À dessein, le dessin, followed by Derrida, à l’improviste, by Ginette Michaud (Le Havre: Franciscopolis Éditions, 2013). With a downloadable sound recording. [Translations: Portuguese, Spanish, Italian.] Trace et archive, image et art, followed by Pour Jacques Derrida, by Daniel Bougnoux and Bernard Stiegler. Foreword by François Soulages (Paris: INA Éditions, 2014). A Les Arts de l’espace. Écrits et interventions sur l’architecture, ed. Ginette Michaud and Joana Masó, in collaboration with Cosmin Popovici-Toma (Paris: Éditions de la Différence, 2015). Pensare al non vedere. Scritti sulle arti del visibile, 1979–2004, ed. Ginette Michaud, Joana Masó, and Javier Bassas, preface and trans. into Italian by Alfonso Cariolato (Milan: Jaca Book, 2016).

(B) Articles A “Séquence 2—Scène 2,” conversation with Peter Eisenman on Roméo et Juliette for the Third International Biennale of Architecture, 8 November 1985; published

Bib l io g r a p h y on t h e A rt s a n d A rc h i t e c t u r e | 287 in Cahiers du CCI 1: Architecture: récits, figures, fictions (Paris: Éditions du Centre Georges-Pompidou and Centre de création industrielle, 1986), 53–54; rpt. in Les Arts de l’espace, 62–69. [Translation: Italian.] A “Maintenant l’architecture,” trans. into Italian by Marisa Ronc, in La Città e le forme, proceedings of the symposium Città: forma e significato (December 1985), ed. Gabriella Belli and Franco Rella (Milan: Nuove edizioni Gabriele Mazzotta, 1987), 99– 106; rpt. in Jacques Derrida. Adesso l’architettura, 113–27, and translated into French by Cosmin Popovici-Toma as “Maintenant l’architecture. Conférence donnée au Palazzo delle Albere, Musée d’art de la province de Trente (1985),” in Les Arts de l’espace, 47–61. A “A Letter to Peter Eisenman,” trans. Hilary P. Hanel, in Assemblage: A Critical Journal of Architecture and Design Culture 12 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, August 1990): 7–13; published in French as “Barbaries et papiers de verre ou La petite monnaie de l’‘actuel’. Lettre à un architecte américain (fragment),” Rue Descartes 10: “Modernités esthétiques” (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, June 1994): 33–45; rpt. in Les Arts de l’espace, 100–116. [See also Peter Eisenman’s response: “Poste/El Cards: A Reply to Jacques Derrida,” Assemblage 12 (August 1990): 14–17. Translated into French by Cosmin PopoviciToma as “Cartes post/el/les. Réponse à Jacques Derrida,” in Les Arts de l’espace, 117–24.] [Translations: German, Italian.] A “Générations d’une ville: mémoire, prophétie, responsabilités,” in Prague. Avenir d’une ville historique capitale. Actes d’un colloque tenu à Prague du 11 au 13 mars 1991, ed. Alena Novotná Galard and Petr Kratochvíl (La Tour-d’Aigues: Éditions de l’Aube; Paris: Association pour la communauté culturelle européenne, Série Nouveaux cahiers, 1992), 39–53; “Générations d’une ville,” in Lettre internationale 33 (Paris: Aujourd’hui international, Summer 1992): 23–27; rpt. in Les Arts de l’espace, 125–39. [Translations: German, Spanish, Italian.] A “Faxitexture,” trans. Laura Bourland, Anywhere 2 (New York: Rizzoli International, 1992): 18–33; Noise 18–19: “La ville” (Paris: Éditions Maeght, 1994): 5–13; rpt. in Exposé. Revue d’esthétique et d’art contemporain 2: “Pertes d’inscription” (Orléans: Éditions ZYX, 1995): 98–110; and in Les Arts de l’espace, 265–94. [Translations: Japanese, Italian.] “Signaux lumineux / Luminous signs,” in Les Artistes du Monde contre l’Apartheid, Art contre Apartheid. 78 artistes des années 80 / Art Against Apartheid. 78 Artists from the 80’s, Association française d’action artistique (Paris: Ministère des Affaires étrangères, 1995), 8–9 and 10–11. [This volume also contains “Le dernier mot du racisme” (1983), 48–53; “Racism’s Last Word,” trans. Peggy Kamuf, 54–59 (originally published in Critical Inquiry 12 (1985): 290–99; rpt. in Psyche 1, 377–86, and in Signature Derrida, 52–62). Jacques Derrida co-organized in 1983 the exhibition “Art contre Apartheid”

288 | Bibl io gr a ph y on t h e A rt s a n d A rchit e c t u r e with the artists Ernest Pignon-Ernest and Antonio Saura, and the writers Jorge Amado, André Brink, Michel Butor, Allen Ginsberg, and Michel Leiris, among others. This exhibition gathered 78 artists, an initiative aimed at the creation of the Fondation culturelle contre l’Apartheid and the writers’ committee Pour Nelson Mandela. The exhibition was shown thirteen years later, in 1996, in South Africa.] “.  .  .  .  .  .  .” [Untitled ], in Les Cahiers du Grif, nouvelle série, 3: “Sarah Kofman” (Paris: Descartes, 1997): 131–65; rpt. in a shorter version in Chaque fois unique, la fin du monde, 205–32. [Jacques Derrida comments on Rembrandt’s La Leçon d’anatomie du docteur Nicolas Tulp (1632).] [Published as “Introduction,” trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas, in Selected Writings: Sarah Kofman, ed. Thomas Albrecht, with Georgia Albert and Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), i–xxxiv. An excerpt was published in Jacques Derrida: The Work of Mourning, 165–88.] “Joue—le prénom,” in Les Inrockuptibles 115 (20 August–2 September 1997): 41–42. [“Play—The First Name,” trans. Timothy S. Murphy, Genre 36 (Summer 2004): 331–40.] “Corona Vitae (fragments),” in Granel. L’éclat, le combat, l’ouvert, ed. Jean-Luc Nancy and Elisabeth Rigal (Paris: Belin, 2001), 137–88; rpt. in Chaque fois unique, la fin du monde, 291–319. “Cette nuit dans la nuit de la nuit . . . ,” Rue Descartes 42 (November 2003): 112–27. [Response, at the Collège international de philosophie, to Marie-Louise Mallet’s La Musique en respect, 1 February 2003.] “Comment ne pas trembler?,” Annali della Fondazione Europea del Designo (Fondation Adami) (Milan: Bruno Mondadori Editori), vol. 2: “Ekphrasis” (2006): 91–104. [Transcription by Simone Regazzoni; in the same issue, see Jacques Derrida and Édouard Glissant, “Fragments d’une discussion,” 105ff.]

(C) Interviews A “Labyrinth und Archi/Textur. Ein Gespräch mit Jacques Derrida,” interview by Eva Meyer, conducted in Paris, February 1984, in Das Abenteuer der Ideen. Architektur und Philosophie seit der industriellen Revolution (Internationale Bauausstellung, Berlin, 1987) (Berlin: Frölich & Kaufmann, 1984), 95–106; translated into French by Cosmin Popovici-Toma as “Labyrinthe et archi/texture. Entretien avec Eva Meyer,” in Les Arts de l’espace, 25–46. A shorter version appeared as “Jacques Derrida: Architettura ove il desiderio può abitare,” Domus 671 (April 1986): 17–24. [The shorter version was published as “Architecture Where Desire Can Live,” in Theorizing a New Agenda for Architecture: An Anthology of Architectural Theory, 1965–1995, ed. Kate Nesbitt (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996), 142–49; rpt. as “Architecture Where the Desire May Live,” in Rethinking Ar-

Bib l io g r a p h y on t h e A rt s a n d A rc h i t e c t u r e | 289 chitecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory, ed. Neil Leach (New York: Routledge, 1997), 301–5.] [Translations: German, Italian, Russian, Spanish, Brazilian.] A “Artists, Philosophers and Institutions. A Talk with Jacques Derrida,” in Rampike (Toronto) 3:3 and 4:1, special double issue, “Institutions, Anti-institutions” (1984– 1985): 34–36. “Artaud et ses doubles,” interview by Jean-Michel Olivier, in Scènes Magazine 5 (Geneva, February 1987): 30–33. A “Fragments of a Conversation with Jacques Derrida,” interview by Gianmarco Vergani, Peter Shinoda, and David Kesler, in Precis: The Journal of The Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation 6: “The Culture of Fragments” (New York: Columbia University, 1987): 48–49. [Translation: Italian.] A “Le philosophe et les architectes,” interview by Hélène Viale, in Diagonal 73 (Paris: Ministère de l’Équipement et du Logement, August 1988): 37–39; rpt. in Les Arts de l’espace, pp. 93–99. [Translations: Italian, German.] A “In Discussion with Christopher Norris,” video-interview conducted in March 1988, Architectural Design Profile 77, “Deconstruction II,” published in Architectural Design 59:1–2 (London: Academy Editions, 1989): 6–11; rpt. in Deconstruction: Omnibus Volume, ed. Andreas Papadakis, Catherine Cooke, and Andrew Benjamin (London: Academy Editions; New York: Rizzoli, 1989), 71–75. Translated into French by Philippe Romanski and published as “Architecture et déconstruction. Entretien avec Jacques Derrida,” in Derrida et la question de l’art. Déconstructions de l’esthétique, ed. Adnen Jdey (Nantes: Éditions Cécile Defaut, 2011), 479–99; rpt. in Les Arts de l’espace, 70–92. [Translation: Italian.] “[Réponse à L’Effet Godard ],” in L’Effet Godard, ed. Carole Desbarats and Jean-Paul Gorce (Toulouse: Éditions Milan, 1989), 110. [Response to the question: “Do you believe that Jean-Luc Godard’s work has had an impact on your own work or your imagination? (Croyez-vous que l’œuvre de Jean-Luc Godard ait exercé une influence sur votre propre travail ou encore sur votre imaginaire?).”] “Accecato di fronte al disegno,” interview by Luciana Mottola Colban, Il Giornale dell’Arte 82 (Turin: Umberto Allemandi, October 1990): 11–12. [Translation: English.] A “Summary of Impromptu Remarks” and “‘Discussion[s]’ ‘A-1,’ ‘A-2,’ ‘A-3,’” in Anyone, ed. Cynthia C. Davidson and Jeffrey Kipnis (New York: Rizzoli International, 1991), 38–45, 78–93, 164–71, and 240–41. Translated into French by Cosmin Popovici-Toma as “Résumé des remarques impromptues (58 min 41 sec),” in Les Arts de l’espace, 171–209. [Translation: Italian.] A “The Berlin City Forum,” excerpts from a conversation with Kurt Foster, Akira Asida,

290 | Bibl io gr a ph y on t h e A rt s a n d A rchit e c t u r e Wim Wenders, et al., videotaped on the occasion of the Berlin City Stadtforum Symposium in Berlin, August 1991; published in Architectural Design Profile 62:11– 12, “Theory & Experimentation. Architectural Ideas for Today and Tomorrow” (London: Academy Editions, 1992): 46–53. Translated into French by Cosmin Popovici-Toma as “Le forum de la ville de Berlin. Entretien avec Kurt Foster, Akira Asada et Wim Wenders,” in Les Arts de l’espace, 210–31. [Translation: Italian.] A “Response to Daniel Libeskind,” followed by “Discussion” with Daniel Libeskind, Jeffrey Kipnis, and Catherine Ingraham, in Research in Phenomenology 22:1, “Deconstruction and the Architecture of the Uncanny” (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1992): 88–94 and 95–102. [See also Daniel Libeskind, “Between the Lines: The Jewish Museum, Berlin,” in the same issue (82–87) and “Jacques Derrida on ‘Between the Lines’: Discussion,” in Daniel Libeskind, radix-matrix: Architecture and Writings (Munich: PrestelVerlag, 1997), 110–15. Both texts translated into French by Cosmin PopoviciToma in Les Arts de l’espace, 140–47 and 148–59, and “Discussion,” 160–70.] [Translations: German, Italian.] A “Jacques Derrida: Invitation to a Discussion,” interview by Mark Wigley (moderator), in Columbia Documents of Architecture and Theory (D), vol. 1 (New York: Columbia University, 1992), 7–27. Translated into French by Cosmin Popovici-Toma as “Invitation à la discussion,” in Les Arts de l’espace, 232–56. [Translation: Italian.] “L’atelier de Valerio Adami: Le tableau est avant tout un système de mémoire,” roundtable with Jean Borreil, Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Michel Deguy, Jacques Derrida, Marc Le Bot, Alfred Pacquement, Pierre Zarcate, and Maurice Matieu, transcription by Armelle Auris, photographs by François Boissonnet, Rue Descartes 4, “Le théologico-politique” (Paris: Albin Michel, 1992): 143–61; rpt. in Ateliers I. Esthétique de l’écart, ed. J. Borreil and M. Matieu, transcription by A. Auris, photographs by F. Boissonnet (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1994), 171–209. A “Talking about Writing,” interview by Peter Eisenman, in ANY: Architecture New York 1:0 (New York: Anyone Corporation, May–June 1993): 18–21. Translated into French by Cosmin Popovici-Toma as “Eisenman et Derrida: parler d’écrire,” in Les Arts de l’espace, 296–311. [Translation: Italian.] “Derrida. La déconstruction de l’actualité,” interview by Brigitte Sohm, Cristina de Peretti, Stéphane Douailler, Patrice Vermeren, and Émile Malet, in Passages 57 (September 1993): 60–75; excerpted version reprinted under the title “Artefactualités,” in Échographies—de la télévision, 11–35. [“Artifactualities,” in Echographies of Television, 1–27.] A “Déconstruction—Architecture. Table ronde de Madrid.” Transcription of a roundtable on “La deconstruccción y la arquitectura” organized by the group “Debates urbanos” and the Faculty of Philosophy of the Université nationale d’enseignement à

Bib l io g r a p h y on t h e A rt s a n d A rc h i t e c t u r e | 291 distance (UNED), which took place on 23 April 1997; ed. and published in Les Arts de l’espace, 335–58. “La langue de l’autre,” interview with Ornette Coleman by Jacques Derrida, with Thierry Jousse and Geneviève Pereygne, 23 June 1997. Translated into French by Sylvie Finkelstein in Les Inrockuptibles 115 (20 August–2 September 1997): 37–40, 43. [“The Other’s Language: Jacques Derrida Interviews Ornette Coleman, 23 June 1997,” trans. Timothy S. Murphy, Genre 36 (Summer 2004): 319–29.] [Translation: German.] “Le musicien, le philosophe et les fanatiques,” with Philippe Carles, Jazz Magazine 473 (September 1997): 26–28. “Derrida évoque Artaud,” interview by Pierre Barbencey, regards.fr, 1 September 1997, http:// www .regards .fr/ acces - payant/ archives - web/ jacques - derrida - evoque -artaud,627. “Die Fotografie als Kopie, Archiv und Signatur” (1992), interview by Hubertus von Amelunxen and Michael Wetzel, in Theorie der Fotografie IV: 1980–1995, ed. Hubertus von Amelunxen (Munich: Schirmer & Mosel, 2000), 280–96; excerpts in Spanish as “La fotografía: copia, archivo, firma. Entrevista con Jacques Derrida,” trans. Ana Useros, Minerva 7 (Madrid: Círculo de Bellas Artes, Spring 2008): 81–87. [Translation: English (see Copy, Archive, Signature above).] “Artaud, oui . . . Entretien avec Évelyne Grossman,” Europe 873–874, “Antonin Artaud” (January–February 2002): 23–38. “Les voix d’Artaud (la force, la forme, la forge),” interview by Évelyne Grossman, in Magazine littéraire 434 (September 2004): 34–36. [Translation: Spanish.] “Derrida on Derrida—Q and A with Jacques Derrida [Film Forum, New York City, Oct. 23, 2002, 9:30 PM],” in Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering Kofman, Screenplay and Essays on the Film “Derrida,” (New York: Routledge, 2005), 110–17.

Filmography

A single asterisk* is used for unavailable video recordings whose references were found on the internet, in bibliographies, and in library catalogues. A double asterisk** is used for broadcasts found on the Inathèque’s website, which features a “catalogue [that] gives access to radio and television records archived from 1995 onward by the Institut national de l’audiovisuel as per the required legal deposit. The online databases provide a simplified description of these programs” (from the catalogue’s home page). We reproduce these records in part, as well as the documents’ numbers (INA call number). References that are not preceded by an asterisk have been verified (viewed documents). As in the bibliography, references preceded by an “A” pertain to architecture. Last, several video recordings are available as part of Jacques Derrida’s archives, deposited at the University of California, Irvine (“Jacques Derrida Papers. MS-C01. Special Collections and Archives: The UC Irvine Libraries, Irvine, California”). A descriptive summary is available online at: http:// hydra.humanities.uci.edu/derrida/uci.html. Marie-Joëlle Saint-Louis Savoie

* Ghost Dance. A film by Ken McMullen (director). Looseyard Productions for Channel 4 and Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen (ZDF). Great Britain and West Germany. 1983. 94 min. * L’Appel du Silence. A film by Philippe Alfonsi (director). Broadcast 1 December 1983 on Résistances (Art Against Apartheid ). Antenne 2. France. * Caryl Chessman. L’Écriture contre la mort. A film by Jean-Christophe Rosé (director). Jacques Derrida and Caryl Chessman (authors). INA for TF1. Ministère de la Culture. France. 1986. 56 min.

294 | Fil mo g r a ph y * Big Words . . . Small Worlds. A film by Ian Potts (director). Written and narrated by David Lodge. Broken English, Great Britain. 1987. 64 min. Available via the “Keywords Project” website (University of Pittsburgh/Jesus College, University of Cambridge): http://keywords.pitt.edu/videos/video_6.html. * Disturbance (among the jars). A multimedia installation by Gary Hill, with the participation of Jacques Derrida. Commissioned by the Musée national d’art moderne, Paris, and the Centre Georges-Pompidou. France. 1988. * “Jacques Derrida.” In Réflexions faites, by Philippe Collin (director). Hosted by Didier Éribon. Coproduction GMT Productions and La Sept, France. 1990. 55 min. [With Geoffrey Bennington, Hélène Cixous, René Major, Gérard Titus-Carmel, and Gianni Vattimo.] Deconstructivist Architects. A film by Michael Blackwood (director). Written by Joseph Giovannini. Michael Blackwood Productions. 1989. 58 min. [Jacques Derrida speaks from 28 min 14 sec to 30 min 45 sec; 34 min 42 sec to 35 min 26 sec. Peter Eisenman, Daniel Libeskind, and Bernard Tschumi take part in the discussion.] Mémoires d’aveugle. A video by Jean-Paul Fargier (director). Louvre Museum. Les Films d’Ici. France. 1990. 53 min. [Jacques Derrida comments on the exhibit and reads excerpts from Memoirs of the Blind and “Circumfession.”] * The Late Show. A roundtable on the work of Roland Barthes. Broadcast 5 April 1990 on the BBC. * “Jacques Derrida.” In Les Grands Entretiens. No. 14. TV FNAC. France. 1991. 72 min. * Jean Genet, l’écrivain (1944–1986). A film by Michel Dumoulin (director). La Sept and INA. France. 1992. 99 min. Talking Liberties: Jacques Derrida. A film by Alex Marengo (director). Interview by Alan Montefiore, in the series “Oxford Amnesty Lectures,” Wall to Wall Television for Channel Four, 1992; transcriptions published under the title “Jacques Derrida” in Talking Liberties, ed. Derek Jones and Rod Stoneman, London, Channel 4 Television, 1992, 6–9 and “‘Talking Liberties’: Jacques Derrida’s Interview with Alan Montefiore,” in Derrida & Education, ed. Gert J. J. Biesta and Denise Egea-Kuehne, London and New York: Routledge, 2001, 176–85. * Mémoire volontaire. A film by Jean-Christophe Rosé (director). Interview by Bernard Stiegler. December 1993. INA. France. 1994. 405 min. ** “Entretien avec Jacques Derrida.” In Le Cercle de minuit. Directed by Pierre Desfons. Hosted by Laure Adler. France 2. 1996. 76 min 45 sec. [No.: 288180.001; first broadcast 23 April 1996 on France 2.] * Jacques Derrida: Le Spectre de Marx. A film by Marie Mandy and André Louvet (directors). Saga Film. CSC Production. France. 1996. 28 min. Mémoire Moire des Souvenirs. A film by Lara Fitzgerald (director), based on Hélène Cixous’s writings. Les Films aux bords de l’abîme. Office national du film du Canada (ONF). Montreal (Canada). 1997. 53 min 34 sec. [With the participation of Anne-Marie Alonzo, Marie-Claire Blais, Monique Bosco,

Fi l mo g r a ph y | 295 Mireille Calle-Gruber, Hélène Cixous, Anne Hébert, Daniel Mesguich, Ariane Mnouchkine, and Lynn Penrod. Interventions by Jacques Derrida: 14 min 42 secs to 15 min 36 sec; 28 min 54 sec to 29 min 57 sec.] * “Ogród Sztuk—W stylu Derridy . . . Rozmowa z filozofem” [The Garden of Arts— Derrida’s style  .  .  . A conversation with the philosopher]. TV Polonia. Drecka, Kamila. 1997. * Si j’ose écrire. Directed by Jean-Charles L’Ami. Presented by Dolores Oscari. Producer Monique Hayoit. RTBF. Belgium. 1998. 60 min 20 sec. [First broadcast December 3, 1998 on La Deux (Belgium).] * Maurice Blanchot. A film by Hugo Santiago (director/scriptwriter) and Christophe Bident (scriptwriter). France 3 and INA. “Un siècle d’écrivains.” France. 1998. 57 min. D’ailleurs, Derrida. A film written and directed by Safaa Fathy. La Sept ARTE and Gloria Films. France. 1999. 67 min 57 sec. Also in English: Elsewhere Derrida. * Safaa Fathy Video Recordings of Jacques Derrida Lectures (2000–2004). MS-C014. Special Collections and Archives. University of California. Irvine Libraries, Irvine (CA). [This collection includes video recordings of a selection of public readings, conferences, panels, discussions, and ceremonies by Jacques Derrida from 2000 to 2004.] Jacques Lacan: la psychanalyse réinventée. A documentary by Élisabeth Kapnist. Written by Élisabeth Roudinesco and Élisabeth Kapnist. ARTE and INA. France. 2001. 62 min. [Interventions by Derrida: 41 min 48 sec to 42 min 53 sec; 56 min 51 sec to 57 min 56 sec.] ** “Victor Hugo.” In Culture et dépendances. Directed by Serge Khalfon. Hosted by Franz Olivier Giesbert. France 3. Futur TV and ATPF. France. 2001. 108 min 54 sec. [No.: 1869289.001; first broadcast 21 November 2001 on France 3.] ** “Spécial Derrida.” In Culture et dépendances. Directed by Jean Louis Cap. Hosted by Franz Olivier Giesbert. France 3, ATPF, and Futur TV. France. 2002. 97 min 53 sec. [No.: 2007821.001; first broadcast 22 May 2002 on France 3.] * Derrida. A film by Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering Kofman. Jane Doe Films. USA. 2002. 85 min. ** “Trace et archive, image et art.” Collège iconique. 25 June 2002. Paris, Institut national de l’audiovisuel (INA). 2002. ** “La guerre qui vient: 1ère partie.” In Le Monde des idées. Hosted by Edwy Plenel. La Chaîne Info. France. 2003. 15 min. [No.: 15244.036; first broadcast 8 February 2003 on LCI.] ** “La guerre qui vient: 2e partie.” In Le Monde des idées. Hosted by Edwy Plenel. La Chaîne Info. France. 2003. 23 min. [No.: 15244.038; first broadcast 8 February 2003 on LCI.] ** “Jacques Derrida: 1ère partie.” In Le Monde des idées. Hosted by Edwy Plenel. La Chaîne Info. France. 2004. 20 min. [No.: 36361.036; first broadcast 13 March 2004 on LCI.]

296 | Fil mo g r a ph y ** “Jacques Derrida: 2e partie.” In Le Monde des idées. Hosted by Edwy Plenel. La Chaîne Info. France. 2004. 20 min. [No.: 36361.038; first broadcast 13 March 2004 on LCI.] ** “L’angoisse du futur.” In Culture et dépendances. Directed by Jean Louis Cap. Hosted by Franz Olivier Giesbert. France 3, Futur TV, and ATPF (producers). France. 2004. 99 min 31 sec. [No.: 2596405.001; first broadcast 23 June 2004 on France 3.] Nom à la mer. A film by Safaa Fathy (director). France. 2004. 28 min 34 sec. [Jacques Derrida reads Safaa Fathy’s poems.] De tout cœur . . . A film by Safaa Fathy (director). France. 2005. 53 min 41 sec. [Includes Jacques Derrida’s Lettre ouverte pour la Palestine, Paris, March 2002; Jacques Derrida with Élisabeth Roudinesco, Librairie Kléber, Strasbourg, December 2001; Jacques Derrida with Jean-Luc Nancy, Reid Hall, Paris, February 2000.] Jacques Derrida, le courage de la pensée. A film by Virginie Linhart (director). Co-written by Virginie Linhart and Benoît Peeters. ARTE. 2014. 53 min. [First broadcast: ARTE, 8 October 2014.] Love in the Post: From Plato to Derrida. A film by Joanna Callaghan (director). Co-written by Joanna Callaghan and Martin McQuillan. Heraclitus Pictures, UK. 2014. 80 min. [This adaptation from the “Envois” section of Jacques Derrida’s The Post Card features interviews with Derrida and contributions from Geoffrey Bennington, J. Hillis Miller, Ellen Burt, and Catherine Malabou. See also Joanna Callaghan and Martin McQuillan, Love in the Post: From Plato to Derrida. The Screenplay and Commentary (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014).]

Notes on Editor s and T r ansl ator s

Jav ie r Ba s s a s is a philosopher and teaches translation theory at the University of Barcelona. He has translated and/or edited in Spanish books by Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Marion, Jean-Luc Nancy, Catherine Malabou, Michel Deguy, and Jacques Rancière, among others. He is the main editor of the “Pensamiento atiempo” series at Casus Belli (Madrid ) and, jointly with Joana Masó, of the “Ensayo” series at Ellago Ediciones in Spain. Joa na M a s ó teaches French literature and composition at the University of Barcelona, where she is a researcher in the UNESCO Chair in Gender, Development, and Cultures. She has translated, edited, and prefaced texts by Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous in Spanish and Catalan. She has co-edited, with Marie-Dominique Garnier, the volume Cixous sous X. D’un coup le nom (Presses universitaires de Vincennes, 2010) and, with Marta Segarra, Hélène Cixous’s writings on art ( Peinetures. Écrits sur l’art, Hermann, 2010; Poetry in Painting: Writings on Contemporary Arts and Aesthetics, Edinburgh University Press, 2011). She also co-edited, with Ginette Michaud, the collection of Derrida’s texts on architecture, Les Arts de l’espace. Écrits et interventions sur l’architecture (Éditions de la Différence, 2015). Gin e t t e Mich au d is Professor Emerita in the Département des littératures de langue française at the University of Montreal. A member of the International Committee in charge of editing the teaching seminars of Jacques Derrida, she has co-edited both volumes of The Beast and the Sovereign (orig. Galilée, 2008 and 2010; in English: University of Chicago Press, 2009 and 2011), Le parjure et le pardon (Seuil, 2019 and 2020), and devoted several studies to the philosopher’s work: Tenir au secret (Derrida, Blanchot) (Galilée, 2006; rpt. 2017), Veilleuses. Autour de trois images de Jacques Derrida (Nota bene, 2009), Juste le poème, peut-être (Derrida, Celan) (Le Temps volé éditeur, 2009; Spirale, Eva-le-Grand essay prize for 2009– 10; rpt. Hermann, 2017), Jacques Derrida. L’art du contretemps (Nota bene, 2014),

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La Vérité à l’épreuve du pardon. Une lecture du séminaire “Le parjure et le pardon” de Jacques Derrida (Les Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 2018), and, together with Isabelle Ullern, Sarah Kofman et Jacques Derrida. Croisements, écarts, différences (Hermann, 2018). Two volumes dealing with the mutual relations between the works of Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous, Battements—du secret littéraire and “Comme en rêve . . . ,” were published by Hermann in 2010. She has written Cosa volante. Le désir des arts dans la pensée de Jean-Luc Nancy (Hermann, 2013), co-edited, with Danielle Cohen-Levinas, Appels de Jacques Derrida (preceded by “Justices” by Jacques Derrida, Hermann, 2014), and co-edited Jacques Derrida’s texts on architecture in Les Arts de l’espace (La Différence, 2015). The present volume, together with its translations into Brazilian (2012), Spanish (2013), and Italian (2016), form part of the research project she directed on “The question of the arts in the works of Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Hélène Cixous,” funded by the Social Sciences and Human Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). Ginette Michaud was elected to the Royal Society of Canada in 2011 and awarded the ACFAS Adrien-Pouliot Prize for Scientific Cooperation with France in 2017. Pl e sh e t t e De A r m i t t (1967–2015) was Chair and Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Memphis. Her research and teaching interests included contemporary French thought, feminist theory, and psychoanalysis. She is the author of The Right to Narcissism: A Case for an Im-possible Self-Love (Fordham University Press, 2013) and co-editor of Sarah Kofman’s Corpus (SUNY Press, 2008). She is also the editor of the Spindel Supplement of the Southern Journal of Philosophy, entitled “Freudian Futures” (2013), the co-editor of a memorial issue of Epoché on Jacques Derrida (2006), and the co-translator of Derrida’s “A Europe of Hope” (2006) and, republished in this volume, “Aletheia” (2010). Her publications also include articles on Derrida, Kofman, and Kristeva in journals such as Mosaic, Parallax, Philosophy Today, Research in Phenomenology, and the Southern Journal of Philosophy. Pe g g y K a m uf writes on literary theory and contemporary French thought, particularly that of Jacques Derrida. Her most recent book is Literature and the Remains of the Death Penalty (Fordham University Press, 2018). Her essays have appeared in major refereed journals in the US, Canada, the UK, France, and Spain, and work of hers has been translated into German, French, Spanish, Japanese, Italian, and other languages. She has also translated numerous texts by Derrida and several works by Hélène Cixous. She is an editor of Oxford Literary Review and on the editorial board of numerous other academic journals. Director of the Derrida Seminars Translation Project, she co-edits the series publishing

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Derrida’s teaching seminars in English. She is Professor Emerita of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. L au r e n t Mil e si is Tenured Professor of English Literature and Critical Theory at Shanghai Jiao Tong University and Honorary Senior Research Fellow at Cardiff University. He has written extensively on Joyce and related aspects of modernism, twentieth-century (American) poetry, postmodernism, and poststructuralism, with a particular emphasis on Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous. His edited collection James Joyce and the Difference of Language was published by Cambridge University Press in 2003 (digitally reprinted in 2007), and his annotated translation (together with Stefan Herbrechter) of Jacques Derrida’s H. C. pour la vie, c’est à dire . . . came out with Stanford University Press in 2006. His annotated translations of Cixous’s study of Samuel Beckett, Le Voisin de zéro and Philippines have both been published by Polity Press (2010, 2011), and his translation of her novel Tombe was published by Seagull Books in 2014. He is one of the general editors for the “Theory, Culture and Politics” book series at Rowman & Littlefield International, where his co-edited Credo Credit Crisis: Speculations on Faith and Money was published in 2017. He serves as joint Editor in Chief for the international journal Word and Text: A Journal of Literary Studies and Linguistics. A n dr e w Ro t h w e l l is Professor of French and Translation Studies at Swansea University. His main research interests are in French poetry of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, with special reference to the visual arts, literary translation, and translation technologies. He has published extensively on modernism, especially Dada and Surrealism, including the work of Albert-Birot, Breton, Cendrars, Desnos, Max Jacob, and Reverdy, as well as on contemporary poet and thinker Bernard Noël. He has also published English translations of poetry by Noël (La Chute des temps / Timefall), Jacques Dupin, Jean-Michel Maulpoix and others, Bruno Dumont’s novels Humanity and Life of Jesus, and Émile Zola’s Thérèse Raquin and La Joie de vivre / The Bright Side of Life, both with Oxford World’s Classics. K a s Sagh a fi is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Memphis. He is the author of Apparitions—Of Derrida’s Other (Fordham University Press, 2010) and The World after the End of the World: A Spectro-Poetics (State University of New York Press, 2020). He is currently working on Remains: Jacques Derrida (to be published by Edinburgh University Press) and is co-editor, with Geoffrey Bennington, of two volumes of essays by Jacques Derrida: Thinking What Comes, vol. 1: Essays and Interventions and Thinking What Comes, vol. 2: Interviews and Interruptions (forthcoming Edinburgh University Press). He has published arti-

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cles on contemporary French thought in journals such as Mosaic, Oxford Literary Review, Parallax, Research in Phenomenology, Bulletin de la Société américaine de philosophie de langue française, and Philosophy Today. He co-edited with Pleshette DeArmitt a memorial issue of Epoché devoted to Jacques Derrida (2006) and cotranslated with her three articles by Derrida: “A Europe of Hope” (Epoché, 2006), “Aletheia” (Oxford Literary Review, 2010), “Remain(s)—or the Supplement of Infinity” (forthcoming), and the special issue “Thinking What Remains,” Derrida Today (2016). J e a n- Luc S vob oda has worked as a translator for SBC galerie d’art contemporain (http://www.sbcgallery.ca/) on their book Vera Frenkel, Cartographie d’une pratique (Vera Frenkel: Mapping a Practice, 2010). L au r i e Vol p e finished her dissertation, which examined Derrida’s La Carte postale and Barthes’s Fragments d’un discours amoureux, during her year working as an instructor of English at the Université Paris-Dauphine. After receiving a PhD from LSU in Baton Rouge, she taught French at various schools in the United States, then English after moving to Paris in 2003, where she lived for ten years.

Index

Introductions and notes by the editors or the translator are not included in the index, unlike Jacques Derrida’s own notes. Derrida’s works referenced in the volume are listed individually under the French title, with the English title following in parentheses, if available. Page numbers in bold refer to images of artworks. Abraham, 136, 234 Abraham, Nicolas, and Maria Torok, L’Écorce et le noyau (The Shell and the Kernel), 79 absence, 24, 71, 122, 169, 184, 222. See also negativity; presence abstraction, 159, 167; and figuration, 269n6 abyss/abyssal, 75, 91, 125, 136, 176, 184, 193–94, 231, 243, 253 Accidents 3 (Shinoyama), 191 activity, 46–47, 112, 178. See also passivity actor(s), 12, 60, 66, 203, 205, 208–9, 216, 224–26, 234, 237–38, 242, 244, 248 actuality, 248, 250 Adami, Valerio: Concerto with Four Hands, 150; Derrida, interview with, 148–55; institution devoted to drawing founded by, 31, 143, 146; language of drawings by, 31; “Le Voyage du dessin,” 149; Viaggio in treno, 147 address/addressee/addressing, 15, 18–19, 54, 59, 67, 83–84, 105, 160–61, 165, 169, 220–21, 226–27, 246 Aeschylus, 233 Aesthetics (Hegel), 45 affect/affected/affective, 97, 108, 159, 204–5, 247, 254; color and, 122, 154; the underside/support of art and, 181–85; of a work without a title, 169–70

Agosti, Stefano, 93 À la recherche du temps perdu (Proust), 25 Alejandra (Sábato), 48 aletheia, 44, 137 “Aletheia” (Derrida), 189–200 allegory, 149, 192–93, 195 alphabet/alphabetical, 39, 41, 133, 135, 137–38, 159, 167 Als Schrift (Puglia), 136, 138 Althusser, Louis, 255 anachrony, 10, 247, 251. See also dyschrony; synchrony; time anacoluthon, 161, 171, 226 analogy, 161 animal, 21–22, 32, 34–38, 44, 57–58, 76, 108, 121, 158, 164, 167, 174, 179 Antelme, Robert, The Human Race, 228 Apocalypse, 138 Apollinaire, Guillaume: Calligrammes, 139; “Il pleut” (“It’s Raining”), 139 aporia, 29, 34, 57, 64, 166 apparition(s), 160, 218–20 appearance/disappearance, 9–10, 12, 30, 71, 122–23, 127, 129, 131–33, 136–37, 141, 164, 166, 170, 192, 210, 242 apprehension, 34, 107, 199 appropriation/reappropriation/exappropriation, 45, 61, 166, 183–84, 229, 233. See also nonreappropriable; proper

302 | in de x Aragon, Louis, 142 architecture, 45, 100, 220; beauty in, 20; deconstructive, 24–25, 29–30; Derrida’s self-proclaimed incompetence in, 4–6; indestructible presence of, 8–9; thought at work in, 22 archive(s), 14, 54, 72, 106, 123, 144, 166, 192, 197, 200; drive, 51, 77–78; as finite, 77–78; Incas’ royal, 158; political dimension of, 51–52, 76–77, 229; public/ national, 74–75; questions regarding, 74–75; of radio and television, 49–50; reproducible, 194; and testimony, 228–29; trace and, 50, 69, 75–77; and work, 228 Archive Fever (Mal d’Archive; Derrida), 51– 52, 71–73, 76, 229 Archives nationales, 75 Ariadne, 131 Aristotle: De Coelo, 130; the diaphanous, visibility and, 43, 112; Eudemian Ethics, 131; Metaphysics, 131; phonetic writing as the signifier of a signifier, 40; prayer that is neither true nor false, 136, 256; “rendering” the phenomena, 131; “to save the phenomena,” 129 art(s), 5, 12, 50, 150, 180–81, 221; cinema as art of phantoms, 209; classification of the, 45, 181–82, 185; of contretemps, 251; definition of a work of, 8, 20, 172; drawing, 150 (see also drawing[s]); Fathy’s art of interruption, 55–56; in Gradiva, 71; as habitation, 22; history of, 15, 128 (see also history of the arts); history of women in, Deblé’s visual analysis of, 118–28; industrial, 143; of montage, 61, 223; new, 205, 207; plastic, 172–73; popular art form, 219–20; public countersignature required for a work of art to exist, 14–15 (see also signature); silent, nondiscursive, 7–10, 17; spatial, 16, 20–22 (see also spatial arts); theatre, 231, 235; underside(s) of, 19–21, 80, 175–76, 182, 231 (see also underneath/underside); video, 202–27 (see also video/video art); visual, 10, 13, 19–21, 80, 182, 231

Artaud, Antonin: publication of portraits and drawings, 100–101; saluting, 163; signature of, 5, 17; “subjectile” and, 16, 179, 181, 186. See also subjectile ARTE, 59, 63–64, 224–25 “artifactuality,” 250 artist, 11, 21, 48, 62, 96–97, 123, 127–28, 153–55, 182–84, 206 art market, 176 “Aschenglorie” (Celan), 195 Ashbox (Puglia), 131–36 Athena, 166 Atlan, Jean-Michel: Baal, 159; Baal guerrier (Warrior Baal), 169, 171–72; Calypso I, 170, 172; Calypso II, 170, 172; Calypso III, 159, 169–71; Carthage I, 171; Carthage II, 171; Danse guerrière (War Dance), 171; Danses incantatoires, 163, 168; Grand Roi Atlante (Great Atlantis King), 164, 169–70; Jéricho, 162–63, 174; Kantian oppositions, the “Atlan effect” and, 164–65; La Kahena (Kahina), 163, 169, 171–72; La Redoutable, 165, 169, 171; large-sized works by, 159, 162–68; Le Nil, 166; Le Samouraï, 171; Les Miroirs de l’Asie, 167, 169, 172; Le Tao, 169; Levinas’s reading of, 172–73; life and career of, 156, 158; Livre des Rois (Book of Kings) II, 163; Miroirs magiques du roi Salomon, 172; Murailles de Jéricho (Walls of Jericho), 163; Peinture berbère, 172; Pentateuque, Derrida’s reading of, 158–62; Pentateuque, Kantian reading of, 165; Pentateuque as an untitled painting, 168–69; Pharaon, 166; Salamboo, 172; Sinaï, 172; Sodome, 163, 169; Tanit, 159, 169, 172; titles, problem of, 268n3; unmeasuring greatness in, 164–74; Untitled, 157; vision of the painter and, 269n5 Atlantis, 166, 271n19 Atlas, 163–64, 170 Augustine of Hippo, Saint, 163 aura, 183, 207, 219 Aurora (Puglia), 140 Auschwitz, 228

i n de x | 303 author, 13–14, 15, 52, 154, 178, 182, 193, 209, 211, 225, 229, 247, 256 authoritarian, 8, 123 authority, 5, 8–9, 16, 31, 39, 56–57, 61, 66, 76–77, 85, 104, 108–9, 114, 123, 128, 153–54, 166–67, 213, 221, 225, 227, 229, 231–32, 235 autobiography, 96, 139 auto-immunity, 72–73. See also immunity Aviv, Nurith, 80 Baal (Atlan), 159 Baal guerrier (Atlan), 169, 171–72 Babel, 134–37 Bach, Johann Sebastian, 13 Baecque, Antoine de, 214–28 Balzac, Honoré de, 212 Barthes, Roland, 26, 67, 196; Camera Lucida, 198 Bataille, Georges, “Story of the Eye,” 108 Baudelaire, Charles, “The Blind,” 48, 112 Beaumarchais, Pierre-Augustin Caron de, 247 beauty/beautiful, 19–20, 25, 50, 64, 83, 95, 108, 112, 114, 116, 164, 172–73, 193, 233, 238 belief, 44; at the cinema, 218–21, 227; at the theater, 238. See also credit Benjamin, Walter, 146, 148, 150; aura of the nonreproducible, 183; “Critique of Violence,” 29; film analysis and psychoanalysis, connection between, 218, 228; technical reproducibility, 182, 227 Bergson, Henri, 44–45 Berkeley, George, 167 Berlin Wall, 247 betrayal, 67, 83–85, 186 Beyle, Henri (Stendhal), 140 Bible: Book of Kings, 163, 271n21; Genesis, 138; Gospel of Saint John, 39; Old Testament, 106, 162; Pentateuch, 159–61, 169 Bildungsroman, 168 birth, 121, 125–28, 138, 159, 163, 167– 68, 174, 191–93, 195, 197–99, 206, 270–71n14

Blanchot, Maurice, 44, 46, 205, 207, 221, 223 “Blind, The” (Baudelaire), 48, 112 “Blind Man, The” (Chénier), 48 blindness, 21, 33, 37, 80, 96, 99, 100, 102– 13, 115, 130; in biblical history/Greek mythology, gender and, 107–8; color and, 167; of Derrida, the Louvre exhibition and, 103; experience of, drawing and, 47, 102; great writers and artists who are, 48; memory and, 105; seeing and, 80; “seeing” by the draftsman and the blind man, 34–36, 94–97, 106–7, 110–13, 117; speech and, 40; as a theme of the Louvre exhibition, 104–5, 109– 10, 117 (see also “Memoirs of the Blind” [exhibition at the Louvre]) blind spot, 37, 113 bliss, 153–55. See also ecstasy; jouissance body, 4, 65, 93, 132, 136, 140, 143, 149, 152, 183, 222, 234, 269n6; Deblé’s female body, 120–27, 138, 265n7; experience of the, 45, 81, 120–21, 123–27, 177, 206, 210–11; headless, 241; Marx’s, 241; photographic exploration of by Shinoyama, 189–92; presence and, 11–14, 19–20; sonorous, 139; of subjectile, 172, 180–81, 183–84; unveiled, 194; words and the, 16–17, 66, 90, 126, 134, 228; of work, 159, 180–81, 183, 226 book, end of the, 209–10 Book of Kings, 163, 271n15. See also Bible Borges, Jorge Luis, 48, 105, 109 Botticelli, Sandro, Primavera, 155 Bourdieu, Pierre, 49 Brulard, Henry (Stendhal), 140 Brunette, Peter, 6–8, 10–12, 15, 20, 23, 26, 28 Büchner, Georg, Lenz, 139 Burial of the Count of Orgaz, The (El Greco), 64, 66 Cahen, Gérald, 65 Calligrammes (Apollinaire), 139 calligraphy, 137, 139 Calypso, 170, 172 Calypso I (Atlan), 170, 172

304 | in de x Calypso II (Atlan), 170, 172 Calypso III (Atlan), 159, 169–72 camera, 9, 55, 57, 65, 75, 191–92, 194–95, 205, 210–11, 218, 221, 225, 228 Camera Lucida (Barthes), 198 Capital (Marx and Engels), 83–84 capitalism/capital/capitalization, power of, 76, 220, 243, 249–50 capitals/capitalization (uppercase letters), 126, 128, 220, 225 Carthage I (Atlan), 171 Carthage II (Atlan), 171 catharsis, 155 Celan, Paul, “Aschenglorie,” 195 Céline, Louis-Ferdinand, 152 censorship, 76, 235 Changer d’images (short film; Godard), 83–84 Charaudeau, Patrick, 66–67, 69–70, 79 Chardin, Jean-Baptiste-Siméon: selfportraits in the Louvre exhibition, 95–96, 105, 110, 114; Self-Portrait with Spectacles, 110, 114 Chartreux, Bernard, 244 Chénier, André, “The Blind Man,” 48 Chirac, Jacques, 248 choreography, 165 Christ, 95, 97, 109–10, 234, 249 Cinders (Feu la cendre; Derrida), 223 cinema, 6, 18, 20, 22, 78, 100, 127, 141, 193, 206–12, 222, 225; art of the cut/edit in, 61–62; belief, mode and system of, 218–19, 227; collectivity and singularity in the experience of, 220–21; deconstruction and, link between, 223–24; Derrida’s childhood experience of, 215–16; Derrida’s interest in, 214–15; Derrida’s reaction to seeing himself in D’ailleurs, Derrida, 60–62; Derrida’s self-proclaimed incompetence in, 4; discourse/nondiscourse and, 9; emotional impact of, 215–17; as image, 63–64 (see also image); mediation of the signature in, 12; mimêsis in, 64; montage of, 56, 61, 223–24; phantoms, as the art of, 209; as a popular art form, 216–17, 219–20; the private/

public distinction in D’ailleurs, Derrida, 54, 58–60; psychoanalysis and, 218; responding to, 55; specter and, 217–21, 226–28; technical medium of, 9–10; testimony in, 221–22; timing of shots in, 51; voice recording in, 223. See also United States: American cinema “Cinquante-deux aphorismes pour un avant-propos” (“Fifty-Two Aphorisms for a Foreword”; Derrida), 20, 23–24 circumcision, in D’ailleurs, Derrida: deconstruction and, 59; dissymmetry for, 58; interminable discourse regarding, 57; as the interruption of reappropriation, 61; male and female, 62; as a theme, 56 “Circumfession” (Derrida), 223 citation, 64, 123, 126–28, 171 Cixous, Hélène, 48 Coignard, Jérôme, 94–97 Collège iconique, 50 Collège international de philosophie, 75 color, 36, 90, 97, 140, 154, 180; in Atlan’s paintings, 158, 161, 165–67, 169–70, 270n13; drawing and, 47, 99, 154–55; in nature or in painting, 174; wash, from a, 120 colossal, 137, 164, 168 Commune, 219 communism, 243–44, 249–50 community, 14, 143, 208, 220–21 competence, 4–5, 17, 60, 76–77, 100, 153. See also incompetence Concerto with Four Hands (Adami), 150 consciousness, 37–39, 45, 54, 62, 75, 127, 149, 233 contact, 44–45, 67, 126, 173, 182, 204, 212. See also tact contretemps, 140, 241–42, 245, 251 Coppola, Francis Ford, 219 countersignature, 14–15, 270n13. See also signature Courbet, Gustave, The Wounded Man, 114 Coypel, Antoine, 107, 109 credit: authorship/responsibility for a work, 159, 163, 227; system of in the arts, 218; theater, that we bring to, 239. See also belief

i n de x | 305 crisis, 30, 124, 151, 155, 181, 245–46. See also ecstasy Critias, 166 Critique of Judgment (Kant), 165 Croce e Delizia (Puglia), 139 crypt, 74, 79, 91, 132, 168–69, 176–77, 184, 204 cult, 184 culture/cultural, 17, 28, 30, 39–40, 42, 54, 61–62, 65, 67, 95, 105–6, 149, 151, 153, 158, 167, 210, 215–17, 248, 253–55 curator(s), 96, 102–3, 105, 114, 182 cut, 148, 154, 205, 224, 229; archiving and the, 72; film as the art of the, 61–62; between impression and imprint, 72; as the interruption of reappropriation, 61; the secret and the, 74–75; between speech and image, 65; trace left by the, 69 D’ailleurs, Derrida (Derrida’s Elsewhere; Fathy), 50, 52–53, 55–69, 224–26, 228–29 dance, 127, 158–59, 163, 166, 169–71, 208, 216, 219, 234, 269n6, 272n32. See also Ghost Dance (McMullen) danger/dangerous, 34, 41, 43, 71–73, 84, 195, 245, 270n13 Danse guerrière (Atlan), 171 Danses incantatoires (Atlan), 163, 168 Dante Alighieri, 223 dark/darkness, 161, 167, 190, 192–94, 197– 99, 204, 216 daylight, 133, 135, 192, 244 death, 11, 40, 73, 79, 82, 124, 140, 148, 160– 61, 184, 190–92, 197–99, 222, 226–27, 233, 237, 248, 255, 269nn6–7 Deblé, Colette: commentary on the work of, 120–28; Diane découvrant la grossesse de Calixto de Jean Daret, 119; Lumière de l’air, 265nn7–8; Susannah after Tintoretto, 120 Debray, Régis, 49 debt, 92 decision/indecision, 24–25, 36, 57, 153, 160–61, 165, 195, 213, 225, 238, 245, 248. See also undecidable

De Coelo (Aristotle), 130 deconstruction, 23, 67, 91, 140; alternative deconstructive critical practice, 26; applicability of across fields, 5–6; architecture and, 24–25; the “call” required by, 25; cinema and, link between, 223–24; circumcision and, 59; disorder and, 80–82; future of, 26–30; Heidegger’s, 40–41; negativity of, response to affirmation of, 23–24; polarization around, 27; production of knowledge and, 28–29; as a virus, 7, 30; visual arts, applicability to, 10–11 De la grammatologie (Of Grammatology; Derrida), 77, 100, 155 Deleuze, Gilles, 255 Delorme, Michel, 178 de Man, Paul, 27 democracy, 48, 75, 246 Derrida, Jacques: Adami, origin of friendship with, 146, 148–49; brother’s ability at drawing, 96, 110–11; cinema, childhood experience of, 215–16 (see also cinema); “Cinquante-deux aphorismes pour un avant-propos” (“Fifty-Two Aphorisms for a Foreword”), 20, 23–24; “Circumfession,” 223; in D’ailleurs, Derrida (Fathy), 50, 52–53, 55–69, 224–26, 228–29; De la grammatologie (Of Grammatology), 77, 100, 155; Donner le temps (Given Time), 52; drawing, relationship to, 99–102 (see also “Memoirs of the Blind” [exhibition at the Louvre]); Droit de regards (“Right of Inspection”), 16–17, 22–23, 199; Echographies of Television, 214, 217, 221, 227; “Envois,” 6; Éperons (Spurs), 91–92; facial paralysis, episode of and obsession with the eye, 96, 103; Feu la cendre (Cinders), 223; “Forcener le subjectile” (“Maddening the Subjectile”), 179; Glas, 29, 148–49; images of survivor, surcease, surge, 252–56; La Carte postale (The Post Card), 6, 210–11; La Vérité en peinture (The Truth in Painting), 99, 179; Limited Inc, 28; Mal d’Archive (Archive Fever), 51–52, 71–73, 229; Mémoires

306 | in de x Derrida, Jacques (continued) d’aveugle (Memoirs of the Blind), 48, 103, 105, 117; “Memoirs of the Blind” (exhibition at the Louvre), 48, 80, 103, 117; “Of an Apocalyptic Tone . . . ,” 17; Psyché. Inventions de l’autre (Psyche: Inventions of the Other), 89; “+R (Into the Bargain),” 7–8; Signéponge/Signsponge, 12; Spectres de Marx (Specters of Marx), 227, 247; Tourner les mots, 80–81, 214, 225–26; Voice and Phenomenon, 83 Derrida’s Elsewhere (Fathy). See D’ailleurs, Derrida (Derrida’s Elsewhere; Fathy) Der Satz vom Grund (Heidegger), 38 Descartes, René, 11, 78, 104; “Second Meditation,” 204 description, 154, 166, 181 design, 31, 33, 41, 68, 94, 98–99, 143, 146 desire, 7–8, 54, 70–71, 154, 254–55, 174, 192, 204, 221; affect as, 181–84; allegorical and narrative, 149; beauty and, 19–20; the body and, 16; cinema and, 219, 221; drawing and, 97, 113, 150; images and, 70; for light, 198; music as an object of, 17; painting and, 155, 159; photography and, 194–96; “undersides” and, 176–77 destination, 7, 83–84, 226 destinerrance, 7 destruction, 24, 73, 76, 166, 235 detail, 39–40, 218, 228, 269n6 Diana, 121 Diane découvrant la grossesse de Calixto de Jean Daret (Deblé), 119 diaphanous, 43, 112, 128, 235 Dibutatis, legend of, 107 “Die Blinde” (Rilke), 48 difference, 9–10, 23, 32, 42, 44, 47–48, 62, 67–68, 74–75, 78, 82, 84, 100, 137, 181, 185, 194, 206, 213, 220, 227, 234, 248, 253 digital image, 206 dimension, 51, 105–6, 117, 162, 168–70, 215, 218, 225, 227, 238–39, 248 Dionysus, 233 discourse, 4–6, 20–22, 24–27, 38–39, 42–43, 45, 57–59, 90, 92–93, 95, 102, 104, 106, 109, 111, 116, 132, 138, 168, 172, 205,

207, 209–10, 237–39, 270n13; authority of, 8–9, 16; authority of resisted by cinema, 225; critical, 14; deconstruction and, 10–11, 30; hegemony of philosophical, 5; legitimacy of, 4–5; Marx’s, 250; philosophical, the theater and, 233; words and, 16–17, 99 discursivity/nondiscursivity, 9, 13, 16, 223 dissymmetry, 43, 58, 91, 174 Disturbance Install 1 and 2 (Hill), 202 document, 63, 76, 78, 221–22 documentary, 50, 63–64, 190 Don Juan, 101 Donner le temps (Given Time; Derrida), 52 Doppelt, Suzanne, 141 d’Orléans, Charles, 142 draftsman, 35, 90, 92, 95–97, 105–6, 109– 11, 113, 117, 143, 148–51, 153 drama/dramaturgy, 101, 152, 155, 183, 233 drawing(s), 5, 39–40, 42–43, 80, 100–117, 120, 123, 125–26, 128, 137, 148–49, 154, 158, 176–79, 181–82, 185; beautiful, determination of, 114; blindness and, 36, 47, 95–97, 99, 104–7, 110–13, 117; Derrida and Adami on, 149–55; design/ anticipation and, 33–34; four ways to, 142–44; by Henich, experience of writing texts to accompany, 101–2; illustration, 90–93; invitations to write/speak about, 99–102 (see also “Memoirs of the Blind” [exhibition at the Louvre]); language and, 31; origin of, 107–8; scene in, 152–53; the stroke in (see stroke); trace and, 35, 47 (see also trace) dream(s)/dreaming, 92, 104, 123–25, 139, 158–66, 168, 176, 197, 216, 220–21, 243, 254, 268–69n3, 270n13 Droit de regards (“Right of Inspection”; Plissart and Derrida), 16–17, 22–23, 199 Dupin, Jacques, 146, 148–49 dyschrony, 247. See also anachrony; synchrony; time ear(s), 38, 91, 163, 196, 206, 232 East, 27, 143, 151–52, 167–68 Eastwood, Clint, 219 Ecce Homo (Nietzsche), 33, 139

i n de x | 307 echo, 32, 120, 123, 125, 127, 162 Echo (the nymph), 123–25, 128 Echographies of Television (Échographies—de la télévision; Derrida and Stiegler), 217, 221, 227 Eckhart, Meister, 151 ecstasy, 90, 145, 155, 199; crisis and, 155. See also bliss; jouissance edit/editing/editor, 23, 61, 80, 207, 211, 221, 224–25 ego: essentialization of, 67–69, 73; total ego as death, 73, 82 eidos, 42–44, 96, 104, 131, 133, 135, 231 Eisenman, Peter, 5, 24 election, 109 El Greco, The Burial of the Count of Orgaz, 64, 66 Elijah, 163 ellipse/ellipsis, 93, 161, 171, 226 emotion, 32, 53, 108, 173, 195–96, 215–17, 219–20, 222, 239 encounter, 7, 41, 56, 126, 137–38, 149, 171, 215, 222 Engels, Friedrich, Capital, 83 engraver, 92 Enlightenment, 47–48 entertainment, 216 “Envois” (Derrida), 6 Éperons (Spurs; Derrida), 91–93 erase/erasure, 77, 128, 143, 149, 152, 215 eroticism, 172–73 Esau, 96, 111 essentialization, 67–69, 73 Eudemian Ethics (Aristotle), 131 Euripides, 233 eve, 81, 90, 167 Eve, 121 event(s), 18, 21, 134, 148–49, 152, 155, 170– 71, 176, 191, 193–95, 197–98, 243, 247, 270n13; concept of, 11, 35, 84; discursive, the title and, 115, 117; experience of, 34–35, 38, 41–42, 53, 97, 122, 164, 168; Mesguich’s distinction between two sorts of, 233–34; nonknowledge as the necessary precondition for, 25; of repetition, 174, 196, 236; signature and occurrence of an, 13–14; video, 203, 205–6

evidence, 124, 197, 207 exappropriation, 61. See also expropriation; reappropriation excess, 14, 22, 169, 174, 176 exhibition, 47, 60, 84, 92, 95–98, 100–106, 108–11, 113–14, 116–17, 127, 131, 144, 149, 151, 199, 214 experience, 5–6, 8, 10, 12, 19–22, 32–33, 36, 38, 40, 44–45, 47, 55–57, 61, 63, 73–76, 80, 85, 95, 97, 99–110, 112–13, 115, 117, 128, 138, 143, 150–51, 171–72, 180–81, 204–5, 207, 209–10, 216–22, 224–26, 231, 234, 236, 254; concept of, 35; of the event, 35; Kant’s definition of, 46; meanings of, 41–42; of thought, 42; of the trace, 75, 77 exposition, 53, 72–73, 97, 105, 108, 117, 126, 170, 172, 198–99 exposure, 140 expropriation, 85 eye(s): creatures without, 33–34; seeing and seen, distinction between, 36–37; for seeing what’s coming, 34; as a theme in the Louvre exhibition, 108–9 (see also blindness; “Memoirs of the Blind” [exhibition at the Louvre]); for weeping, 32, 108–9. See also seeing; sight; vision “Eyes and Tears” (Marvell), 32, 108 eyesight, 34, 38, 104, 110, 114 faith, 109, 159, 163, 165, 180, 184, 227, 239 Fantin-Latour, Henri, 95–96, 105, 114–17 Fargier, Jean-Paul, “Magie blanche,” 204 fascination, 106–7, 110, 215, 218 Fathy, Safaa: crooked tile, filming of for D’ailleurs, Derrida, 56–57, 80; D’ailleurs, Derrida (Derrida’s Elsewhere), 50, 52, 214, 224; Derrida, portrayal of, 58; Derrida’s reluctance and anxiety, as witness to, 56; female circumcision, insistence on including, 62; image without reference, filming an, 64; interruption of the image (anacoluthon), 226; space, intention and decisions regarding, 52–53, 68, 225; speech and the image, relation of, 55. See also Tourner les mots (Derrida and Fathy) Fautrier, Jean, 172

308 | in de x fear, 33, 107, 152, 159, 162, 165. See also fright/frighten; terror Ferraris, Maurizio, 31–34, 36, 39–41 fetishism, 181, 183, 185 Feu la cendre (Cinders; Derrida), 223 “Fifty-Two Aphorisms for a Foreword” (“Cinquante-deux aphorismes pour un avant-propos”; Derrida), 20, 23–24 film, 228. See also cinema Fool’s Love, A (Tanizaki), 193 “Forcener le subjectile” (“Maddening the Subjectile”; Derrida), 179 foreclosure/foreclosed, 233, 238 foresight, 111 forgiveness, 59–60, 85, 171 format, 159, 162, 164, 168 Forrester, Viviane, 241, 250 Foucault, Michel, 255 frame/framework, 11, 19, 27, 37, 51, 99, 127, 164, 168, 177, 179, 197, 199, 219, 221, 225, 242, 246 Franklin, Phyllis, 27 Freud, Sigmund: aesthetic of Gradiva art in, 71; “extended psyche,” 127; fetishism, interpretation of, 185; Introduction to Narcissism, 121; movies, the unconscious at work at the, 218; narcissism, work on, 121; painting and letting the unconscious speak, 161; propositions developed by Jones from, 243; text, visualization of, 79 fright/frighten, 24, 43, 103, 160, 171, 238. See also fear; terror Garrel, Thierry, 64 gaze, 23, 34, 36–37, 44–45, 67, 79, 95–96, 104, 112, 116, 131, 136, 138, 153, 179, 192, 198, 219; authority of, 108, 231–32; of the camera, 65; exposing, 105 gender, 91; blindness in biblical history/ Greek mythology and, 107–8; circumcision and, 62. See also women genesis, 183, 192 Genesis, 138 genre, 63–64, 207 gesture, 5, 22, 30, 41, 47, 65, 73, 75–76, 78, 80–81, 84, 92, 97, 107, 109, 111, 142–43,

149–50, 154, 160, 164, 169, 172, 193, 215, 222, 265n7 ghost(s), 125, 208–9, 214, 218–22, 227. See also specter/spectrality Ghost Dance (McMullen), 208, 219 Gide, André, 253 gift vs. countergift, 131–32, 140, 171, 236 Given Time (Donner le temps; Derrida), 52 Glas (Derrida), 29, 148–49 globalization, 243, 248 Gloria Films, 224 Godard, Jean-Luc, Changer d’images, 83–84 God/god(s), 46, 78–79, 109, 111, 138, 158– 65, 168–70, 174, 249, 269nn6–7 Gospel of Saint John, 39. See also Bible gouache, 120 Gradiva (Jensen), 71–72 Graff, Gerald, 28 graft/grafting, 45, 92, 135, 139, 185, 203, 206, 210, 219, 223 Grand Roi Atlante (Atlan), 164, 169–70 Graphic Arts Cabinet, 102 ground/groundless, 23, 25, 37, 184 guest, 38, 158–59, 170, 172 Guillaume, Marc, 241, 245, 249 habitation, 22. See also Heidegger, Martin hallucination, 33, 101, 127, 160, 218 Hamlet (character), 81, 242–43, 247 Hamlet (Shakespeare), 81, 242–43, 247 Hanold, 71–73 haptocentrism, 44–45 Hassan, 270n14 haunting, 33, 139, 218–19 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 44–45; Aesthetics, 45 Hegel’s Holidays (Magritte), 93 hegemony, 5, 8, 39, 76, 210, 216, 248 Heidegger, Martin: deconstruction by, 40– 41; Der Satz vom Grund, 38; habitation, concept of, 22; logos, privileging of, 39; optics privileged in metaphysics, recognition of, 44; Sein und Zeit, 57; spatial arts as a basis for questioning, 22; temporalization of the animal, question of, 57; thinking, what is, 38; “What Is

i n de x | 309 Called Thinking?,” 38; woman, suspicion of neglecting, 92 heir, 241, 249 Helene (Marx’s servant), 243 Henich, Micaëla, 101 Heraclitus, 194 heritage, 50, 52, 70, 149, 184, 241, 243–44, 247, 249. See also inheritance hieroglyph, 40, 91, 158 Hill, Gary: Disturbance Install 1 and 2, 202, 204; video art of, 205–7 history, 120, 133–35, 140, 152, 161, 232, 241–42, 247–48; of blindness, 106, 108–9, 111; Derrida’s personal, 10, 16, 58, 104; of genesis/creation, 183; literary, 155; of masons laying tiles, 82; of modesty, 193; of paper, 185; of philosophy (and metaphysics), 30, 40, 44, 46, 96, 104, 193, 232; of politics/ revolutions, 219, 244–45, 247; of the private/public distinction, 59; of psychoanalysis, 75; of religions, 168; of rhetoric, 44; of salvation, 138; secret, that preserves the, 74; of theater, 244; of visibility, 231; of women, 120, 123, 127; of writing, 39 history of the arts, 15, 21, 25, 128, 203–4, 207; architecture, 24; cinema/film, 4, 21, 54, 219, 223; drawing, 102, 117, 143; exhibitions, 102; images and texts, 83; painting, 121–23, 127, 159, 161, 168; photography, 194–95, 197 Hitchcock, Alfred, 218 Homer, 48, 105; Odyssey, 170 Hors d’attente (Puglia), 137 hospitality, 74, 173, 178; host held hostage by, 172; question of, 38; unconditional, 170–71; unconditional/conditional, the private/public distinction and, 59 Hubert, Gérard, 73–74 Hugo, Victor, Mary Tudor, 231, 237 Human Race, The (Antelme), 228 Husserl, Edmund, 40, 44–45 hypothesis: Algerian craftsmen, regarding, 82; draftsmen experience blindness, 106–7, 113; Latin and, 130; new art, technical generality or new “support”

and, 207; of a new principle for classification of the arts, 12; only the human eye can weep, 108; “play within the play” and jealousy or oedipal voyeurism, 243; on the sayable and the visible, 130–31; self-portrait, regarding, 115; of sight, 95–96; theater and philosophy, regarding, 238; title, on doing without a, 170; underneath, what happens to art from, 175–76; the unique repeats itself, 173; on watching a film, 63 icon/iconic, 55–56, 61, 63–64, 70, 82, 91, 159, 226. See also image iconography, 32, 161 ideality/idealization, 181, 185 ideal object, 185 identify/identifying, 9, 11, 25–26, 30, 85, 95, 133, 167, 177, 203, 226 identity, 13, 65, 67–69, 73, 83, 121, 184, 203, 205–6, 252 idiom/idiomatic/idiomaticity, 61, 64, 68– 69, 91, 134, 137, 143, 185, 193, 206, 225 illustration, 90–93, 222 “Il pleut” (“It’s Raining”; Apollinaire), 139 image, 23, 53, 59, 61, 78, 80, 85, 91–92, 106–7, 116–17, 121, 124–25, 128, 138– 40, 148–49, 158–61, 165, 167, 190, 192, 194–96, 200–201, 203, 206, 209–10, 212, 214–18, 221–23, 225–28, 231, 236, 238, 265n7, 269n6, 271n19; dedication of the Collège iconique to, 50; of Derrida, 252–56; film as, 63–64; iconic (visible) and sound, difference between, 82–83, 85; object, not necessarily an, 70; problems/questions regarding, 50–52, 62–63; speech and, cut between, 65–66; words functioning as, 64–65; the written word and, relationship of, 54–58 IMEC (Institut Mémoires de l’édition contemporaine), 3, 98 imminence, 158; of the photographic act, 191, 193, 196–200; of a reflection to be fixed on film, 125; of a tragedy, 155 immunity, 72, 182. See also auto-immunity impossible, 42, 92, 96, 143, 166–67, 183, 197, 200, 223, 228, 235

310 | in de x impression, 13, 15–17, 19, 46, 58, 71–72, 81, 99, 135, 144, 153, 200, 216, 237 impressionism, 121 imprint, 72, 121–22, 125, 128, 135, 192–93, 216, 219, 221–22, 265n7 improvisation, 33, 55–56, 68, 85, 204, 226 INA (Institut national de l’audiovisuel), 49–50 incompetence: Derrida’s self-proclaimed, 4–5, 99–100, 103; drawing, in relation to, 110. See also competence indecision, 36, 195, 248. See also decision/ indecision; undecidable individual/individuality, 5, 12, 146, 167, 213, 220, 248–49, 253 inheritance, 122, 227, 243. See also heritage inhibition, 96, 111, 225 In Praise of Shadows (Tanizaki), 193 instant, 12, 21, 38, 57, 72, 90, 138, 155, 183, 190, 195, 197, 236–38, 254 Institut du dessin, 142, 145 Institut Mémoires de l’édition contemporaine (IMEC), 3, 98 Institut national de l’audiovisuel (INA), 49–50 intelligible, 31, 43, 46–47, 97, 100, 133, 150, 254. See also sensible interior/interiority/interiorization, 39, 65, 128, 205, 216, 220, 233, 239 interpretation, 9, 22, 36, 58, 76–77, 100– 102, 104, 122–23, 131, 153, 160, 185, 220–21, 228, 231, 234, 236 interruption, 20, 51, 56, 58, 61–62, 66, 74, 91, 138, 161, 226, 244 interval, 46, 97, 100, 112, 182 Introduction to Narcissism (Freud), 121 intuitionism, 44–45 Intus ubique (Puglia), 135–36 invention/reinvention, 24, 92, 143, 149, 183, 213, 219, 221 invisibility, 42, 97, 106, 112–13, 192, 199, 226. See also visibility Invisible Seattle, The (Ins Omnia), 212 Iphigenia, 136 irreplaceable, 159, 172, 174, 180, 195, 206, 236

Isaac, 111, 234 Israel, 111, 160–62, 270n12 “It’s Raining” (“Il pleut”; Apollinaire), 139 Jacob, 96, 111 jealousy, 111, 243 Jensen, Wilhelm, Gradiva, 71–72 Jéricho (Atlan), 172 Jew(s)/Jewish, 59, 61, 131, 136, 160, 162–63, 165, 173, 228, 231, 270n14. See also Mary Tudor (Hugo) Jones, Ernest, 243 jouissance, 139, 153–54. See also bliss; ecstasy journey, 41–42, 107, 143 Jousse, Thierry, 214–28 Joyce, James, 48, 105, 146, 148, 150 Juno, 124 justice/injustice, 81, 142, 170, 221, 244 Justine, 173 Kahina, 163, 167, 270–71 Kamuf, Peggy, 247 Kant, Immanuel, 19, 37, 44, 46, 78, 104, 144, 164–65; Critique of Judgment, 165 Karl Marx Théâtre inédit (Vincent), 240–49 Katz, Michèle, 71–72 Khôra, 166 Kierkegaard, Søren, 197, 238 King, Rodney, 221 knot/knotted, 54, 127, 149, 152, 158, 161, 165–66, 170, 174, 244. See also quipus knowledge/nonknowledge, 4, 25, 28–29, 37–38, 45, 53, 60, 101, 135, 143–44, 150– 51, 178, 192, 195, 215–17, 237 Lacan, Jacques, 67, 255; “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter,’” 84 La Carte postale (The Post Card; Derrida), 6, 210–11 La Kahena (Atlan), 163, 169, 171–72, 174 “La lumière indirecte” (Virilio), 204, 274n3 (Videor) language, 11–12, 16–18, 27, 37–38, 65, 68–69, 74, 93, 117, 123, 170, 177, 179, 190–91, 210, 223, 225, 228, 236, 244;

i n de x | 311 drawing and, 31; as a “performative,” 201; photography and, 22–23; power and, 125; space and, 138–39; “to save the phenomena” in painting and, 129– 36; truth and, 137–39; in video, 205. See also translation; word(s) Lanzmann, Claude, Shoah, 221–23, 228 Laporte, Roger, 16 La Quinzaine littéraire, 253–54 La Redoutable (Atlan), 165, 169, 171 Lautréamont, comte de (Isidore Ducasse), 91 La Vérité en peinture (The Truth in Painting; Derrida), 99, 179 law, 6, 29, 50, 55–56, 58–59, 73, 81, 122, 133, 137, 140, 152–53, 159, 165, 174, 177, 180–81, 193–94, 199, 221, 226, 234–35, 237 L’Écorce et le noyau (The Shell and the Kernel; Abraham and Torok), 79 Leda, 127 “Le facteur de la vérité” (Derrida), 79. See also La Carte postale (The Post Card; Derrida) legitimate/legitimacy/illegitimacy, 123, 162, 206; of archives, 76; of discourse, 4–5; of heirs of Marx, 240–44, 249; of the private/public distinction, 59; in/of the theater, 242, 244–45 Le Nil (Atlan), 166 Lenin, Vladimir, 248 Lenz (Büchner), 139 Le Samouraï (Atlan), 171 Lesgards, Roger, 146, 149–55 Les Miroirs de l’Asie (Atlan), 167, 169, 172 L’Espoir (Malraux), 216 Le Tao (Atlan), 169 L’éternel éphémère (Mesguich), 231–39 “Le théâtre du point de vue de l’imaginaire” (Mannoni), 238 Levinas, Emmanuel, 46, 172–73 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 236 “Le Voyage du dessin” (Adami), 149 Lewis, Mark, 208–12 Libeskind, Daniel, 24 life, 25, 28, 30, 39, 41, 57, 73, 75, 78–79, 82, 96, 116, 136, 139–40, 149–52, 163, 191,

204, 215–17, 245, 248, 253–55, 269n6, 271n19. See also living light, 104, 106, 122, 125, 128, 131, 137, 142, 162–63, 166, 172–73, 211; blindness and, 109–10; dark/shade/shadow and, 190, 192–94, 197–99; daylight, 133, 135, 192, 195, 244; the eye and, 45; photography as the writing of, 126, 140–41, 192; privileging of touch and, 44; public space and appearing in the, 47; sensitivity to, 33–34; visibility and/of, 43–45, 106, 112, 194 Light of the Dark (Shinoyama), 190, 198 limit(s)/limited/limitless, 4, 7–8, 10–11, 13, 29–30, 41, 45–47, 59, 63, 67, 70, 74–76, 91, 132, 134, 144, 150, 162, 171, 173, 185, 203, 248, 255 Limited Inc (Derrida), 28 line, 20, 31, 35, 50, 53, 82, 84, 90–92, 100– 101, 112, 120–21, 123, 125, 133, 139, 141, 143–44, 146, 148–51, 154, 166, 180, 182, 205, 237, 265n7. See also stroke; trait literacy, 209, 212 literature, 9, 53, 64, 105, 150, 181–82, 185, 212, 221 lithograph, 185 living, 7, 33, 39–41, 43, 54, 56–58, 74, 76, 84, 158, 163, 181, 195, 198, 217–18, 223, 241, 248. See also life Livre des Rois II (Atlan), 163 logocentrism, 5; computer virus as example of, 7; deconstruction of, 11, 21, 29; discourse and, 8–9; meaning of, 39; phonocentrism and, 39, 41; the spatial arts and, 5. See also deconstruction logos, 39–40, 42, 133, 135–36 Lotto, Lorenzo, 127 Loubrieu, François, 89, 91–93; Untitled, 1979, ink drawing, 90 Louvre exhibition, 117. See also “Memoirs of the Blind” (exhibition at the Louvre) lucidity, 96, 106, 112 Lumière de l’air (Deblé), 265n3, 265nn7–9, 265n11 Luther, Martin, 249 Lyotard, Jean-François, 255

312 | in de x machine(s), 12, 27, 75, 91, 143, 195, 211–12, 224, 227, 249 “Maddening the Subjectile” (“Forcener le subjectile”; Derrida), 179 Maeght Foundation, 146, 175 “Magie blanche” (Fargier), 204 Magritte, René, Hegel’s Holidays, 93 Maine de Biran, Pierre, 44 Mal d’Archive (Archive Fever; Derrida), 51– 52, 71–73, 76, 229 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 142 Malraux, André, L’Espoir, 216 Mannoni, Octave, Un si vif étonnement, 238 market/marketplace, 92, 99, 143, 176, 183–84, 192, 213, 219, 224, 245, 249. See also art(s) Marranism, 56 Martin, François, 98, 101 Marvell, Andrew, “Eyes and Tears,” 32, 108 Marx, Fred (Marx’s illegitimate son), 243 Marx, Karl, 240–51; Capital, 83–84 Mary Tudor (Hugo), 231, 237 Matisse, Henri, 142 McLuhan, Marshall, 209 McMullen, Ken, Ghost Dance, 208, 219 measure, 137, 162, 164, 168–69, 196 medium, 9–10, 44, 122, 138, 201, 210, 219 Mémoires d’aveugle (Memoirs of the Blind; Derrida), 48, 80, 103, 117 “Memoirs of the Blind” (exhibition at the Louvre): Adami’s reference to, 151; brothers in, stories about, 111; description of, 94–95; discussion of in Coignard interview, 95–97; lecture on the experience of creating, background/ preparation, 101–6; lecture on the experience of creating, themes, 106–17; the ruin in, 116; the self-portrait in, 113–17 memory, 21–22, 57, 59, 80, 120, 125, 127, 134–36, 139, 146, 162–63, 166, 171–72, 179, 192, 200, 235, 252; archive and, 76, 197 (see also archive[s]); blindness and, 105, 109; cinema and, experience of, 219, 228–29; drawing and, 107, 111–12, 150, 153; of films, 215–16; films of, 222–23; as a modification of the

living present, 40; paternalist in art, 122; repetition as, 236; the scar in, 82; self-portrait and, 95; spectral, 219; the theater and, 235–37, 239, 242–44 mercy, 121, 170, 172–73 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 45; The Visible and the Invisible, 112 (see also invisibility; visibility) Mesguich, Daniel: L’éternel éphémère, 231–39; Mary Tudor (director of play by Hugo), 230–31 Metamorphoses (Ovid), 124 metaphor, 42, 44–45, 96, 100, 104, 109, 133, 139, 149, 154, 161, 171, 232, 235, 237 metaphoricity, 44 Metaphysics (Aristotle), 131 metonymy, 44, 56–57, 132, 136, 139, 159, 169, 192, 196–97, 268–69n3 Michel, Régis, 102 Michelangelo, 14–15 Miller, J. Hillis, 27 Milton, John, 109 mimêsis, 43, 63–64 Minc, Alain, 250 Minitel, 211–12 Miroirs magiques du roi Salomon (Atlan), 172 mirror, 36–37, 95–96, 103, 106, 115–17, 123, 128, 158, 160, 162, 164, 167, 243, 255 mise en abyme, 181 mise en scène, 224, 232 modesty, 60, 84, 99, 192–93, 196, 198 Molyneux, William, 167 Mondzain, Marie-José, 82–83 montage: cinema and, 56, 61, 223–24; of images, 54 Montagne Sainte-Victoire (Cézanne), 43 Morel, Vonick, 152, 268n5 Moses, 160–62, 270n9 Most High, 35, 161–62, 164, 168 mother, 57, 70, 122, 128, 137–38, 191, 226– 27, 237, 243, 269n7 mourning, 33, 226–28, 241; work of, 20, 219, 248–49 mouth, 65, 127, 137, 162, 198, 200, 244, 249 Murailles de Jéricho (Atlan), 163

i n de x | 313 Musée d’Orsay, 114 museum, 12, 14, 78, 102, 126, 154, 178, 182 music, 8, 16, 31, 33, 38, 45–48, 55, 57–58, 61, 64, 134, 139, 142, 150, 170–71, 181– 82, 185, 216, 223, 227, 234; Derrida’s self-proclaimed incompetence in, 4, 17; signing from inside the, 13; tone, writing/communication and, 17–19 mutism, 8, 16, 205 mystique, 169, 204 mythology, 106, 108–9, 124, 148

tion/reappropriation/exappropriation; proper nonreproducibility/nonreproducible, 176, 180, 182–83. See also reproducibility nonseeing, 105. See also seeing nontheorizable, 231. See also theory/ theoretical Nora, Pierre, 49 Norris, Christopher, 4 nudity, 172–73, 176, 192–94, 198. See also nakedness

Nadeau, Maurice, 254 nakedness, 83, 172–73. See also nudity Nancy, Jean-Luc, 44, 274n1 (Videor) narcissism, 123, 125, 204; Derrida’s, 51–52, 204; exposed women’s bodies and, 125; of the image, 65; as the theme of the Louvre exhibition, 110 Narcissus, 128; in the exhibition, 110; the mirror or two-way gaze and, 37; at the moment of “Farewell,” 128; as painter, 121, 124–25; the trace and, 69 narration/narrative/narrativity, 99, 122–23, 149–50, 155, 160–61, 168, 191, 195, 197– 98, 207, 219, 223–24 negative, 19, 111, 125, 137, 141, 181, 194– 95, 211 negative theology, 25, 138, 169 negativity, 23–24, 137. See also absence Neith, 166 New Figuration, 146 New Historicism, 29 Nietzsche, Friedrich: Ecce Homo, 33, 139; “eternal return” motif, 78; Heidegger’s neglect of woman in the writings of, 92; interpretation as active and selective, 77; seeing and blindness in Ecce Homo, 33; “third sex” of, 92; “umbrella” of, 91 night, 47, 97, 104, 110, 112, 133, 159, 167, 169, 179, 191–95, 197–99, 231, 235, 237, 271n21 nondiscursivity, 9. See also discursivity/ nondiscursivity nonknowledge. See knowledge/ nonknowledge nonreappropriable, 60. See also appropria-

object(s), 5, 7–8, 16–17, 25–27, 32, 34, 42, 45–46, 70–72, 82, 91–92, 108, 115, 139, 151, 165, 177, 182, 185, 219, 231, 274n3 (Videor); deconstruction as, 27; receives/finitude/passivity and produces/ infinity/activity, opposition of, 46; sight/seeing and, 34, 42, 45; subject and relation to, 42; trace and, 70–71; visual, questions regarding, 8 objectality, 70 objectalization, 67, 70 objectify, 19, 25 objectivity, 42, 231 objectivization, 70 obscurity, 47, 106, 192–93 Odyssey (Homer), 170 oedipal, 152–53, 243 Oedipus, 106 “Of an Apocalyptic Tone . . .” (Derrida), 17 Of Grammatology (De la grammatologie; Derrida), 77, 100, 155 Old Testament, 106, 162. See also Bible Ophelia, 244 optical, 44, 96, 103–5, 113, 133, 192, 194, 204–5, 231 Orto petroso (Puglia), 141 Otages (Fautrier), 172 other, 32, 38, 65, 77, 89–90, 93, 128, 159, 165, 168, 170, 173, 196–98, 203, 217, 228, 233–34, 252–54, 256; anticipated, cannot be, 42; coming of/to the, 18, 41–42; constructing the, 67, 72; desire for the, 20; the differential stroke and the, 100; erotic confusion and the, 196; gaze of the, 67, 96; hostage of the, 172;

314 | in de x other (continued) inscribing the, 135; invention of the, 92; learning from the, 143; love of self as the, 124; proper to you belongs to the, what is, 61; recognizing the voice of the, 85; relation to the, 46; seeing and the, 36, 115; as spectator, 117; as a surprise when coming from below, behind, or sideways, 35; the trace and the, 41, 75, 84–85; wholly, 195 Ovid, Metamorphoses, 124 painter(s), 13, 21, 43, 47, 72, 89–90, 92, 116– 17, 123–24, 130, 132, 134, 146, 150–51, 155, 158, 160, 164, 167–68, 170, 174, 232, 269nn5–6 painting(s): Derrida’s self-proclaimed incompetence in, 4; drawing and, 99; format of, decisions about, 168–69; signing from inside the, 13; title of (see title); “to save the phenomena” in language and, 129–36; truth and, 137– 38; wash, Deblé’s technique of, 120–21; without words, 161 paper, question of, 180, 185 paradox/paradoxical, 7, 16, 26, 31, 36, 43, 61, 64, 95, 133, 175, 183–85, 197, 221, 224, 231–32, 235–36, 254 parasite/parasitology, 7, 257n6 parergon, 179 passivity, 46–47. See also activity Payne, Andrew, 208–12 Peinture berbère (Atlan), 172 Pentateuch, 159–61, 169. See also Bible Pentateuque (Atlan), 158–62, 165, 168–69 percept/perception, 33–34, 38, 46, 96, 100– 101, 105, 112, 209, 218, 220–21, 228 performance/performativity, 13, 99, 203–4, 237, 242, 245 perspective/perspectivism, 8, 37, 50, 151, 181 perversity, 17 Phaedrus (Plato), 40 phainesthai, 44, 47–48, 130, 140 phantasma, 137, 140, 148, 152, 199, 228, 248–49, 251 phantomality, 217–19

Pharaon (Atlan), 166 pharmakon, 7 phenomenology, 40, 45, 47, 181, 185, 218 phenomenon, 30, 44, 47, 137, 192–93, 212– 13, 219, 227 philosophy, 21–22, 24, 30, 38, 53, 80, 97, 105, 140, 167, 193, 219, 221; competence in, deconstruction and, 4–5; optical metaphor in the history of, 42–44, 96, 104; passivity/activity opposition in the history of, 46; theater and, 231–34, 238; thought and, distinction between, 21– 22; trace and, 50 phonê/phonocentrism, 39–41 photograph(s), 15, 23, 116, 141, 190, 194, 196, 200, 211, 219, 253. See also still (photographic) photography, 9, 17, 22–23, 50, 53, 116, 206, 209; allegory of light and, 192–95; head shots, opposition to, 211; image by Shinoyama (Aletheia), reaction to, 190–200; by Puglia, 141; as skiagraphy, 140, 192–93; specter and, 141, 199; as the writing of light, 126, 140– 41, 192 pictogram, 139 picture/pictural, 43, 91, 115–16, 123, 125– 26, 132–33, 136–37, 141, 155, 168, 180, 211, 256, 265n8, 271n19 Plato: deconstruction at work in, 30; driving the poet out of the city, 233; eidos (the idea) of, 42–43, 104, 133, 231; on the nonvisibility of the visible, 112; Phaedrus, 40; Timaeus, 166, 271n21 pleasure, 70, 154, 192, 217, 224 Plissart, Marie-Françoise, 17, 22; Droit de regards (“Right of Inspection”), 16 poem/poet(s)/poetry/poetic, 12–13, 20, 22, 43, 105, 108–9, 134, 136–37, 139, 142, 148, 158, 163, 174, 181, 183, 221, 233, 246, 268–69n3, 272n32 point of view (point de vue), 7–9, 11, 13–14, 23–24, 28, 37, 40–41, 95, 102, 112, 117, 123, 177, 209, 220, 250 Polieri, Jacques, 173 political, 6, 11, 14–15, 25, 27, 48, 51–52, 59–60, 73–77, 79–80, 83, 140, 148–49,

i n de x | 315 152, 158, 203, 209–10, 212–13, 220, 222, 227–28, 235–36, 240–51, 253–54 politics, 5, 10, 60, 81, 150, 176–77, 185, 237, 241–43; capitalism and, 250; of the image, new communication technologies and, 210; principle of resistance to, 48; the public archive and, 73–77; state vs. private ownership of new communication technologies, problem of, 213; the theater and, 220, 242–51 Ponge, Francis, 12–13, 252 portrait, 43, 58, 64, 71, 92, 100, 114–16, 199, 274n1 (Videor). See also self-portrait(s) Post Card, The (La Carte postale; Derrida), 6, 210–11 Prado, 127, 151 Prat, Jean-Louis, 178–79 prayer, 136, 166, 256 presence, 7–9, 18, 39, 40, 42, 54, 72, 95, 105, 178, 211, 220–22, 231; the artist’s body and, 11–12; collective in the theater, 220; experience and, 41; “telepresence,” 274n3 (Videor); “thereness” as a feeling of, 7–9, 223; unique and singular, 235– 37. See also absence presentation, 31–32, 41, 66, 102, 164, 204, 222–23, 231, 235–38 Primavera (Botticelli), 155 private/public distinction, 143, 149, 152, 203, 213, 244; art requires a public countersignature to exist, 15; in D’ailleurs, Derrida, 54, 58–60; ownership of new technologies and, 212–13 production, 13, 22, 27–29, 62, 90, 181, 183, 185, 203, 207–8, 210, 212–13, 224, 243. See also reproduction prohibition, 162, 167–68, 177, 180–81, 216 projection, 101, 207, 216, 218, 220 promise, 167, 177, 191, 196, 198–200 proper, 16–17, 37, 45, 61–63, 96, 102, 108, 132, 134–35, 137–38, 143, 169, 172, 183, 203, 226, 241, 245. See also appropriation/reappropriation/exappropriation; nonreappropriable proper name/noun, 16, 102, 132, 134–35, 137–38, 166, 169, 178, 226, 241 prosthesis, 109, 194, 206–7

Proteus, 253 Proust, Marcel, À la recherche du temps perdu, 25 psyche, 79, 127, 132, 144, 163 Psyché. Inventions de l’autre (Psyche: Inventions of the Other; Derrida), 89 psychoanalysis, 53, 75, 217–18, 228, 239 public space, 47–48, 54, 178, 231, 245 Puglia, Salvatore: Als Schrift, 136, 138; Ashbox, 131–36; Aurora, 140; Croce e Delizia, 139; Hors d’attente, 137; Intus ubique, 135–36; Orto petroso, 141; Présages, 139; Vie d’H. B., 130, 140 punishment, 105, 109 quipus, 158–59, 167. See also knot/knotted Rank, Otto, 243 reading: blindness and, 117; impact compared to viewing films of, 216; seeing and, 92 read/readable/reading, 6–8, 10–11, 17–19, 23, 29, 38, 44, 55, 57, 65–66, 71, 74, 79, 85, 89–92, 95, 101–2, 117, 134–36, 141– 42, 149, 153, 158, 160–61, 165–66, 169, 172, 178, 185–86, 190, 196–97, 205, 207, 216, 218, 223, 226, 228, 231, 250, 253, 255–56, 270n13 real/reality, 6, 8, 24, 50, 54, 62, 99, 103, 151, 154–55, 203, 205, 209, 216, 221, 223, 239, 242, 246–49, 252, 269n5, 274n3 (Videor) reappropriation, 61, 166, 184 Rebekah, 111 reference(s)/referent, 10–11, 22, 30, 41–42, 51, 63–64, 75, 99–100, 104–5, 115, 143, 149, 151–53, 159, 162–63, 173, 195–96, 203, 219, 227–28, 237, 248 Reflections on the Jewish Question (Sartre), 228 religion, 61, 159, 163, 165, 168, 237 remainder, 12–14, 16, 24, 70 remains, 7, 12–14, 17–18, 23, 40, 42–43, 47, 54, 57, 64, 69–70, 72, 123, 132, 137, 155, 168, 170, 177, 183, 190, 193, 198–99, 203–4, 207, 216, 218, 222, 232–33, 238– 39, 253

316 | in de x Rembrandt, 152 repetition, rehearsal as, 204, 236–37 representation, 67, 91–92, 111–12, 149, 159, 161, 165, 167–68, 180, 182, 211, 227, 231, 269n6; Aristotle’s vocabulary of, 131; collective in cinema, 220; at the crossroads of political life and theater, 245–47; of Dibutatis, 107; drawing as a new experience of, 143–44; editing of in cinema, 221; God’s prohibition on, 162, 168; by “new works,” 207; of objects, 91; open form as a vision of, 152; presentation without, 222, 235–36; of seeing/the blind, 106–8, 110; theatrical, 218; the unrepresentable in theater, 235; of women, 118, 122–27 repression, 185, 215, 228, 235–38 reproducibility, 126, 143, 176, 180, 182, 194, 207, 221, 223, 227. See also Benjamin, Walter reproduction, 12, 126, 131, 172, 182–83, 185, 192, 207, 209, 211, 213 reserve, 27, 56–57, 60–61, 65, 102, 109, 120, 149, 153, 165, 170, 192–93, 196–97, 235 resistance, 5, 8, 23, 48, 55–56, 72–73, 84, 127, 165, 211, 253 Resistance, 172 response, 4, 6, 17–18, 25, 29, 194, 211, 252, 254–55 responsibility, 25, 74–75, 101, 143, 173, 180, 182, 184, 246, 254 restitution, 131–32, 139 revelation, 35, 109, 125 revenant, 222, 228, 244 revolution/revolutionary, 27, 148, 151, 195, 197, 219, 244, 247 rhetoric, 44, 68, 91, 122, 132, 136, 139, 169, 171, 197, 204, 249, 268n3 (Color to the Letter) rhythm, 30, 50–51, 53, 55, 61, 136, 150, 158, 171, 203, 205, 213, 215, 223–24, 269n6, 272n32. See also tempo Ribera, José de, 151 Ricoeur, Paul, 66 Ricur, Jean-Loup, 98–99 “Right of Inspection” (Droit de regards; Plissart and Derrida), 16–17, 22–23, 199

Rilke, Rainer Maria, “Die Blinde,” 48 “+R (Into the Bargain)” (Derrida), 7–8 Rodes, Jean-Michel, 49–50, 75–76 Ronsard, Pierre de, 142 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 100 Rubens, Peter Paul, Three Graces, 127 ruin(s)/ruined, 28, 73, 116–17, 133 Sábato, Ernesto, Alejandra, 48 sacrality, 183–84 sacrifice, 233–34 Sade, Marquis de (Donatien François Alphonse), 173 Saïs, 166 Salamboo (Atlan), 172 salvation, 131, 137–38, 182, 222 Samson, 105 Sartre, Jean-Paul, Reflections on the Jewish Question, 228 saying/sayable, 14, 20, 29, 34, 37, 40, 43, 50– 51, 56, 60–61, 64–65, 68, 82–84, 95–97, 101, 114, 117, 126, 128, 130–31, 135, 137, 140, 149, 151, 155, 177, 181–83, 194, 200, 205, 211, 247, 253 scene, 6, 17, 57–58, 106, 122–23, 139, 148, 152–55, 158–61, 183–84, 190, 204, 208, 215–16, 218, 231–33, 241 screen, 63–64, 185, 199, 214, 216–20. See also silk-screen prints sculptor/sculpture, 7–9, 13, 21, 45, 71, 151, 177–82, 185, 190, 206, 232, 269n6 “Second Meditation” (Descartes), 204 secret, 58–59, 66, 91, 127, 177, 184, 194, 196, 199, 207, 217, 233, 243–44; the cut and the, 74; of excessiveness, 169–70; exhibited as a secret, possibility of, 60, 72; experience of in drawing, 47, 110; the political question and the, 74–75; private/public distinction and the, 59– 60; separation/split personality and the, 60, 65, 74 seeing, 71, 81, 92, 103–9, 111–12, 114–15, 117, 127–28, 190, 194–95, 204–5, 218– 19, 225, 231, 250; as apprehension, 34; blindness and, 34, 94–97 (see also blindness); eyes, visibility of, 115; optical metaphor in the history of philosophy,

i n de x | 317 42–44, 96, 104; point of view and, 37; reading and, 92; a specter, 33; thinking/ thought and, 31–48, 79–80; touch and, 44–46. See also eyesight; sight; vision Sein und Zeit (Heidegger), 57 self-analysis, 74–75 self-portrait(s), 36, 110, 121, 128, 139, 253; blindness and, 95–96, 105–6; concept/ status of, 115–16; of Derrida and Fathy, 58; Louvre exhibition, as theme of the, 113–17. See also “Memoirs of the Blind” (exhibition at the Louvre) Self-Portrait with Spectacles (Chardin), 110, 114 self-referentiality, 227 “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter’” (Lacan), 84 sensible, 42–43, 46–47, 97, 100, 109, 164. See also intelligible separation, 60, 74, 124, 132, 154, 171, 180– 83, 239 seriality/series, 29, 49, 102–3, 114, 126, 134, 136, 140–41, 148, 163, 170–72, 195–97, 200, 217, 231 sex/sexual, 7, 62, 74, 92, 127, 177, 192, 212, 215, 227 sexual difference, 62, 74, 227 shadow/shade, 122, 158; drawing and, 107; light and, 140–41, 192–94 Shakespeare, William, 81, 242–43, 247 Shell and the Kernel, The (L’Écorce et le noyau; Abraham and Torok), 79 Shinoyama, Kishin: Accidents 3, 190–200, 191; Light of the Dark, 190, 198 Shoah, 222–23, 228 Shoah (Lanzmann), 221–23, 228 sight, 33, 37–38, 42, 44–45, 80, 95–97, 104–15, 134, 138, 167, 169, 179, 274n1 (Videor). See also blindness; eyesight; seeing; vision signature, 20, 134, 137–40, 143, 148–49, 158, 174, 193, 206, 270n13; of the Algerian craftsman, 82; the countersignature and, 12–15; as the event of the work rather than the name of the author, 12–14, 25; of the filmmaker, 58; reappropriation of, impossibility of, 61;

respecting the individual, 5; on the support/underside, 182–83; of Van Gogh, relation to/experience of, 11–12 Signéponge/Signsponge (Derrida), 12 silence, 8, 52, 54–55, 121, 126, 133, 161, 163, 168, 171, 173, 179, 190, 195, 204, 228, 254, 271nn15–21 silk-screen prints, 146, 148, 185 Simplicius, 130 simulacrum, 19, 91, 131–32, 137–38, 196, 204, 206, 222, 237–38, 274n3 (Videor) Sinaï (Atlan), 172 singularity, 5, 67, 126, 168, 171, 173, 180, 198, 206, 220, 237 size, 135, 154, 159, 162–69, 172 skiagraphy, 192 snapshot, 195–98, 238, 256 Socrates, 233 Sodome (Atlan), 163, 169 solitude, 53, 168, 171, 198, 220–21 Solon, 166 sonority, 17, 206, 226. See also sound/ resound Sophocles, 233 soul, 40, 45, 127, 132, 140, 192 Soulages, François, 50–54, 62–63, 67, 77, 86 sound/resound, 9, 34, 39–40, 72, 82, 131, 133–34, 139–40, 163, 167, 171, 210, 241 space, 14–15, 21–22, 24, 26, 35, 39–40, 51, 54, 68, 90, 92–93, 107, 109, 114, 116, 132–36, 144, 150–51, 164, 177–78, 181, 198–99, 203–4, 207, 211, 215–17, 225– 26, 228, 231, 233, 237, 243, 245–47, 249, 254–56, 269n6, 274n3 (Videor); conquered in drawing, 154; language and, 18–19, 138–39; time and, 46, 52, 55, 66 spacing, 5, 10, 18–19, 21, 38–39, 46–48, 52, 100, 136, 138–39, 161, 169 spatial arts: competence/incompetence regarding, 4–5; deconstruction applied to, 4–5; silence of, 8–9; vision and, 20–21 spatiality/spatialization, 19, 169 spectacle, 60, 92, 103, 106, 110, 167, 192, 218, 220, 235–36 spectator, 19, 51, 65, 71, 96, 97, 116–17, 158, 182, 184, 216, 218–20, 226, 234, 268. See also viewer

318 | in de x Specters of Marx (Spectres de Marx; Derrida), 227, 247 specter/spectrality, 141, 199, 255; cinema and, 217–21, 226–28; concept of, 248–49; of Hamlet, 242–43; of Marx, 243–45, 251; meaning of, 33, 248; of Nietzsche, 33; photography and, 141, 199; theater and, 248, 250–51. See also ghost(s) specularity, 158, 243 speculation, 99, 102, 176, 210, 243, 250 speech, 21, 73, 81, 134, 139–40, 163, 209– 10, 221–24, 228, 231, 241–42, 245–46, 270n13; blindness of, 40; the image and, 55–58, 65–66; privileging of over writing, 39–41, 46; as time, 46 spirit, 140 Spurs (Éperons; Derrida), 91–92 Stalin, Joseph, 248 Stein, Gertrude, 171 Stendhal (Henri Beyle), 140 Stiegler, Bernard, and Jacques Derrida, Échographies—de la télévision (Echographies of Television), 214 still (photographic), 65, 194–97, 199. See also photograph(s) story, 16, 26, 54, 80, 96, 99, 101–4, 108, 110– 11, 113, 116, 121, 123, 128, 169, 193, 197. See also history “Story of the Eye” (Bataille), 108 stroke, 36, 39, 90, 107, 140–41, 150, 152, 270n13; brush, 11; differential, 46–48, 100; in drawing, 31, 47, 97, 110, 112, 114, 142–44, 148, 154–55; experience of, 47; language and, 31; in music, 48; in painting, 158, 160–61, 164, 166, 169; seeing/visibility and, 36, 100, 105, 110, 112; trace and, 47; in writing, 48, 100. See also line; trait subjectile, 122; for Artaud, 16, 179, 181; for color, 167; for the Incas, 158; the question of, 181, 186; as an underside, 175–76, 179–86 (see also underneath/ underside); uniqueness and, 172, 176; woman as always, 122; as a word to take risks with, 16–17 subject/subjected/subjectivity, 7–8, 14, 18,

24–25, 28, 42, 54–56, 58, 70–71, 92, 123, 146, 150, 164–65, 167–70, 172–73, 177, 182, 184, 192, 196, 199, 204–5, 210, 224, 234, 268n3 (Color to the Letter) sublime, 56, 61, 124, 134, 162, 164–65, 168, 196, 254 substance, 42, 59, 70, 175–76, 179–80 substitution, 172–74, 207, 252 supplement/supplementary, 7, 26, 90, 219, 223, 233 support, 42, 44, 75, 83, 92, 102, 144, 158, 167, 169, 172, 175–76, 178–85, 203, 207 supposition, 141, 175–76 surcease, 255 surface, 32, 36, 99–100, 102, 109, 136, 139– 40, 177, 179–82, 185, 199, 271n21 surge, 255 survival/survivance, 56, 77, 79, 185, 222, 255 survivor(s), 133, 222, 255 Susannah, 121, 124 Susannah after Tintoretto (Deblé), 120 symptom, 32, 204, 206, 245, 249, 256 synchrony, 139–40, 207, 247–48. See also anachrony; dyschrony; time tact, 44–45, 126, 180. See also contact Talbot, Jane, 237 Tanit (Atlan), 159, 169, 172 Tanizaki, Junichiro¯, 192–93; A Fool’s Love, 193; In Praise of Shadows, 193 teaching(s), 10, 58, 85, 143–44, 210, 224 tear(s), 32, 108–9, 125, 192, 195, 197–98 technique, 120, 143, 178, 185, 193–94, 203, 206–7, 210, 213, 218–19, 223, 226, 268n3 (Color to the Letter) technology, 6, 245; considerations regarding and speed of adopting new, 209–12; innovations in and the “end of the book,” 209–10; state vs. private ownership of new, 212–13 telecommunications, 210 telephone, 195, 209–10, 212 teletechnology, 245, 249–50 Teletheory (Ulmer), 26–27 television, 9, 26, 49–50, 59, 63, 78, 203, 206, 209–10, 213, 217, 226, 249

i n de x | 319 tempo, 30, 56, 226. See also rhythm temporality, 9, 15, 46, 52, 57, 219, 236–37, 247 Teresa of Ávila, Saint, 83 terror, 115, 158, 160. See also fear; fright/ frighten testimony, 197, 221–22, 228, 245 text(s), 58, 64–66, 70–71, 74, 79–80, 81, 90, 96, 99, 101, 103, 104, 105, 108, 111–12, 117, 149–50, 173, 185, 204–5, 207, 210, 212, 219, 223–28, 253–54, 268n3 (Color to the Letter); concept/structure of, 10; logic inherent in, 210; as a love letter, 83–84; textuality, 13; textualization, 10; voice in, 18–19; writing and speech as types of, 209 theater, 91, 152, 161, 215, 217, 221, 239, 240, 250; belief and, 238–39; the institution and, 234–35; Karl Marx Théâtre inédit (Vincent), 240–49; L’éternel éphémère (Mesguich), 231–39; philosophy and, 231–34, 238; the political and, 220, 242–47, 249–51; of repression, 235–36; revolutionary, 244; sacrifice and, 233– 34; specter and, 248, 251; temporality and the structure of repetition in, 236– 38; within the theater, 242–44; tragedy, 233–34; the unrepresentable in, 235 Théâtre des Amandiers, 240, 244 theôrein, 44 theory/theoretical, 4, 6–7, 10, 22, 24, 30, 44, 65, 80, 95, 99–100, 166, 208, 217, 219, 227, 231–32, 250 “thereness,” 7, 12–14 thesis, 18, 73, 106, 121, 140, 175, 234. See also hypothesis Thing, 169–70 thinking/thought, 9, 18, 20, 23, 28, 51, 53, 59, 62, 65–66, 70, 97, 128, 132–35, 138, 140, 143–44, 152, 155, 163, 165, 169, 172, 196, 205, 207–8, 212, 217–18, 227, 231–32, 235, 237–38, 252, 255, 269n6; experience of, 42; meaning of, 37–38; philosophy and, distinction between, 21–22 (see also philosophy); the place of the visual in, 79–80; seeing and, 31–48 Thomas the Apostle, 204

Three Graces (Rubens), 127 Timaeus (Plato), 166, 271n21 time: disarticulation of, 139, 203, 236, 246–48, 274n3 (Videor); of the fish and Derrida, 57–58; gift of, 51–52; heterogeneous, 228, 246; as interminable, in D’ailleurs, Derrida on, 57–58; out of joint, 81, 246–47, 251; philosophy/ thought as a dialogue on, 50–51; problems/question of, 52, 153; of rhythm, 53; space and, 46, 52, 55, 66, 134, 138; speech as, 46–47, 139; in the theater, changing the order of, 247; theatrical, 236–38. See also anachrony; contretemps; dyschrony; synchrony “time out of joint,” 81, 246–47, 251. See also Hamlet (Shakespeare) Tintoretto, 122 Tisseron, Serge, 79–80 Titian, 122 title: of Ashbox, 132, 135; of D’ailleurs, Derrida, 52, 68; of Intus ubique, 136; of Memoirs of the Blind, 103, 105; of Pentateuque, 158–60; problem of, Atlan and, 268–69n3; of Self-Portrait, 113, 115–17; “untitled” as a, 167–70 Titus-Carmel, Gérard, 100 Tom Sawyer (film), 215 tonality/tone, 17–19, 24, 47, 55, 85, 139–40, 211, 223, 226 Torok, Maria, and Nicolas Abraham, L’Écorce et le noyau (The Shell and the Kernel), 79 touch/touching, 126, 151, 194; seeing and, 44–46; the support’s body, 180, 191. See also haptocentrism Tourner les mots (Derrida and Fathy), 80– 81, 214, 225–26 trace, 12, 38, 41, 53, 84, 92, 100, 106–7, 125, 148, 163, 182, 209, 215, 219, 232, 235, 253–55; archival/the archive and, 50, 69, 74–78; the cinematic experience and, 217, 222; concept of, 41, 46, 74–78; within deconstruction, 30; definition of, 69–70; drawing and, 35, 47; as finite, 77; as the interruption of reappropriation, 61, 69; of myself (Derrida), 70; objects

320 | in de x trace (continued) as types of, 70–71; philosophy and, 50; of the stroke, 47; trace effect, 184 tragedy, 155, 233–34 trait, 11, 31, 35, 47, 90, 100–101, 115, 143, 146, 148, 174, 180, 182, 203. See also line; stroke transference, 143, 220 translation, 131–33, 159, 249; the absolute idiom/proper name and, 134–36; by Atlan, 163; of cinematic idiom, 225; experience and, 143; Hill, in the work of, 201; between language and nonlanguage, 134; painting and, 132; question of, 22–23. See also untranslatability truth, 101, 126–27, 136–38, 153–54, 159–61, 170, 204, 224, 235, 256; effect of, cinema and, 224; painting/language and, 137– 38; of photography, 190, 193–96, 198, 200; tears unveiling the eye’s, 108–9; the theoretical as the medium of, 44. See also verity Truth in Painting, The (La Vérité en peinture; Derrida), 99, 179 Tschumi, Bernard, 16 Tudor, Mary, 231, 237 Ulmer, Gregory, Teletheory, 26–27 umbrella (Nietzsche’s), 91 uncanny, 218 unconscious, 35, 37, 54, 75–76, 79, 82, 122, 126, 132, 152–53, 161, 169, 185, 218, 228, 235 undecidable, 7, 36, 57, 59. See also decision/ indecision underneath/underside, 32; affect and, 181–85; of art, hypothesis regarding, 175–76; dedication to individuals devoted to, 178–80; forgotten, tendency to be, 179; the frame and, 179; paper as, 180–81, 185; phenomenology of art and, 181, 185; reactions to, 176–77; as support, 178–80; of the title of the lecture, 177–78; the transformation of supports, 181–86 undocumented (sans-papiers), 185, 246 United States: American cinema, 216–17;

deconstruction in, 27–30; as enigma for Derrida, 23 university, 23, 28, 208, 210, 234–35 unpresentable/unrepresentable, 164, 168, 222–23, 235–36 untranslatability, 23, 134 urgency, 51, 53, 237–38 Van Gogh, Vincent, 11–12 veil/unveil, 44, 77, 91, 107–8, 121, 176–77, 192–94, 196–200, 235 Venus, 121, 123–24, 126–27 verbal/nonverbal, 16–17, 56, 90, 101, 169, 272n32 verity, 122, 125, 127. See also truth Veronese, Paolo, 127 Viaggio in treno (Adami), 147 Viatte, Françoise, 102–3, 114 video/video art, 208, 221, 274n3 (Videor); Derrida’s experience in Hill’s, 204–6; introducing in the seminar without changing anything, 210–11; as a “new art,” 205–7; specific identity of, 9, 202–4 Vie d’H. B. (Puglia), 130, 140 viewer, 218, 220, 222. See also spectator Vincent, Jean-Pierre, Karl Marx Théâtre inédit, 240, 243–45 violence, 29, 55–56, 58, 60, 62, 76, 78, 85, 92, 123, 125, 127–28, 160, 171, 247 virgin, 91, 122, 138, 190, 197, 199 Virilio, Paul, “La lumière indirecte,” 204 virtual/virtuality/virtualization, 8, 15, 39, 85, 105, 171, 181, 185, 215, 227, 249 virus, 7, 30, 241; deconstruction as a form of a, 30; non-Marxist, 241 visibility, 16, 32, 37, 39–40, 42, 44, 47–48, 80–81, 96–97, 106, 110, 134, 152, 162, 192, 194, 198–99, 226, 232, 237, 246; no opposition between, 21, 112–13, 231; the readable and, partition between, 91; of the stroke, 112; visibility as not visible, 43, 193; the visibility of the (in)visible in theater, 235, 242, 248. See also invisibility Visible and the Invisible, The (MerleauPonty), 112 vision, 20–21, 33, 37, 42, 44, 96, 108, 113,

i n de x | 321 122, 152, 158, 160, 163, 195, 197, 205, 220, 224, 269n5. See also eyesight; seeing; sight visitation, 127, 170 visual arts, 5, 8, 10, 13, 19–21, 80, 231 voice(s), 65–66, 85, 123, 128, 132–33, 135, 153, 186, 206, 209, 216, 270n13; Atlan’s painting of, 163; beauty and, 19–20; in cinema, 223; of God, 160, 162–63; hegemony of over the visible, 39; interest in, 17; invisibility of, 248–49; recognition/ identity and, 82–83, 85; in texts, 18–19; trace and, 41 Voice and Phenomenon (Derrida), 83 Volterra, Daniele da, 108 voyeur/voyeurism, 123, 192, 199, 216, 243 vulnerability/vulnerable, 73, 122, 126, 165, 172–73 Wagner, Richard, 91 wash drawing, 120 watercolor, 120, 132, 135 Weber, Samuel, 80 weeping eyes, 32, 34 West/Western, 23, 39–40, 42–43, 106, 121, 127, 143, 151–52, 193, 219, 221, 232, 234 “What Is Called Thinking?” (Heidegger), 38 Wills, David, 4, 6–7, 14–17, 19, 22, 27 withdrawal, 138, 169 witness, 35, 116, 161, 175–76, 190, 194–95, 197, 199, 221–22 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 204 Wolf-man, 140 women, 244; in the history of art, Deblé’s

visual analysis of, 120–28; Nietzsche’s women, 91; weeping by, 32, 108–9. See also gender word(s), 8–10, 12, 16, 21, 27, 30, 33, 37, 41–44, 50, 54–58, 63, 66, 68, 70, 74, 76, 80–81, 90–93, 99, 100–102, 105, 107, 111, 115, 117, 120–21, 124–26, 128, 131– 36, 138–40, 151–52, 154–55, 158–62, 163–64, 166–70, 172–81, 185, 190–92, 198, 205–6, 220, 225–26, 232, 241, 243– 45, 247–50, 254–55, 268n3 (Color to the Letter), 269n6, 270n13; “come,” tonal differential and, 17–18; filmed, 228; as images in film, 64–65; love of, 15–17; spoken, 19 (see also speech). See also language Wounded Man, The (Courbet), 114 wound/wounded, 55, 82, 95, 105, 111, 114, 173 writing, 7, 9, 13, 15, 23, 39–41, 43, 46, 48, 55, 59, 73, 75, 77, 83, 89, 92, 99, 100, 123, 126, 134, 136, 138–41, 146, 148, 158, 176, 178–79, 192, 205, 207–8, 217, 221, 223–26, 234, 255, 270n13; filmmaking and, parallel between, 224; the image and the written word, relationship of, 54–58; limits of, composition and, 89–93; to the second power, 53–54; without seeing, 104; as the signifier of a signifier, 40; spatialization in, 18–19; speech vs. image, 209–10; tone, finding the right, 18 Yahweh, 160, 162 Yale school, 29–30