Le Toucher Juste

YVE-ALAIN BOIS

This is the first time I have taken part in a memorial of this sort.1 Thus far my hesitation has always been stronger than my desire to pay tribute. But there are two reasons why I have now managed to bypass this con- stitutive reluctance. The first is that while such a reluctance was long shared by Jacques Derrida himself, he lifted it, painfully and hesitantly, but lifted it nevertheless, as he analyzed its multifarious motives in his first piece of obituary prose (“The Deaths of Roland Barthes”) and in all the posthumous homages he was driven to write, down to the last published one, pronounced at the burial of Maurice Blanchot a year and a half ago. After reading Derrida’s numerous “adieux” to friends and colleagues, none of the fears one might have in taking up the role of memorialist are dissipated—quite the contrary—but at least we know that there is no way out and that whatever we say will necessarily fall into one or the other of the identificatory booby traps he has so unremit- tingly disclosed. The second reason why I summoned the courage to speak is that I felt some public event should send a message of protest against the revolting obituary of Derrida published in the New York Times on October 10, 2004. In today’s pervasive anti-intellectual, anti-academic, and xenophobic climate in this country, I think it is our duty to salute a thinker whose entire oeuvre militated against the forces that set the conditions of possibility of such a climate. At the risk of falling into identificatory trap number one (that by which the phrase “the great man and I” is surreptitiously transformed into “I and the great man”), I shall dwell on my encounters with Jacques Derrida, mostly because they had a determining effect on my profes- sional choice. I had been lucky enough to be exposed to his writing while in high school—the first text of his that I read was one of his first on Antonin Artaud, “La parole soufflée” (reprinted in Writing and Difference). It was daunting, but with the help of a professor of philosophy who was kind enough to hold a private tutorial for several students frustrated by the regular curriculum, I did not give up. Other difficult texts followed, and I quickly realized that they helped each other in my mind, that it was all right not to understand everything at once and that there were thresholds of understanding that one could pass, one after the other, incrementally and perhaps irreversibly so.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/1526381054573569 by guest on 25 September 2021 By the time I came to Paris to study with Roland Barthes, I was ready to tackle On Grammatology. This book was the most complex I had ever read—it took me a good three months to swallow it. It did not change my determination not to become a philosopher. But in its powerful critique of logocentrism, including that of Barthes’s reversal of Saussure’s characterization of linguistics as part of semiology, this book became an ally. I had wanted above all to study art history. But because this disci- pline was utterly mediocre in France at that time, and I am sorry to say that it has not changed much, I had opted for Barthes’s semiology, soon to grasp that its main motto, “Il n’y a de sens que nommé,” (there is no meaning that is unnamed) was also that of this particular branch of art history, called iconology, against which I would spend the rest of my life struggling. Perhaps under the pressure of what I saw as two irreconcilable systems of thought, I literally collapsed. (I would realize only a bit later that Barthes himself had already left the semiological territory he had helped to chart and that he was not fundamentally in disagreement with Derrida—even if he still believed, and would until the end of his life, in Emile Benveniste’s statement according to which language is the only system of signiﬁcation that is able to interpret other systems.) But I was not that clever or well-informed in 1972, and after reading in a binge the three books by Derrida that appeared that year (Dissemination, Margins of Philosophy, and Positions), I fell into a deep depression. What I did not know was that Derrida was in a pretty bad state too. The reason was the almost complete silence that surrounded the publication of the three books I mentioned. They were quite simply boycotted by the French intelligentsia. The only reviews to appear were, quite hilariously in hindsight, in the Communist press. Coming out of my slumber one morning, I wrote him a postcard saying something like: “do not worry about the silence; people, particularly young people, do read your work.” He responded immediately—and I will always remember his phrase: “votre lettre me touche, et elle touche juste” (your letter touches me, and it touches right on)—and he asked me to call him up. During my ﬁrst visit, with his usual generosity, he took a gamble and, in order to pull me out of my depressive state, commissioned an essay from me, vowing to have it published in the journal Critique—which is what eventually happened. One could say that the topic of the essay was a kind of compromise—it concerned Matisse’s texts on art, which had just appeared, and not directly his art itself—but I knew, after having passed this test, that I could, if I wanted to, become an art historian. Thanks to Derrida’s encouragements, but also to Hubert Damisch’s and of course to Barthes’s, I started coediting a journal (or rather a kind of yearly almanac whose fourth and last issue had circa 300 pages!). It is

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/1526381054573569 by guest on 25 September 2021 to this “journal,” called Macula, that Derrida offered in 1978 his famous essay “Restitutions de la vérité en pointure” (rendered in English as “Restitutions of the Truth in Pointing,” which does not come close to translating the pun of the French title between pointure—the size of a shoe—and peinture). I would have quite a few amusing anecdotes to tell about the origin of this text and the various problems encountered around its publication, but all that I currently want to mention is that, at the time, the essay was for me a disappointment. Not only did it not per- form what I expected it would and had nothing to do with the scathing critique of Heidegger’s text Derrida had offered in his seminar on “The Origin of the Work of Art,” which I had attended, but also it seemed to me to be suffering from the same malady that affects all French philoso- phers, except perhaps Merleau-Ponty, when they write about art—which I would call a certain blindness to the specificity of art, a certain ten- dency to consider the work of art as an illustration, as a document rather than a monument.2 Of course I should have known better and not considered this brilliant piece of writing as having anything to do with art per se, or art criticism, and read it, as I had done for Derrida’s even more brilliant text on Kant’s aesthetics (“The Parergon”), as a philosophical tract. But I had some excuse for my misprision, which is that, like many French literati before him, Derrida was then beginning to indulge in the belletristic exercise of the exhibition catalogue, and his artistic taste was then, I am afraid to say, at the measure of his ignorance. Like many, many before him, he had been seduced by the work of artists whose works were illustra- tive and in many ways made to seduce, with a few clever devices, writers like him. The same was also beginning to hold true in the field of architectural criticism, into which he intervened as well (to much dev- astating effects, particularly in this country, given the ﬁckle voracity of architects and their eagerness to consume theory as ornament). As I had started Macula with the ﬁrm desire to combat the dilettan- tism of the belletristic genre, it is not hard to understand why I was dis- appointed, particularly because I had always considered Derrida, no matter how odd it might seem to many, as a model of earnestness—and one has to remember his critique of Michel Foucault’s Madness and Civilization to grasp why this could be so, for in this critique which he reiterated in the obituary of his former professor, Derrida had chided Foucault for his nonchalance with regard to the canon and stressed the necessity, before attempting to “deconstruct” anything, to learn its codes by heart. In short, reading the various texts on art and architecture that Derrida was prone to publish in the late seventies and early eighties, I felt that he was not doing what he had advocated and so superbly done when dealing with Saussurean linguistics or with

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/1526381054573569 by guest on 25 September 2021 psychoanalysis (and also with modern poetry and ﬁction): he had not really paid attention to pictorial and architectural codes, and even less to their history. I drifted away somewhat. I kept reading Derrida’s work but not as assiduously as in the past—until, about fifteen years ago, I stumbled upon a particular problem in my work as an art historian—and it might not be by chance that this was concerning Matisse once more. It would not be the place here to deal with the issue at stake—which concerned Matisse’s invention of his color system and its main law, which states, I quote, “one square centimeter of any blue is not as blue as a square meter of the same blue,” via a new understanding of drawing.3 But what was important for me to discover was that, as in the case of Freud’s or Marx’s, Derrida’s texts on art were not necessarily the most operative, the most precious for the ﬁeld of art history or even of art criticism. Just as we learn a lot more about several artistic devices in Freud’s book on jokes or the sixth chapter of the Traumdeutung than in, say, his take on Leonardo, I realized what I had known long ago but had forgotten or even repressed: that one learns a lot more about how to approach modern painting and architecture in Derrida’s texts on Plato, Mallarmé, or Nietzsche than in his essays on a Gérard Titus-Carmel or a Peter Eisenman. This was the happiest reconciliation of sorts, one that has helped me work for more than a decade.4 My encounters with Derrida have stopped being live for just as long—they have been mostly textual since I left France in 1983. But ever since that feverish eureka surrounding the Matisse conundrum, these encounters have always touched me, and touched right on.

Notes 1. These remarks were read on 6 December 2004 at a memorial event at Harvard University organized by the Humanities Center under the leadership of Marge Garber. The other speakers were Tom Conley, Alice Jardine, Christine McDonald, and David Rodowick. 2. If I remember well, it is only after his seminar that Derrida took cognizance of the essay by Meyer Schapiro on Heidegger and van Gogh’s shoes (Schapiro had sent me a copy, which I passed on to Derrida when urging him to “write down” and publish his dissection of Heidegger’s essay). To my surprise Derrida decided to devote much of his energy to Schapiro’s essay, resulting in what seemed to me an overkill. Upon receiving Derrida’s “Restitutions,” my coeditor Jean Clay and I felt that in all fairness we needed to publish a translation of Schapiro’s text as well—which led us to a complicated diplo- matic dance between two writers we equally, but differently, admired. Somewhat reluc- tantly Schapiro agreed to let us publish his text, but he did not take Derrida’s deconstructive reading very lightly. In “Further Notes on Heidegger and van Gogh,” the afterthought he wrote in 1994 and published that year in the fourth volume of his Collected Papers, he chose to ignore it altogether. 3. See my essay “Matisse and ‘Arche-drawing,’” in Painting as Model (Cambridge:

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/1526381054573569 by guest on 25 September 2021 MIT Press, 1990). Derrida’s model of deconstruction as a “double science” (ﬁrst over- turn a hierarchical opposition; then dispel its binarism by the introduction of a new concept) is particularly examined in relation to Matisse on 60–63. 4. I have also to signal that, to his credit, Derrida attempted seriously to perfect his artistic education during the period I was less attentive to his work. Even though he still tended to treat works of art as documents in his Memoires d’aveugle, which func- tioned as the catalogue of an exhibition he curated in Le Louvre, a lot of homework went into it—an initiation of sorts, without which, for example, he would not have been so receptive to the painting of Simon Hantaï a decade later.

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