Aesthetics Interrupted: the Art of Deconstruction

Geoffrey Bennington

I shall at least pretend to take ‘Art’, that rather peremptory and

intimidating one-word and indeed monosyllabic title or proper name
of this session, in its most obvious sense. Assuming that the word
appears on our programme in English (or perhaps French), I shall
take it initially as referring to so-called fine art, and more especially
to fine art considered as the object of the branch of modern philosophy
called ‘aesthetics’. But as I hope will become clearer as I proceed, such
a limitation cannot really (ultimately, in the end, at the end of the day,
as my father would have said) be justified in the context of Derrida’s
work. So I hope other possibilities will remain at least virtually open
through my remarks, from the most general sense of art as tekhnē,
in terms of which the question of fine art might seem very limitative
and regional, to other possibilities entirely, such as those that might
arise if, out of respect for our hosts in Frankfurt, we took the word
as in fact being written or spoken in German rather than English or
French (perhaps as it appears in the titles of §90 and §91 at the end
of Kant’s third Critique, each time in the expression ‘Von der Art des
Führwahrhaltens. . . ’ (On What Kind of Assent. . . ), to which I will try
to return if only briefly in conclusion).1 Or perhaps we might decide
to take it not as a whole word at all, but as a fragment of a larger
sequence (as a mere part of the word ‘part’, for example, a mere joint
in the word ‘articulation’, or at the heart of the word heart)? Or, with
half an eye already on a strange text of Derrida’s on Valerio Adami to
which we shall return, we could read ‘art’ backwards as ‘tra-’, with a
view to a certain translation, and therefore a transformation, perhaps
thereby transgressing all academic norms and rules, more artfully than
artistically, with no rational end in sight.
The Oxford Literary Review 36.1 (2014): 19–35
DOI: 10.3366/olr.2014.0084
© Edinburgh University Press
www.euppublishing.com/olr
20 Oxford Literary Review

Or some other anagrammatical transformation of the word ‘art’. But

I sense that already you smell a rat.

Anecdotal prelude: a conference around the work of Jean-François

Lyotard at the University of Warwick in 1987. Lyotard is there. One
of the papers favourably compares and contrasts Lyotard’s account of
the dream-work in Discours, figure with what Derrida says about it in
‘Freud et la scène de l’écriture’.2 Lyotard is impatient, unconvinced
by the argument, and affirms ‘Derrida went much further than I did,
much faster’. But then goes on to suggest that just that speed and
distance carried Derrida rapidly (the implication clearly being too
rapidly) past exactly what Lyotard finds so interesting: ‘At bottom,
what interests me is what happens when you stand in front of a painting
and look at it. It seems to me that Derrida isn’t interested in that’.
Double agent that I have always been, I subsequently reported these
words to Derrida: ‘But he’s absolutely right’, he said. One of my
questions will be (will always have been) this question of speed, of how
slow or fast a good deconstruction might be, here for example about the
relation between the time one might indeed spend staring at a painting
and the discursive response it might then provoke. This question of
speed (which of course affects my own presentation today, which will
as always be both too slow and too fast, already caught up in what
Derrida usually — memorably at the beginning of Glas, for example,
calls precipitation3 ) might best be described as political.

Let’s start again from the top, as it were. The deconstruction of the
metaphysics of presence leaves nothing intact. The structures that
commentators on Derrida have come to call ‘quasi-transcendental’
register and accentuate the collapse and dispersion of the traditional
transcendentalia (unum, verum, bonum and perhaps here pulchrum), a
collapse that is arguably already under way in Kant. After, in, or —
better — with deconstruction the one, the true, the good and the
beautiful are all somewhat in ruins. And so attempting to organise our
Geoffrey Bennington 21

thinking after, in or with Derrida in terms of the classical divisions of

philosophy such as ‘epistemology’ or ‘ethics’, and here more especially
‘aesthetics’ allows philosophy to try to hang on to deconstruction as
though deconstruction were still philosophy — which it is not; or as if
it could be reduced to philosophy — which it cannot. Deconstruction,
in spite of what philosophers or historicists may be busy claiming, is
not philosophy, nor a philosophy, nor a kind (Art) of philosophy, not
one option among others for doing philosophy, not one item in the
menu entitled ‘Continental Philosophy’, for example, nor a historically
or geographically containable style or manner of doing philosophy, not
a specialism or a career choice.
All the transcendentalia (the one, the true, the good and here
the beautiful, then) would be, metaphysically, subject to a ‘higher’
transcendental in the form of what early Derrida, following Heidegger,
often calls ‘presence’, and which in the later work is more
usually specified as ‘ipseity’.4 All of Derrida’s non-synonymously
substitutive ‘quasi-transcendentals’, starting with différance, writing,
trace, pharmakon and so on, are names or nicknames for an inner
failing or principle of ruin affecting this transcendental position as
such: attempting to comprehend them under the sign of the One (even
as ‘Deconstruction’) will thus only find dispersion or, as I prefer to
say, scatter; as speaking the truth will thus find falsity (the pseudos as
the truth of truth)5 ; as naming the good will find evil, as pointing to
the beautiful will see only ugliness. Deconstruction is the generalised
principle of an originary corruption that does not supervene on any
prior purity, a principle of what at the beginning Derrida called a
graphic of supplementarity, and at the end a logic of auto-immunity
simultaneously making possible and compromising any effect of ipseity
whatsoever.
This deconstruction of the ultra-transcendental value of presence
also means — often in a rather perplexing way that would need to be
carefully distinguished from an architectonic in the Kantian sense or a
systematics in the Hegelian sense — that every bit of deconstruction (if
I can put it this way) contains all of deconstruction, rather like — in
an analogy I’ve used elsewhere — those fractal curves (such as so-called
Julia sets) where the whole curve can be derived from an arbitrarily
small part of its border.6 In the case of our assigned topic today, art,
it would not be difficult, as I suggested at the outset, to take ‘art’ in
22 Oxford Literary Review

the broad sense of tekhnē and derive from it all of deconstruction as a

thinking of an originary technicity. And this would return us to my
opening ‘political’ question about speed: how fast do or should we
operate that generalising derivation? One aspect of that question of
tactics and strategy (a ‘strategy without finality’, as Derrida sometimes
puts it, in the wake of some memorable but obscure remarks in
Positions7 ) is that it — and this is part of its ‘political’ character — can
in principle have no one good answer.

The principle whereby any bit of deconstruction brings with it all

of deconstruction must also affect the philosophical understanding
of art usually subsumed under the title ‘aesthetics’. According to
what we have just seen, there can in principle be no deconstructive
aesthetics (any more than there could be a deconstructive ethics
or a deconstructive epistemology: if there were these things then
deconstruction would just be another doctrine that may as well take
its place in that dismal sequence known as the history of philosophy,
and unfortunately put us back under the authority of the new and
old historicists who still largely rule over our parts of the university),
and the principle of that impossibility of a deconstructive aesthetics
will, not surprisingly, go back to the deconstruction of the metaphysics
of presence in general. Aesthetics in general is mortgaged to sensory
perception, and from very early Derrida ‘la perception n’existe pas’
(perception does not exist), as he writes in italics in a justly famous
footnote to La voix et le phénomène.8
It is perhaps hardly surprising, then, that when Derrida does
(relatively rarely, though in fact not quite as rarely as one might
immediately suppose) talk about art, about ‘works of art’, what he
finds is not any sensory plenitude but something he most often figures
as blindness. This too we can immediately refer to the early work
on Husserl, where a crucial moment of the deconstruction of the
presence of the present in Husserl’s phenomenology of internal time-
consciousness, again in La voix et le phénomène, involves a reading or a
literalising counter-reading of the motif of the Augenblick, the instant
or blinking of an eye that, on Derrida’s construal, and differently from
Geoffrey Bennington 23

its explicit status in Husserl and even in Heidegger, is essentially a

moment of blindness rather than a moment of insight:

As soon as we admit this continuity of the now and the non-now,

of perception and non-perception into the zone of originarity that is
common to originary impression and to retention, we welcome the
other into the self-identity of the Augenblick, non-presence and non-
evidentness into the blink of an eye of the instant. There is a duration
to the blink of an eye and the duration closes the eye.9

This moment, this Augenblick with its eye-closing duration, returns

explicitly, years later, in a text about art, Mémoires d’aveugle, where
Derrida is explicitly concerned to argue for a ‘transcendental’ blindness
inherent in drawing as such (‘the invisible condition of the possibility
of drawing, drawing itself, the drawing of drawing.’10 ) and which also
invokes in passing the ‘blink (. . . ) this moment of blindness that allows
sight its breath’,11 or, a little later, touching again on the question of
speed, ‘(t)he absolute speed of the instant (the time of the blink that
buries the gaze in the batting of an eyelid, the instant named Augenblick
or wink, blink, and what drops out of sight in the twinkling of an eye)’.12
This instant of blindness is structurally part of perception
(exemplarily visual perception, the most obvious model of perception
that Derrida takes to be definitive of metaphysics at least up until
his book on Jean-Luc Nancy, where he will explore other structures
of interruption in the experience of touch13 ), once we take seriously
what Derrida says about the trace, for example already in ‘Signature,
événement, contexte’, and again in a very late improvised intervention
that I discovered only recently, where he says bluntly: ‘La trace, c’est
l’expérience même (. . . ). De ce point du vue-là, il n’y a pas de limite,
tout est trace’.14
Différance presented in terms of trait and trace seems to lead Derrida
almost inevitably to a certain privilege of drawing in his discussions
of visual art. He is, for example, clearly very fascinated by the story
of Butades or Dibutades, supposedly discovering drawing (but also
thereby writing, in Derrida’s reading at least), by tracing the outline
of her lover’s shadow: this anecdote (which seems to stem from a
slightly hasty tradition of reading Pliny the elder),15 is already discussed
in some detail via Rousseau in the Grammatologie, and returns, with
24 Oxford Literary Review

explicit reference to that earlier text, in Mémoires d’aveugle,16 where

Derrida describes this shadow-tracing, mythical origin of both writing
and drawing, as a skiagraphia, a shadow-writing (he also refers it to the
shadows of Plato’s cave) that is bound up with the originary blindness
that is his main point in his discussion of drawing:

a skiagraphia or shadow writing in each case inaugurates an art

of blindness. From the outset, perception belongs to recollection.
Butades writes, and thus already loves in nostalgia. Detached from
the present of perception, fallen from the thing itself-which is thus
divided-a shadow is a simultaneous memory, and Butades’ stick is a
staff of the blind.17

This motif of skiagraphia, shadow-writing, then returns to open a

conversation on photography that was partially published in German
in 2000, and more fully in English in 2010 (the French text has not
yet been published).18 Photography might seem, on this description, to
realise much more perfectly and instantaneously than the tracing of a
stick the writing of a shadow, or a play of light and shadow, whence
its supposed ‘adherence’ to the referent made famous by Barthes. This
thought, which Derrida is of course concerned to complicate (and in so
doing again invokes the Augenblick19 ), would make of photography the
not-yet-quite artistic origin of art, a kind of pure tekhnē that is not even
a tekhnē, apparently realising a millennial fantasy that art disappear as
art into nature:

However artful the photographer may be, whatever his or her

intervention or style, there is a point at which the photographic
act is not an artistic act, a point at which it passively records
(. . . ). That would be the beauty or sublimity of photography but
also its fundamentally nonartistic quality: suddenly, one would be
given over to an experience that fundamentally cannot be mastered,
to what has taken place only once. So one would be passive and
exposed, the gaze itself would be exposed to the exposed thing, in
the time without thickness of a null duration, in a time of exposure
reduced to the instantaneous point of the snapshot. Art would itself
be conditioned by non-art, or what amounts to the same, by a
hyperaesthetics, by a perception that is somehow immediate and
Geoffrey Bennington 25

natural: immediately reproduced, immediately archived. But if we

admit that there is a duration, that this duration is constituted by a
technē, the totality of the photographic act is, if not of the order of
technē, at least undeniably marked by it. This would enjoin us also
to rethink the essence of technē.20

This posited durée of the supposedly instantaneous is none other than

the duration of the Augenblick itself that we saw already posited in La
voix et le phénomène, a duration which not only marks photography
as ‘technical’ or ‘artistic’ in spite of its apparent non-artistic or
non-technical quality, but also so marks perception itself, such that
the Augenblick of perception itself is distended, divided and now
‘technologised’ from the first, here by its photographic prosthesis.
Seeing is already photographic: the perception that ‘does not exist’ as
presence exists only if it is already an art. So it comes as no surprise that
in this interview Derrida again draws these motifs back to the legend
of Dibutades and the ‘origin of art’:

We can no longer oppose perception and technics; there is

no perception before the possibility of prosthetic iterability;
and this mere possibility marks, in advance, both perception
and the phenomenology of perception. In perception there are
already operations of selection, of exposure time, of filtering, of
development; the psychic apparatus functions also like, or as, an
apparatus of inscription and of the photographic archive. Think of
Freud’s Wunderblock. What I attempted to say about this a long time
ago, about writing, also concerned photography. Retrospectively,
looking into this techno-historical rearview mirror, we would
therefore have to recomplicate the analysis or the description of what
was supposed to have preceded photographic technology or what is
so called. We would have to go back along this path all the way
to the Platonic skiagraphia, and to all shadow writing — before the
modern technology nicknamed ‘photography’. What is described as
a play of shadow and light is already a form of writing. There is the
legend of Dibutades, who sees, retains, and draws only the shadow
of her lover on the wall, before this operation is itself represented
by drawing: is this not already a play of light, shadow and archive?
With this difference in terms of naturality, namely, the shadow in
26 Oxford Literary Review

light, the white-black, appears thus as the first technical possibility in

perception itself. The difference in light, the difference of exposure,
if you will, which is not necessarily the difference between day and
night — here we have perhaps the first possibility of the trace, of the
archive and everything that follows from it: memory, the technics of
memory, mnemotechnics, etc.21
It seems, then, that what we were saying cannot in all rigor be called
Derrida’s ‘aesthetics’ comes down to this possibility of differential
and — however minutely — deferred exposure in perception itself, best
or most obviously captured in terms that seem primarily rather black
and white, best brought out in any case in terms that do not essentially
seem to involve consideration of colour, and that seem to give a
privilege to the trait as exemplarily at work in drawing.

This privilege of the trait as a way towards thinking the trace shows up
in many of Derrida’s explicit discussions of aesthetics. For example, in
De la grammatologie or La vérité en peinture he spends a good deal of
time glossing claims by Rousseau and Kant that what is essential in an
image is always outline or design rather than colour.22 In the reading
of Rousseau, it is the trait that allows the mimetic essence of art to
show up in the form of the estampe or engraving, so that according
to Rousseau, ‘les traits d’un tableau touchant nous touchent encore
dans une estampe’ (the lines of a touching painting still touch us in
a print), allowing Derrida to develop Rousseau’s theory of the trait as
‘the element of formal difference which permits the contents (coloured
or sonorous substance) to appear’, and as the principle of an originary
reproducibility of the work of art.23 In the same late improvised text I
have been referring to, this prioritising of trait and thereby drawing is
again explicit, even as the thickness and blackness of the trait is both
accentuated and effaced:
I speak of drawing rather than colour because in drawing, the
experience of drawing (even when marked in the most homogeneous
seeming colour), we are dealing with the experience of the trait,
the differential trace. It is the experience of what comes to posit a
Geoffrey Bennington 27

limit between spaces, times, figures, colours, tones, but a limit that is
both a condition of visibility and invisible. Naturally there are thick
traits, as they say, traits which have a visible thickness, a fat black
trait, but what makes the trait in this fat black trait is not the black
thickness but the differentiality, the limit that qua limit, qua trait,
is not visible. The operation of drawing has to do with neither the
intelligible nor the sensible, and this is why it is, in a certain sense,
blind. This blindness is not an infirmity. One must see in the current
sense of the term in order to deploy these powers of blindness. But
the experience of the trait in itself is an experience of the blind: ab-
ocular (etymology of aveugle), without eyes.24

This somewhat effaced relation to colour in apparent favour of

drawing, of the line or the trait, the insistence on a blindness that
seems as though it must a fortiori be a colour-blindness, resonates
across Derrida’s writing about visual art, which on occasion also stresses
writing in the narrower sense, the way that words might appear in
paintings (for example in his piece on Salvatore Puglia).25 One might
be forgiven, in the wake of his own discussion of this issue in Kant, for
thinking that this tendency towards an interest in the line and often
the letter inclines his thinking here towards a kind of formalism.26
This apparent uncertainty about the relation of design or drawing
on the one hand and colour on the other also emerges from Derrida’s
piece on Adami in The Truth in Painting. This piece again centres on
drawings by Adami (an artist whose trait is of course usually indeed
thick and black), but does explicitly address the issue of colour, and also
indeed that of formalism. A little over half way through this text, after
a blank space that is larger than any other in the whole piece, as though
he were drawing a deep breath, Derrida does in fact come to a question
about colour, as though conscious of the fact that he has delayed in
getting to this issue: ‘La couleur n’a pas encore été nommée’ (Colour
has not yet been named).27 In what follows, Derrida runs a complex set
of parallels that promise to elucidate something of the relations between
form and content, line and colour, if only in the form of what he calls
a ‘paradox’:

And here is the paradox: because it’s lacking in nothing, because

its unchangeable program controls and constrains all that can
28 Oxford Literary Review

come upon it, it’s careful to take absolutely new itineraries each
time. In its quasi-completion, each word, each sentence takes on
a heterogeneous meaning, broaches a second traversal which is not
however secondary, derived, servile with respect to the master tr: to
drawing as practiced by Adami. Colour is never anticipated in it,
it never arrives before the complete halt of the motor trait, but by
that very fact it deploys, in broad contained bands, a force all the
more unbridled for the graphic apparatus’s remaining ready, calm,
impassively ready for anything.28

Derrida’s quite difficult point seems to be that the very decided nature
of the trait opens Adami’s work up to a more intense or transgressive
experience of colour than might otherwise have been the case:

The rigor of the divide between trait and colour becomes more
trenchant, strict, severe and jubilant as we move forward in the
so-called recent period. Because the gush of colour is held back, it
mobilizes more violence, potentializes the double energy: first the
full encircling ring, the black line, incisive, definitive, then the flood
of broad chromatic scales in a wash of colour.29

But this interplay absolutely depends on the idea that colour itself
is indeed differential, a dispositif différentiel.30 Differential colour can
be brought out, as in Adami (but also in different ways, as in, say,
Cézanne, or even in Keith Haring), by laying the line on a bit thick,
by thickening and blackening the trait the better to let the colours
do their thing. But this apparent precedence of the trait might always
have only a heuristic or didactic function (just as the insistence on
writing in early Derrida inevitably produced confusions, as though
writing simply were the trace as opposed to voice), and run the risk
of tending to have us confuse trait and trace, whereas the differential
trace of colour-differences might always be brought out better in the
apparent absence of any trait at all, in its co-originary re-trait, the
withdrawal or retrac(t)ing from which it allows the differential field
of colour to emerge with all its potential effects of presence.31 Once
the trait is tendentially not even black (but invisible), once blindness is
not blackness (but perhaps something more like Proust’s ‘kaléidoscope
Geoffrey Bennington 29

de l’obscurité’ at the beginning of the Recherche, or Goethe’s colours

emerging from the shadows),32 then it is not colour-blindness either,
and all the colours of the rainbow can indeed emerge, not just where
they are separated by thick black lines, but perhaps all the better in the
absence of such lines (in Rothko, for example).

The interruption of the presence of the present, and thereby of

aesthesis itself, most obviously through Derrida’s reflection on the
blindness intrinsic to the drawn trait, but also in the differentiality
of colour ‘itself’, might also affect our understanding of judgement in
general as supposedly exemplified in the aesthetic judgement. You will
remember that Kant, seeking to elucidate judgement at its most purely
judgemental, in its reflective rather than determinative form, in search
of a rule rather than subsuming under a given rule — judgement at its
most judgemental, then, which will also turn out to be where critique
is most critical, most itself, not on the way to theory or doctrine,
already thereby proto-deconstructive — Kant claims that the aesthetic
judgement, as opposed to the teleological judgement, is ‘the part that
belongs essentially’ to the critique.33 And yet once we open up the
aesthetic to the resources of the differential trace, and therefore of
blindness, as Derrida does, then the question of judgement, of what
is most essential or critical in the judgement, will itself inevitably be
displaced. It is no accident that in both the Adami text, and at the end
of the late improvised piece ‘Penser à ne pas voir’, Derrida moves to
political questions, via Adami’s Benjamin in the first case, and via a
consideration of the more general issues of publicity and secrecy in the
second. Here he is at the end of that late reflexion:

So there is an experience of the secret here, i.e. of what stands

retrac(t)ed with respect to visibility, with respect to enlightenment,
with respect even to the public space. At bottom, if one wants to
hang on to the equation between public space, space itself, and the
fact of appearing in the light (phainesthai, the phenomenality of the
phenomenon, phenomenology), then what I have just said about
the traced-tracing trait, the trace of the trait, does not belong through
30 Oxford Literary Review

and through to the public space, to the space of enlightenment,

and thus, in a way, to the space of reason. Which does not mean
that this belongs to some obscurity, or generates obscurantism, or
belongs to the night. But no more does it come to light. In any
drawing worthy of the name, in what makes for the tracing of
a drawing, a movement remains absolutely secret, i.e. separated
(secernere, secretum), irreducible to diurnal visibility.
The political consequences of this are serious. Wherever there is
tracing of difference — and this is also valid for the trait of writing,
the musical trait — wherever there is a trait insofar as it is subtracted
or retracted with respect to visibility, something resists political
publicity, the phainesthai of public space. ‘Something’ that is not a
thing or a cause, presents itself in the public space but withdraws
from it at the same time, resists it. This is an odd principle of
resistance to the political as it has been determined since Plato,
from the Greek concept of democracy up to the Enlightenment.
‘Something’ in this resists all of itself without one having to organize
resistance with political parties. This resists politicization but, like
every resistance to a politicization, this is also naturally a force of
repoliticization, a displacement of the political.34

This radicalisation of a thinking about art that introduces into the field
of aisthesis the complications of a thinking of the trace suggests that
the essential moment of judgement may not in fact be found in the
aesthetic judgement (as judgement of the beautiful) at all. One obvious
place in Kant where pressure can and has been put on this matter
(by Derrida himself and many others) is through the analytic of the
sublime, which does indeed engage with something beyond the field
of the sensory, and therefore beyond the aesthetic as such. My own
suggestion in conclusion is that it might in fact be more interesting
to pursue these questions into the now rather unfashionable critique
of teleological judgement, where the very impurity of the situation
Kant describes (an impurity that stems from the irreducible place
of contingent objects in the teleological judgement: the teleological
judgement cannot ever be purely formal) would be very precisely
a motive to pursue it further, in a way that might sidestep some
of the more familiar construals of the relationship of aesthetics and
politics. If the teleological judgement turns out, against Kant’s most
Geoffrey Bennington 31

obvious intention, always to show up something of the order of

an originary interruption in the teleological structure itself, whereby
something of the end is indefinitely held back from the start, then
we might find ourselves precisely in that zone of ‘strategy without
finality’ I mentioned earlier, the zone of what is most often called
by the old name ‘politics’. In those final paragraphs of the Critique of
Teleological Judgment that I mentioned at the outset, where the ‘Art des
Führwahrhaltens’ appears in the title, the kind of holding-for-true in
play is not of the order of knowledge, but of the order of a faith —
a faith that in Mémoires d’aveugle Derrida precisely characterises in
terms of blindness35 — but a faith that turns out to be merely an open
engagement to a promise that is itself no more than a pure holding-
open of the promissory structure itself in a temporality that already
looks messianic.36
Of course this suggestion about what to read in the Critique of
Judgment is itself, as they say in American English, a judgement-call,
the place for a decision in the absence of an applicable rule.
Or perhaps, as we might also want to say: there’s an art to it, an art
to judgement and an art to deconstruction, in Derrida’s hands at least
a very fine art.

Notes
1
Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft in Werke in 12 Bänden, vol. 10, edited
by Wilhelm Weischedel (Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp, 1977), §§ 90–91, pp.
426–42; tr. Werner S. Pluhar as Critique of Judgment (Indianapolis, Hackett
Publishing Company, 1987), pp. 353–68. In this essay, references are given to the
original French editions of Derrida’s work, followed by references to the translation
in parentheses.
2
Jean-Francois Lyotard, Discours, figure (Paris, Klincksieck, 1971) (Discourse, Figure,
translated by Antony Hudek and Mary Lydon (Minneapolis, University of
Minneapolis Press, 2011); Jacques Derrida, ‘Freud et la scène de l’écriture’ in
L’écriture et la difference (Paris, Editions du Seuil, 1967) (‘Freud and the Scene
of Writing’ in Writing and Difference, translated by Alan Bass, Chicago, University
of Chicago Press, 1978).
3
Jacques Derrida, Glas (Paris, Galilée, 1974), p. 12a (Glas, translated by John P.
Leavey and Richard Rand, Lincoln and London, University of Nebraska Press,
1986), p. 6a.
32 Oxford Literary Review
4
See especially Voyous (Paris, Galilée, 2003) (Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, translated
by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas, Stanford, Stanford University Press,
2005).
5
See Jacques Derrida, La voix et le phénomène (Paris, Presses Universitaires
de France, 1967) (Voice and Phenomenon, translated by Leonard Lawlor,
Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 2011), p. 61n (47n): ‘cette « fausseté »
est la vérité même de la vérité’ (‘this “falsity” is the very truth of truth’).
6
See Heinz-Otto Peitgen and Peter H. Richter, The Beauty of Fractals (Berlin,
Springer Verlag, 1986), p. 10. See too my ‘Fractal Geography’ in Reading Of
Grammatology, edited by Sean Gaston and Ian McLachlan (London, Continuum
Books, 2011), pp. 137–145.
7
Cf. Jacques Derrida, Positions (Paris, Editions de Minuit, 1972), pp. 95–6, where
Derrida explains, abyssally, that using the word ‘strategy’ for ‘une opération qui
refuse d’être en dernière analyse commandée par un horizon téléo-eschatologique’
(‘an operation that in the last analysis refuses to be governed by a teleo-
eschatological horizon’) is itself strategic in this displaced sense. The formula
‘stratégie sans finalité’ appears many times: see for example La Carte postale. De
Socrate à Freud et au-delà (Paris, Flammarion, 1980), p. 297; Psyché. Inventions de
l’autre (Paris, Galilée, 1987), p. 95 and especially Du droit à la philosophie (Paris,
Galilée, 1990), pp. 458–9.
8
‘Show finally that the theme or value of “pure presentation”, of pure and
originary presentation, of full and simple presence, etc., constitute the complicity
of phenomenology with classical psychology, their common metaphysical
presupposition? By asserting that perception does not exist or that what one calls
perception is not originary, and that in a certain way everything “begins” with
re-presentation (a proposition that can obviously be sustained only in the crossing-
through of these two latter concepts: it means that there is no “beginning” and the
“re-presentation” of which we are speaking is not the modification of a “re-“ that
has supervened upon an originary presentation), by reintroducing the difference
of the “sign” into the heart of the “originary”, the point is not to fall short
of transcendental phenomenology, be it towards an “empiricism” or towards a
“Kantian” critique of the claim to originary intuition. In this way we have just
designated the primary intention — and the distant horizon — of the present essay.’
Derrida, La voix et la phénomène, pp. 49–50 (39; tr. mod.).
9
Derrida, La voix et la phénomène, p. 73 (56).
10
Jacques Derrida, Mémoires d’aveugle. L’autoportrait et autres ruines (Paris, Réunion
des Muséees Nationaux, 1991) (Memoires of the Blind. The Self-Portrait and Other
Ruins, translated by Michael Naas and Pascale-Anne Brault, Chicago, University
Geoffrey Bennington 33

of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 46 (41). See also a ‘quasi-transcendental deduction’

in Mémoires d’aveugle, p. 84 (73) of which drawings of blind people would then
be a kind of secondary figuration that Derrida slightly mysteriously refers to as
‘sacrificial’ (cf. too p. 96 (92).)
11
Derrida, Mémoires d’aveugle, p. 38 (32): ‘clin d’oeil (. . . ) cet instant d’aveuglement
qui assure à la vue sa respiration’. This reference to the rhythm of breathing
might be read alongside a comment in De la grammatologie (Paris, Editions de
Minuit, 1967), p. 206 (Of Grammatology, translated by Gayatri Chakravorty
Spivak, Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), p. 143: ‘Sans la
possibilité de la différance, le désir de la présence comme telle ne trouverait pas
sa respiration. Cela veut dire du même coup que ce désir porte en lui le destin de
son inassouvissement. La différance produit ce qu’elle interdit, rend possible cela
même qu’elle rend impossible.’ (Without the possibility of differance, the desire
for presence as such would not find its breathing-space. That means by the same
token that this desire bears within it the destiny of its non-satisfaction. Differance
produces what it forbids, makes possible the very thing it makes impossible.).
12
Derrida, Mémoires d’aveugle, p. 53 (48). This ‘twinkling of an eye’ is quoting the St
Paul of 1 Corinthians 15:52; for a paradoxical duration of the Augenblick, cf. too
Derrida, Mémoires d’aveugle, pp. 72–4 (69).
13
Cf. Jacques Derrida, Le toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy (Paris, Galilée, 2000). (On
Touching, Jean-Luc Nancy, translated by Christine Irizarry, Stanford, Stanford
University Press, 2005).
14
Jacques Derrida, ‘Penser à ne pas voir’ in Penser à ne pas voir: Ecrits sur les arts
du visible 1979–2004, edited by Ginette Michaud, Joana Masó and Javier Bassas
(Paris, Editions de la Différence, 2013), p. 69: ‘The trace is experience itself,
wherever nothing in it comes down to the living present and in which every living
present is structured as present by referral to the other or something other, as a
trace of something other, as referral-to. From that point of view there is no limit,
everything is trace. These are propositions that some people have judged to be a
little provocative. I have said that everything is trace, that the world was trace, that
experience was trace, that this gesture is trace, that voice is a writing, that voice is a
system of traces, that there is no outside-text, that there is nothing that as it were
borders from the outside this experience of the trace.’ (my translation)
15
Pliny the Elder (Natural History, translated by John Bostock and H. T. Riley
(London, Bohn, 1855), Book XXXV, 43 (12)) in fact has Butades discovering the
art of modeling rather than drawing or painting: ‘Butades, a potter of Sicyon, was
the first who invented, at Corinth, the art of modeling portraits in the earth which
he used in his trade. It was through his daughter that he made the discovery; who,
34 Oxford Literary Review

being deeply in love with a young man about to depart on a long journey, traced the
profile of his face, as thrown upon the wall by the light of the lamp. Upon seeing
this, her father filled in the outline, by compressing clay upon the surface, and so
made a face in relief, which he then hardened by fire along with other articles of
pottery.’ Pliny does however state in an earlier chapter that ‘all agree that [the art
of painting] originated in tracing lines round the human shadow’ (XXXV, 5).
16
Derrida, De la grammatologie, pp. 333–4 (234); Derrida, Mémoires d’aveugle, pp.
53–6 and note p. 50 (49–51): this scene was a popular subject of painting and
drawing in the eighteenth century, and the book includes several examples.
17
Derrida, Mémoires d’aveugle, p. 54 (51).
18
Jacques Derrida, Copy, Archive, Signature: A Conversation on Photography, edited
by Gerhard Richter, translated by Jeff Fort (Stanford, Stanford University Press,
2010). I am grateful to Gerhard Richter for providing me with a copy of the original
French transcription of the interview, on the basis of which I make some very slight
changes to the published translation.
19
Derrida, Copy, Archive, Signature, p. 8.
20
Derrida, Copy, Archive, Signature, p. 10 (translation slightly modified).
21
Derrida, Copy, Archive, Signature, pp. 14–15.
22
Cf. Derrida, De la grammatologie, pp. 296–7 (206–7); La vérité en peinture (Paris,
Flammarion, 1978) (The Truth in Painting, translated by Geoffrey Bennington and
Ian McLeod, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 88–9 (76–7).
23
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Essai sur l’origine des langues in Oeuvres completes, 5 vols,
edited by Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond (Paris, Gallimard, 1959–95),
Vol. V, p. 413; Derrida, Grammatologie, p. 297 (209).
24
Derrida, ‘Penser à ne pas Voir’, p. 77.
25
‘Sauver les phénomènes: pour Salvatore Puglia’ in Le Contretemps, I (1995), pp.
14–25, reprinted in Penser à ne pas voir, pp. 179–192.
26
See for example the claims made in a difficult text by Marie-Claire Ropars-
Wuilleumier, ‘The Dissimulation of Painting’ in Deconstruction and the Visual Arts.
Art, Media, Architecture, edited by Peter Brunette and David Wills (Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 65–79: ‘In deconstructing Kant, Derrida
retains certain of his postulates: first the privilege given to drawing over colour
(. . . )’ (p. 72).
27
Derrida, La vérité en peinture, p. 193 (169). This sentence also gives its title to an
essay by Stephen Melville in the Deconstruction and the Visual Arts volume in which
he is kind enough to quote my own earlier claim that ‘Colour is, in deconstruction’.
See specially Brunette/ Wills, Deconstruction and Visual Arts, pp. 44–7.
28
Derrida, La vérité en peinture, p. 196 (171–2).
Geoffrey Bennington 35
29
Derrida, La vérité en peinture, p. 196 (172).
30
Derrida, La vérité en peinture, p. 196 (172).
31
This would be the place to read Derrida’s extended and difficult commentary on
Heidegger’s use of terms in Riss, in the Origin of the Work of Art: see especially
‘Le retrait de la métaphore,’ in Psyché, and De l’esprit. Heidegger et la question
(Paris, Galilée, 1987) (Of Spirit. Heidegger and the Question, translated by Geoffrey
Bennington and Rachel Bowlby, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1989), pp.
171ff (104ff). Cf. Martin Heidegger, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ in Off
the Beaten Track, edited and translated by Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes,
Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp. 1–52.
32
Cf. Marcel Proust, A la recherche du temps perdu, 4 vols, edited by Jean-Yves Tadié
(Paris, Gallimard, 1987), I, p. 4; Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Theory of Colours,
translated by Charles Lock Eastlake (Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1982).
33
Kant, Critique of Judgment, p.193.
34
Derrida, Penser à ne pas voir, p. 72.
35
Derrida, Mémoires d’aveugle, p. 36 (30).
36
See the reading of this moment in Kant in my book Frontières kantiennes (Paris,
Galilée, 2000).