for Adrian Frandle, who created the conditions for this seeing
On this, the day of May 16th, in the year 1991, Jacques Derrida delivered a lecture titled “A dessein, le dessin.” We know this because Francois Martin recorded this lecture, and preserved the tape— a fact that I myself only encountered due to the thoughtfulness of a friend.
Considering the “authority of the gaze” in history, where ‘to know’ also means ‘to see’ or ‘to look’, Derrida draws the audience’s attention to Memoirs of the Blind (Mémoires d’aveugle), a book that focused on artistic “exhibition or exposition of the gaze.” He describes Memoirs of the Blind as “the log book of a blind man invited to organize an exhibition at the Louvre,” a book whose “first meaning” can be summed in the statement: “Here are the memoirs of the blind man that I am and have been throughout this exhibition of drawings.”
He is speaking of blindness in art— and sight. Of course he is doing violence to himself in this as well, for Derrida always applies the most intense intellectual violence to matters concerning his own subjectivity, or his own “I”. By “exposing the gaze, well, the eye as it is itself is exposed, exposed to the wound.”
Drawing comes from blindness, or the “apprehension” of it, as Derrida conjectures (italics mine):
Of the fall in the sense of sin…. ‘Sin’ is densely-connoted word for Derrida to lay (and to leave unexamined) in this context, yet that is precisely what he does.
Jean Baptiste Regnault, Origin of Painting, 1785
Pivoting to the artistic theme of ‘the origin of drawing’ in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Derrida gestures towards “numerous representations around the character of Dibutatis” before retelling Pliny’s tale in his own words:
This tale “sets us on the path of a kind of increased light or visibility in the very experience of blindness,” he continues, before uttering a somewhat paradoxical claim: “In the night, in the night itself, the most light appears.”
“The condition of sight can’t be seen”: we can’t see visibility. “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.” This leads Derrida to a “localizable point” in the field of the vision that he calls “the blind spot” or “the blind point.” The thought that guided him in the exhibition was “that the draftman’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 […] cannot but bustle around this blindness, this 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.” At this point, Derrida recognizes himself in his words, and this act of seeing is what led him 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.” He continues by noting that, in returning to the book, “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.”
The violence of the attempt to see (which is kinned to the attempt to know, as he mentions briefly at the beginning) involves a struggle with recognition:
Joseph Benoit Suvee, Invention of Art of Drawing, 1793
“No internal analysis of a so-called ‘self-portrait’ drawing can prove that it's indeed a self-portrait,” Derrida says. For example, when a person refers to “Egon Schiele’s self-portrait,” they are only quoting the title given by the artist. Schiele is the one who determined which of his pieces were self-portraits and which were speculative fictions, and this determination took place in the act of titling.
The cliche version of this would mention something about the eye of the beholder— though Derrida doesn’t bother with this English idiom. Why should he, in French? Deconstruction welcomes the kindling of the idiom and cliche, but Derrida is focused on the reflected image: the thing we see when we look in the mirror. There is something lovely and provocative in the way he says “it is we who put out the self-portrait painter’s eyes”:
”Reading, as opposed to seeing drawings, is experiencing blindness,” Derrida concludes.
As for Dibutades—
Francine van Hove, Dibutades, 2007
In the legend as recounted by Pliny (Natural History Book XXXV), the daughter remains unnamed. Pliny tells the story in order to “append some accounts of the plastic art.” According to his account:
“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, 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 [umbram ex facie eius ad lucernam in pariete lineis circumscripsit]. 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.”
This is the story of sculpture, of the plastic arts—- and plasticity is also a story of materiality, or the materials in which a subject is conceived. In drawing, as in all the paintings above, Dibutades is confronted with her own shadow alongside that of her lover’s. Pliny doesn’t mention whether or not her tracings include herself, or whether a part of her shadow mixes with his so that the final tracing is a composite —- say, her ear and cheek buried in his profile.
So there is the problem of proximity, or the relationship between the shadows on the wall. But there is also the unstable nature of the medium, itself: projection is a very sensitive endeavor. The scale of a shadow can be reduced or enlarged depending on the position, angle, and proximity of the light source. Tracing a portrait from a shadow gives up on precision: the fidelity is to the idea rather than accurate depiction. Dibutades would hardly be able to recognize her lover in the tracings of a shadow, and recognition is what seems to be at stake for the viewer of the portrait, as opposed to its creator?
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[All Derrida quotations are from Jacques Derrida’s “Drawing by Design,” the transcription of lecture delivered by Derrida on May 16, 1991, titled “A dessein, le dessin, as translated by Laurent Milesi and given to me by Adrian Frandle.]