Jacques Derrida – Memoirs of the Blind

17. Sl:hool of Guercino. DellJ 5co{ru ra 5i, Dellu P,lIura No, J..<.,uvre Muscum. Memoirs of the Blind the power to draw, sublimation or interiorization (the arts of the invisible, the intelligible light, the interior or supernatural revelation). How does one demonstrate that the draftsman is blind, or, rather, that in or by drawing he does not see? Do we know of any blind draftsmen? There are deaf musicians, some great ones. There are also great blind sing ers and poets, about whom we will have more to say later; and blind sculp tors: 46 observe the drawing from the school of Guercino, Della Seoltura Sl~ Della Pittura No. This beggar has all the characteristics of the blind 17 men in the Scriptures. His gesture is that of a sculptor; for while he holds a staff in his left hand, he recognizes with his right hand the bust of a woman who might well be blind herself, her face offering itself to a caress, her eyes turned upwards, disoriented like the man's but in a movement that wavers between imploring and ecstasy ("1 ask myself-what are they seeking in the heavens, all those blind men?" the ultimate question for Baudelaire's "faintly ridiculous" Blind Men, "terrifying and strange as sleep-walkers").'" But if the blind man's mute fingers indicate "yes" to sculpture and "no" to painting, speech is enough to invert things-and to convert them. Speech, which is to say, rhetoric. It has been much disputed which is the most Excellent of the two Arts, Sculpture, or Painting, and there is a Story of its having been left to the determination of a Blind man, who gave it in favour of the Latter, being told that what by Feeling seem'd to him to be Flat, appear'd to the Eye as Round as its CompetitorY "'Charles Baudelaire, The Complete Verse, vol. 1, tr;ns. Francis Scarfe (London: Anvil Press, 1986), 185. -Trans. 46. Roger de Piles tells "The Story of a Blind Sculptor Who Made Wax Portraits." Once again, it is a story of memory: " ... 'One day, having met him in the Justinian Palace where he was copying a statue of Minerva, I took the opportunity to ask him whether he did not see just a little bit in order to copy as exactly as he did. I see nothing, he told me, and my eyes are at the tip of my fingers .... I feel out my original, he said, I study its dimensions, its protrusions and cavities: I try to retain them in my memory, then I put my hand to the wax, and by the comparison that I make between one and the other, going back and forth between them several times with my hand, I finish my work as best as I can .... But without going any further, we have in Paris a portrait by his hand, that of the late Monsieur Hes selin, head of the Bureau of Monies, who was so happy with it and found the work so marvelous that he begged the author to have himself painted so that he could take his portrait back to France and thereby conserve his memory.' ... I noticed that the Painter had put an eye at the tip of each of his fingers in order to show that the eyes he had elsewhere were totally useless to him." Coitrs de peinture par principes, preface by Jacques Thuillier (Paris, 1989), 161ff (my emphasis). This narrative is used to support a thesis about chiaroscuro that we cannot reconstitute here. 47. Jonathan Richardson, "An Argument in behalf of the Science of a Connoisseur," in Two Discourses: 1719 (London: Scholar Press, 1972),23-24. 43 Jacques Derrida Leaning against the base of the statue, lower than it, as if abandoned on the ground, (the) drawing is indeed put down: put down, subordinated in the hierarchy of the arts, submitted to the judgment of the blind man who touches but also listens to what he is told about the relief. But what, in fact, is the blind man touching? Recognizing the lines of the face at the level of the eyes, looking them in the face with his hand, but as if from memory, he puts his fingers on the forehead of the other: a loving gesture or a blessing, a protective gesture too (he seems to be hiding or closing her eyes: you don't see, don't look, I'm closing your eyes, you see: what is one doing when one closes the other's eyes?). Unless one imagines him, like Pygmalion animating a statue, in the process of restoring sight by touch ing: a blind man restoring sight to a blind woman (you don't see, now see!, you, you see, you have seen, you will have seen, you already saw-you are already living [tu vis deja)). And it just so happens that the eyes of sculp ture are always closed, "walled up" in any case, as we were saying, or turned inward, more dead than alive, scared stiff, more dead than the eyes of masks. But what is a mask? We have yet to speak of the blind man's memory as the experience 0/ the mask. _ Let me stop you for a moment before you go too far. If we can recall no blind draftsman, none that is literally deprived of sight and eyes (ab oculis), is it not going against common sense, giving in to an easy provo cation, to claim exactly the opposite, i.e., that every draftsman is blind? No one will dispute that the draftsman is prey to a devouring proliferation of the invisible, but is that enough to make him into a blind man? Is it enough to justify this counter-truth? Monet himself only almost, at the end, lost his sight. _ We are talking here about drawing, not painting. From this point of view, there are, it seems to me, at least three types of powerlessness for the eye, or let us say, three aspects, to underscore once again with a trait that which gives the experience of the gaze (aspicere) over to blindness. Aspec tus is at once gaze, sight, and that which meets the eyes: on one side, the spectator, and on the other, the aspect, in other words, the spectacle. In English, spectacles are glasses. This powerlessness is not an impotence or failure; on the contrary, it gives to the experience of drawing its quasi transcendental resource. I would see the first aspect-as we will call it-in the aperspective 0/ the 44 Memoirs of the Blind graphic act. In its originary, pathbreaking [frayage] moment, in the tracing potency of the trait, at the instant when the point at the point of the hand (of the body proper in general) moves forward upon making contact with the surface, the inscription of the ins crib able is not seen. Whether it be improvised or not, the invention of the trait does not follow, it does not conform to what is presently visible, to what would be set in front of me as a theme. Even if drawing is, as they say, mimetic, that is, reproductive, figurative, representative, even if the model is presently facing the artist, the trait must proceed in the night. It escapes the field of vision. Not only because it is not yet visible,48 but because it does not belong to the realm of the spectacle, of spectacular objectivity-and so that which it makes happen or come [advenir] cannot in itself be mimetic. The heterogeneity between the thing drawn and the drawing trait remains abyssal, whether it be between a thing represented and its representation or between the model and the image. The night of this abyss can be interpreted in two ways, either as the eve or the memory of the day, that is, as a reserve of visibility (the draftsman does not presently see but he has seen and will see again: the aperspective as the anticipating perspective or the an amnesic retrospective), or else as radically and definitively foreign to the pheno menality of the day. This heterogeneity of the invisible to the visible can haunt the visible as its very possibility. Whether one underscores this with the words of Plato or Merleau-Ponty, the visibility of the visible cannot, by definition, be seen, no more than what Aristotle speaks of as the dia phanousness of light can be. My hypothesis-remember that we are still within the logic of the hypothesis-is that the draftsman always sees him self to be prey to that which is each time universal and singular and would thus have to be called the unbeseen, as one speaks of the unbeknownst. He recalls it, is called, fascinated, or recalled by it. Memory or not, and forgetting as memory, in memory and without memory. On the one hand, then, anamnesis: anamnesis 0/ memory itself Baude- 18 48. "What is it to draw?, asks Van Gogh. "How do we do it? It is the act of clearing a path for oneself through an invisible iron wall." This letter is cited by Artaud (Oeuvres Completes, 13 :40). In an essay devoted to the drawings and portraits of Antonin Artaud ("Porcener Ie subjectile," in Dessins et portraits d'Antonin Artaud, ed. Jacques Derrida and Paule Thevenin [Paris: Gallimard, 1986]), I try in particular to interpret the relationship between what Artaud calls drawing's necessary awkwardness or mal-adresse in the path clearing of the invisible and the rejection of a certain theological order of the visible, the rejection of another maladresse of God as "the art of drawing." It is as if Artaud here countersigned Rimbaud's willful blindness: "Yes, my eyes are closed to your light.

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