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Others form man; I tell of him and portray a particular one, very ill-formed, whom I should
really make very different from what he is if I had to fashion him over again. But now it is
done. Now the lines of my painting [les traits de ma peinture] do not go astray, though they
change and vary . . . Stability itself is nothing but a more languid motion.
Michel de Montaigne1
# The Author 2014. Published by Oxford University Press; all rights reserved
doi:10.1093/oxartj/kcu007
Matthew Ancell
Fig. 1. Caravaggio, The Conversion of St. Paul, 1600 1601, oil on canvas, 230 175 cm. Santa Maria del Popolo, Rome. (Photo: Scala / Art Resource, NY.)
because the logic of belief will make, as we see, the movement to fidelity. Art
historians such as Michael Fried and theorists like J. Hillis Miller have
commented on Memoirs of the Blind, however, the centrality of perspective to
the argument of the text, and its philosophical ramifications, has remained a
critical blind spot.7
I would like to posit a double hypothesis that Renaissance perspective and
early modern scepticism reveal not only a forceful critique of the Western
philosophical project in the text, but also establish Derrida as a sensitive
curator and interpreter of art in that Memoirs of the Blind makes a profound yet
overlooked contribution to the discourse on perspective. The catalogue has
the elliptical structure of a dialogue which suggests Derridas struggle with
Judaism and a movement to a personal position of faith figured as a kind of
anamorphic fideism as a supplement to monocular Enlightenment thought as
expressed by linear perspective and Cartesian rationalism. Derrida draws a
complex outline of the structure of faith itself and what it means for figures,
such as Caravaggio and Durer grappling, it seems, with the epistemological
ramifications of failures of representation and perception. I suggest that in
Memoirs of the Blind a self-portrait of Derrida emerges, similar to the one
Michel de Montaigne attempted in his Essays: a kind of autobiographical vision
blinded by tears that distort reason, an entrance into the logics of blindness
and belief, and a picture of a disfigured self that takes shape from the
contingent nature of experience.
Conversion and Covenant
After including in his catalogue two drawings of the theme of Pauls conversion
without further comment, Derrida turns to Caravaggios interpretation of the
biblical accounts of the Damascene conversion and its previous artistic
renderings. In the book of Acts, Paul (Saul of Tarsus) is assaulted by a heavenly
flash of light, interrogated by the Lord, and blinded for three days. Fallen from
his horse, Paul now lies at the edge of the picture plane, perhaps at our feet. It
seems that we, with Paul, are facing upward, yet we are unable to look past the
steadied horse into the light of heaven (emanating from its invisible complement).
Caravaggio has depicted the very moment that Paul turns towards what has
bowled him over in a kind of sunflower blindness, a conversion that twists the
light and turns it upon itself to the point of dizziness.8 As with many works in
Memoirs, what we see is a moment in the process of conversion, which involves,
Derrida claims, learning to see the divine condition of the picture itself . . .
which is possible only in hymn or prayer.9 This conversion effects a turning away
from sketching, from design, which function along with linear perspective as
figures for rationality. The space before us, the extraordinary jumble of human
and animal arms and legs, defies perspectival construction.10 All is foreground,
with no horizon or vanishing point to ground the figures in the composition.
While the figures are embodied, they are also strangely dismembered. Notably,
the servants legs do not match up with the body that emerges above the horse,
and Pauls left leg appears rather disjointed from his hip, while his right leg, from
the knee down, disappears altogether.
Leo Steinberg has argued that the painting (like its counterpart, The Crucifixion
of St. Peter, 1600 1601) was not intended to be viewed from a right angle, and
suggests that Caravaggio could have been influenced by anamorphic techniques
during his apprenticeship in Milan (he rightly does not call Caravaggios work
an anamorphosis, as it is not in the strict sense).11 My own in situ analysis,
from all permitted oblique angles in the Cerasi Chapel, also did not resolve the
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Matthew Ancell
invisible deity that supplements and organises the logic of belief, of revelation in
blindness. That is, both perspective and faith must make recourse to the infinite
(the vanishing point and Deity, respectively); in other words, the way
perspective thinks (especially in its extreme form of anamorphosis) mirrors
the discourse of faith. Belief is not necessarily irrational, but rather must
somehow account for the fragmented limbs in its field of vision and assemble
them from different and conflicting points of view. Faced with the absence of a
grounding origin, the monocularism of Enlightenment reason, the disembodied
Cogito, or rational self-formed from the Cartesian mind body dualism,
converts to the believing, abocular or binocular subject. Derrida invokes a new
vocabulary of belief for talking about this invention, in all senses of the word,
that explains the operations of drawing as an act of faith and the operations of
faith as the picturing of the world.
Vous croyez . . . ?
If art thinks, then it also believes, argues Derrida. Memoirs begins, after an epigraph
from Diderot, in the middle of a dialogue between a philosopher and interviewer,
implicitly male and female, respectively.18 At the ostensible conclusion of the
printed text, which ends in an ellipsis, we find that the conversation continues
with the quotation by Diderot. In the French version, the text resumes with the
quotation followed by another ellipsis, giving the conversation a circular, or
more precisely, elliptical structure, which is meant to foil the dialectical,
rational, and linear structure of the philosophical dialogue.
I write without seeing. I came. I wanted to kiss your hand . . . This is the rst time I have
ever written in the dark . . . not knowing whether I am indeed forming letters. Wherever
there will be nothing, read that I love you. Diderot, Letter to Sophie Volland, June 10,
1759 (. . .)19
If we connect the dots by joining the ellipses, Diderots epigraph could, on the one
hand, appear to fall outside the circuitous structure, as its complement. On the
other hand, as Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (the translators of Memoirs
of the Blind) ask, Doesnt the rest of the book draw this epigraph into it, so to
speak, so that the book is a sort of circle or ring or, as one says in French, an
alliance?20 Alliance evokes the religious, specifically covenantal aspects of
faith, but the discussion at this stage in the text is explicitly about scepticism,
playing on its modern sense of doubt and critique of faith in particular, and
drawing upon its pre-Cartesian and pre-Socratic positions:
- Do you believe this [vous croyez]? Youll observe from the very beginning of this
interview Ive had problems following you. I remain sceptical . . .
- But scepticism is precisely what Ive been talking to you about: the difference
between believing and seeing, between believing one sees [coire voir] and
seeing between, catching a glimpse [entrevoir] or not. Before doubt ever
becomes a system, skepsis has to do with the eyes. The word refers to a visual
perception. . . . The judgment depends on the hypothesis. So as not to forget
them along the way, so that everything be made clear, let me summarize:
there would be two hypotheses.
- You seem to fear the monocular vision of things. Why not a single point of view?
Why two hypotheses?
- The two will cross paths, but without ever confirming each other, without the
least bit of certainty, in a conjecture that is at once singular and general, the
hypothesis of sight, and nothing less.21
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Matthew Ancell
The statement The judgment depends on the hypothesis could also be rendered the
judgment suspends or defers the hypothesis.22 We must talk around the suspended
or deferred object, even as we depend on it. To think of this dependence of judgment
as suspension and deferral makes explicit the relationship between sceptical
epistemology (the suspension of absolute judgments) and Derridas deconstruction
in the context of faith and its object.
The translators note that a reading of Memoirs of the Blind depends on the elided
direct object (i.e. this) of its first and penultimate lines Do you believe [vous
croyez]? Much like Paul thrown on his back, whether or not you see this poses a
double hypothesis, a double vision in a sceptical mode. While the texts or
objects in which Derrida locates his discussion are the drawings and paintings
included in the Parti Pris exhibition, two of the subtexts or absent objects of his
discussion that is, the this of the text in the catalogue are drawn from early
modern discourses: one thesis, then, views fideistic scepticism as opposed to
Cartesian rationalism, and the other, their pictorial analogues anamorphosis
as the logical undoing of Albertian perspective (as later appropriated as a model
of Cartesian thought). These two discourses enact the tensions at work in
Memoirs of the Blind. Linear perspective, often taken as a figure for disembodied
rationalism, reveals its own representational failures when taken to its logical
extreme, that is, anamorphosis, which in turn is predicated on that very
technique and which posits a suspension of judgment. Similarly, Derrida
dismantles the claims of reason even as he reincorporates reason into the very
structure of faithful self-reflection.
John Caputo has argued for reading Derrida as religious deconstructively
unconventional, sans religion as it were, but religious nonetheless. Claiming to
have been read less and less well over almost twenty years, like my religion
about which nobody understands anything, Derrida reports that the constancy
of God in my life is called by other names, so that I quite rightly pass for an
atheist.23 This initially baffling confession of religion prompts Caputo to
reconstruct a Derridean religion from his texts, starting with the increasingly
religiously oriented works of the late 1980s. Oft-analysed affinities between
deconstruction and negative theology are ultimately superficial, Caputo
demonstrates. Instead, Derridas desire for the impossible is messianic and
prophetic, theology being too systematic to withstand the interruptive force of
God or the (W)hol(l)y Other (tout autre). Deconstruction, Caputo states,
repeats the movements of faith, of expecting what we cannot know but only
believe . . . of the blindness of faith . . . in the impossible, but without the
dogmas of the positive religious faiths.24 Caputos compelling argument
overlooks, however, the ways in which Derridas religion, while perhaps sui
generis, repeats the non-dogmatic early modern sceptical discourses and their
contemporary pictorial analogues discourses that Memoirs of the Blind relies
upon elliptically as it articulates these movements of faith in pictorial terms.
I view fideism and linear perspective as Derridas subtexts, then, not because
they are hard to identify or that one would be surprised to find them there, but
because while these discourses are only elliptically present, recognising what a
very patient reader like Derrida is reading is crucial in our own reading of his
texts. Contrary to expectations, or maybe entirely consonant with them,
fideism is never explicitly mentioned in Memoirs of the Blind, and linear
perspective, as such, only briefly (and only if we count the term aperspective
and a discussion of the prefix per- which implies perspective without naming
it).25 Another way to posit my thesis is that in Memoirs of the Blind Derrida
addresses the question of faith and the absence of the direct object of faith by
eliding two discourses: early modern scepticism and its visual counterparts in
200 OXFORD ART JOURNAL 37.2 2014
perspectival practice. This elliptical movement mirrors the problem that gives rise
to it, namely the relationship between faith and the object of faith, the relationship
between belief and the absence or disappearance of a direct object.26 Such a
relationship is the structure of faith, as the author of Hebrews formulates it,
the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.27
The most employed term in Memoirs of the Blind is trait a trait or feature, mark, line,
or stroke. Like other Derridean terms of differentiation, the trait is not a thing,
although it does things. It delimits and joins and adjoins only in separating.28 It
has no thickness, marking the interior and exterior of a figure. It is, in this sense,
invisible. The trait functions not just for drawing, but for writing, analogous to the
trace, differance, pharmakon, and other deconstructive terms. The argument in
Memoirs of the Blind, then, is about the logic at the very origin of representation,
the way art thinks, explored in a discussion of the self-portrait. Maria Scott notes:
the text of Memoirs of the Blind shares the same self-eclipsing logic of retrait which it
attributes to drawing. Like the graphic trait which never presents itself as such but which,
by its power of reference, haunts drawing as its condition of possibility, Derridas text is
allusive and elliptical throughout ... the logic that dictates the recurrence of [Memoirs]
themes is infuriatingly elusive.29
The logic is allusive, I would agree, but that is part of the point, infuriating or not.
Let me attempt to trace out the elusive logic of Memoirs of the Blind.30
Derridas hypothesis of sight includes the crossing of two further hypotheses
that inform each other. The first, as exemplified by the epigraph from Diderot,
is that drawing is blind, blind at its origin, structurally blind. The second is that
a drawing of the blind is a drawing of the blind, that is, representations of the
theme of blindness reflect the blindness of the draughtsman.31 Some of this is
counter-intuitive. Derrida calls the first type of blindness transcendental the
invisible condition of the possibility of drawing, drawing itself, the drawing of
drawing.32 This is never the theme or the object of a drawing, Derrida insists.
There are three aspects of transcendental blindness. First, in simple terms, the
artist must turn from the object to the paper and work from memory. The object
then recedes or withdraws from visible presence. Second, once traced, the trait,
as an outline, becomes invisible, serving merely indexically to the figures.
Derrida refers to the drawing presenting a jalousie (a blind) of traits cutting up
the horizon, traits through which, between which, you can observe without being
seen.33 The third aspect concerns what Derrida calls the rhetoric of the trait.34
Seeing is reading. There is always a verbal supplement (cf. the invisible
complement of the incarnate Logos in the Cerasi Conversion). In a self-portrait,
for example, we must retreat to language in that we must have faith in the title,
and, regarding the canvas, how can we know that what the artist is drawing is
him or herself?35
The discussion of the transcendental logic of the invisible leads to the
second logic, the narrative or spectacle of representation of the blind, what
Derrida terms the sacrificial logic of the invisible, the representation of the
unrepresentable. Sacrificial refers to the economic operation in which
blindness is exchanged for a different form of sight and this sacrifice always
implies some sort of violence (the violence of ruse or deception, the violence
of punishment, the violence of conversion and of martyrdom, the blindness
that comes from wounded eyes or from bedazzlement).36 These theses will
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Matthew Ancell
Fig. 2. Du
rer. Draughtsman Drawing a Recumbent Woman, c. 1600, woodcut, 7.7 21.4 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. (# The Metropolitan
Museum of Art, Image Source: Art Resource, NY.)
later converge in the catalogue on scenes of wounds, blindness, and conversion that
exemplify the second logic, just as Caravaggios Paul receiving revelation also
exemplifies this sacrificial blindness.
reality Embodied truth becomes phenomenal and the female figure crowds the
frame, exceeding its boundaries and leaving the viewer with traces of the ideal.
Moreover, if we reconstruct the visual pyramid extending from the
phallogocentric fixed point to the body of the woman, the centric ray would
appear to transverse her body near her genitalia, about where her left hand
touches her thigh. It is difficult to know this with certainty, since the centric
ray from our point of view, perpendicular to the plane of the woodcut, is right
of centre of the gridded window, and therefore not perpendicular to the table.
This only furthers the point, however, since the embodied state of the viewer,
just eye-balling the woodcut, so to speak, obviously prevents entry into the
purely geometrical realm of the perspectival scheme in order to establish the
vanishing point corresponding to the draftsmans point of view.
While the presence and immediacyof the body in the image ostensibly present the
unobscured truth of the matter to the viewer, the woodcut discloses the fact of
structural blindness. That is, knowledge of the other, the originary secret,
remains cut off from view, foregrounding an alternative method of knowing, the
abocular sense of touch, which falls outside the limits of empirical rationalism.
We see that the vanishing point, the origin of perspectival representation, is
perhaps veiled by cloth if not completely obscured by the models leg hardly
the intended object of the draughtsmans monocular gaze. The vanishing point
the infinite, the transcendental, truth as such retreats from his view, and
the draftsmans failure to appropriate, to know, is testified by the absence of
any marks (traits) on his page.41 Knowledge of the woman, the woodcut
indicates, requires not just mental and optical engagement, but a corporeal
commitment, a fidelity to a relationship to the other that will always exceed
coldly analytical attempts to comprehend its totality.
Venetian Blindness
Memoirs of the Blind constantly questions the privileged status of the viewer, equated
with the thinking subject who, within the perspectival system, stands outside the
contingencies of space. Svetlana Alpers offers Durers Draughtsman as an example
of a commanding, Albertian mode of representation, wherein the artist or
viewer is prior to the world, as opposed to the northern mode in which the
world prior to us [is] made visible.42 She gives a further illustration of the first,
or Albertian, mode in Titians Venus of Urbino,43 the naked female body in the
field of vision in both of these examples ostensibly offered to the viewer/artist
as subordinate nature to male control.44 This commanding mode draws upon
the problematic Albertian window metaphor, with the isomorphism of the
Albertian window and the Cartesian plane facilitating the association of linear
perspective with Enlightenment rationalism. Artificial perspective seems to
rationalise space, with all figures in the plane coherently relating to each other
in reference to the vanishing point. Thus, the analogy of the vanishing point as a
precursor to Descartess cogito as a philosophical ground has been widely
assumed and unchallenged until relatively recently, notably by Lyle Massey.45
Panofsky has been quite influential in making this association, assuming a shared
conception of space between pre-Cartesians and post-Cartesians.46 As Massey
has demonstrated, however, both of these assumptions are problematic because
of the embodied position of the viewer, something from which even Descartess
discourse never truly thought its way out. Moreover, taking perspective to its
logical extreme, the process of anamorphosis demonstrates the distorting
effects inherent in perspective. With two irreconcilable viewpoints, or foci, or
at least one extremely oblique point of view, anamorphosis exposes the vantage
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Matthew Ancell
Derrida responds to the rationalist tradition by illustrating its inability to see its own
blindness, to note what is truly invisible. As Derridas text indicates, he is speaking
here of graphic and not color blindness, of drawing and not painting.49 One is
reminded of the seventeenth-century definition of linea as lunghezza senza
larghezza [length without width].50 Rather than the Form of the intelligible
realm, accessible through dialectic reason, the trait is the generative ellipse, the
difference that cannot be perceived between the forms of objects in the sensible
world. The Platonic opposition between the sensible and the intelligible, as
connected here to linear perspective, recalls the early modern debate over disegno
and colore. Serving to render objects in the picture plane in a coherent relationship
to each other and the viewer, the system of orthogonal lines, transversals,
horizon, and vanishing point of Albertian perspective are theoretically invisible
since they form the substratum, part of the disegno, the sketch or overall design of
a work developed from perspective.51
The reference by Derrida to a jalousie (a blind) of traits cutting up the horizon,
traits through which, between which, you can observe without being seen,52
invokes several related images connected to perspective (from perspectiva, seeing
through). In the introduction to A Derrida Reader, Peggy Kamuf connects the
partially obstructed view of the jalousie (that is, the slats of a venetian blind) to
the various and partial selections of Derridas corpus that constitute the
collection. The introduction is not exactly a dialogue that explores the richness
204 OXFORD ART JOURNAL 37.2 2014
of the image of the jalousie (and notion of the jealousy of the monotheistic God) as a
differential term.53 God enters the picture at this point in that, when speaking of the
trait, Derrida asks if it is
by chance that in order to speak of the trait we are falling back upon the language of
negative theology or of those discourses concerned with naming the withdrawal [retrait] of
the invisible or hidden god? . . . It is theological through and through, to the point,
sometimes included, sometimes excluded, where the self-eclipsing trait cannot even be
spoken about, cannot even say itself in the present, since it is not gathered, since it does
not gather itself, into any present, I am who I am (a formula whose original grammatical
form, as we know, implies the future).54
The traits in a one-point perspective scheme are ordered by the vanishing point
(sometimes included, sometimes excluded), as if it were the invisible,
unnameable god indicated by the Tetragrammaton, the deus absconditus from
which meaning emanates but is always in retreat from comprehension. Thus, our
interactions with Deity are with the phenomena, expressions, representations,
signs that decline from it in the divine grammar. As Brian Rotman observes, the
vanishing point has a dual semiotic character, since within the scene in the
picture plane it signifies a specific location, but one that, as it is infinitely distant,
is unoccupiable. In its external position, the vanishing point organises other
signs in a meta-linguistic relation. Meaning, then, is inseparable from the
process of depiction itself.55 The trait and vanishing point are generative, but not
present.
As is typical of his style, Derrida is speaking from inside the discourse, pointing
toward an exterior of the structure that cannot be named but inhabits a position
Before [avant] all the blind spots that, literally or figuratively, organize the
scopic field and the scene of drawing.56 At this point in the dialogue in Memoirs,
the female interlocutor notes that Derrida seeks to transcendentalise, that is, to
ennoble an infirmity or an impotence.57
Would you not claim in your jealous, even envious passion, in our wounded impotence, to
be more faithful to the trait, to the trait in its most rened end or nality? As for the great
draftsmanto follow your suggestiondoes he not also try in vain, up to the point of
exhausting a ductus or stylus, to capture this withdrawal [retrait] of the trait, to remark it,
to sign it nallyin an endless scarication.58
Sight and blindness are bound together. Recognising the impotence of reason, its
inability to penetrate beyond the lines of logical representation, beyond artifice,
Derrida confesses the valorisation of blindness as a structural feature of drawing
and therefore of all representation. To be sure, Derrida is not an irrationalist, or
even anti-Enlightenment, yet his project questions the certainties and axioms
of Enlightenment in order to think them better.59 As Nietzsche pronounced,
the Enlightenments greatest casualty is faith, or at least the object of faith. The
object of faith is, here, the missing object, the unseen subject, the subjectile or
subjectum of Memoirs of the Blind, which illustrates the blind impotence of reason
severed from the blindness of faith.60
` ne pas voir
L ouvre ou
Matthew Ancell
Fig 3. Caravaggio, Incredulity of Saint Thomas, c. 1602, oil on canvas, 107 146 cm. Schlo Sanssouci, Potsdam. (Photo: Gerhard Murza / Art Resource, NY.)
see in both artificial and natural perspective dramatise distortions that occur in
Derridas self-portrait or revelation of the self. Two of the distortions I have in
mind for this claim (in addition to those we have seen in the Conversion, but that
are not in the exhibition) are the following. In the Calling of St. Matthew (1599
1600), Christs legs are awkwardly turned in the opposite direction of his torso.
Consider also the impossible angle of Christs (apparently detached) hand in the
Potsdam Incredulity of Saint Thomas (c. 1602), which allows for a natural grasp
as he guides the disciples touch and, significantly, a clear view of the stigma.62
This bodily fragmentation leads Fried to conclude that Caravaggio was never
simplyperhaps not even primarilyan optical realist . . . in Paul Valerys
phrase, as cited by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, he always took his body with
him.63 Knowing the only object that we can know, the self (inasmuch as it is
knowable), takes place in an act of self-representation that cannot depend on
strictly rational procedure, as figured by the perspectival sketch. As Itay Sapir
has observed, Caravaggios tenebrism substitutes precisely for the nowinexistent perspectival structure.64 This substitution buries the vanishing point,
the infinite, into the space of darkness and incertitude. Consequently, all
knowing is provisional, embodied, and phenomenal.
With this in mind, and breaking with the law of the exhibition again, let us
examine the Incredulity of Saint Thomas (Fig. 3) in more detail, as it serves along
206 OXFORD ART JOURNAL 37.2 2014
with the Conversion as an emblem of the entire argument of Memoirs of the Blind. The
painting sets up what is at stake in the logics of blindness. That is, empirical vision and
knowledge are set in relief to blindness, revelation, and conversion. In perspectival
and epistemological terms, the disembodied rational viewpoint must concede its
insufficiency and enter into an embodied and relational position to know the
other. In the painting, in this moment of conversion, incarnate divinity is thrust
into the foreground, almost into our space, the embodied realm, in visceral
detail. Several critics give the paintings portrayal of sight an empirical reading,
emphasising that Thomas stares into the wound.65 John Spike concludes that
Thomas peering unblinkingly into the slashed flesh is the image of an empirical
scientist who will not be satisfied with second-hand information. The theory
under examination was the physical resurrection of the Lord.66 But, to describe
Thomas as an empirical scientist misses the point, just as Thomass gaze misses
the wound entirely. Lorenzo Pericolos recent analysis of the Postdam painting
supports an abocular, non-linear, and anamorphic reading. He observes that
Christ and Thomas occupy different planes and, therefore, the apostles stare is
not toward the wound67 Thomass demand for ocular proof is thwarted. Not even
gazing at the surface of the wound at this point, Thomas is blind. Here it is
important to remember the distinction between Renaissance scepticism and what
would become the colloquial sense of scepticism later on, as I noted Derrida uses
the term (knowingly) at the beginning of Memoirs of the Blind. Thomass
scepticism, while perhaps initially of the sort of disbelief, converts into a sceptical
fideism, an epistemological position that acknowledges the impossibility of
absolute knowledge but that depends on the assurance of an experiential
relationship with the object to be known. The scientific detail that fascinates
many critics, has occluded Thomas condition of blindness, or abocularity.
Pericolo argues that perceptually the beholder reroutes Thomas gaze toward
Jesus side to compensate for Caravaggios intentional misalignment of the two
figures.68 The rational impulses of the viewer reconstruct a perspectival pyramid
that connects Thomass eye to the wound.
Moreover, if the vanishing point from Thomass viewpoint is supposed to be the
wound which perspectiva naturalis would dictate if he were staring into it then
Caravaggio presents us with another disruption of the perspectival system.69 In the
absence of perspective, the viewer is inevitably drawn to the wound, which elicits
visceral reactions. Contra Howard Hibbards classicizing composition of the four
heads in a concentrated diamond that reassures him against the unbearable
realistic detail by counterbalancing the shocking wound, Mieke Bal argues that
the centripetal pointer of the wound is emphasised and sucks us in.70 The
incoherent nexus of hands intensifies these transgressions of perspectival law,
and foregrounds the philosophical implication that our pictures of the world are
subject to perceptual and rational error. We stare at the mark, the organising
principle of the composition, the substitute vanishing point, blind to what
might lie beyond. For Nicola Suthor, the viewers gaze both penetrates but is
also disturbed [or hurt, shocked].71 There is a doubling of viewpoints, ours
and Thomass, and both go astray or are blind.
But that is not to say that this is not a scene of sight and knowledge, for as Thomas
gropes, he is guided by Jesus touch. Pericolo notes that, in a sense, Thomas sees
through his finger.72 Once again, drawing upon Diderot, Derrida observes the
possibility of a providential gift passing through the hands of the blind:
It is inscribed on the inside of these hands, which are guided by the hand of God, as if
Yahwehs design were mapped out on the surface of their skin, as if it had, to use an
expression of Diderots, traced the portrait on the hand. Diderots Letter on the Blind for
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Matthew Ancell
the Use of Those Who See describes in two places this vision by the skin. Not only can
one see by the skin, but the epidermis of the hands would be like a canvas stretched
taut for drawing or painting: . . . [quoting the letter] Thus the blind have likewise a painting,
in which their own skin serves as canvas.73
Thomas misses the mark visually, even as the canvas of Christs body is revealed to
him. Christs body is scened as a painting, his shroud a curtain that reveals the
picture.74 The scene is doubled, though, as the traits of the stigmata are
inscribed, in a sense, on Thomas in his conversion, his epistrophe or turning to
Christ. He recognises Deitys design which is transferred to him, the small tear
in his robe establishing a compositional and bodily correspondence between
Christ and himself. Paul, after his own conversion, would declare I carry the
marks of Jesus branded on my body.75 Humanity draws upon Christs bodily
canvas and he in turn inscribes a new law on the inner parts of believers,
obviating but not erasing the mark of circumcision. Paul and Thomas find
themselves both inside and outside the Law (figured in Memoirs as linear
perspective, disegno, and the law of the exhibition).
Thomass tactile knowledge follows Ann Hartles characterisation of Michel de
Montaigne in which he transcends both simple credulity and learned
presumption, and that, in philosophical terms, would be called learned
ignorance.76 As Richard Popkin has observed, it is the sceptic, and not the
dogmatist, who is in a position to receive revelation.77 In the moment of desired
rational confirmation, figured by sight, Thomas is blind, simultaneously touching
his own hip as if to verify the experience. As Fried observes, only the viewer sees
the naked haunch of the newly resurrected Christ.78 Again, nudity is occluded
from the view of the depicted observer, as in Durers Draughtsman, but now
Christ opens up his shroud and wound to be experienced (if not seen) by the
disciple, who now knows God and exclaims his recognition, according to the
Johannine account, My Lord and my God.79 Here, there is a play of sensuality,
in all senses of the word, that borders on a kind of reverse mysticism. That is,
knowledge comes in and through the senses and phenomena, even as the sense
we most rely upon for knowledge fails. The intimacy is not figured as eroticism
strictly speaking, but it is a moment of love that gives knowledge to the
believer-doubter of an order that eludes the dispassionate draughtsman. Thomas
occupies the unoccupiable vanishing point but in an asymmetrical relationship in
that the viewpoint does not correspond to it. And it is a relationship, the implied
covenant of belief, that makes it possible. The order of knowledge acquired,
though, is precisely not an acquisition, but a renewal of a relationship and a
promise of return, of what Derrida calls the avenir or the to come. This is not a
moment, then, of full presence, since the wound is a sign, a mark, or an absence
(in short, a trait) in the incarnated Word through which Thomas assures himself
of his salvation, corporeal and spiritual, through a new covenant or alliance. As
Derrida explains:
ce] of the trait suggests that at the origin of the graphein there
the thanksgiving grace [gra
is a debt or gift rather than representational delity. More precisely, the delity of faith
matters more than the representation, whose movement this delity commands and thus
precedes. And faith, in the moment proper to it, is blind. It sacrices sight, even if it does
so with an eye to seeing at last.80
What one really believes always remains hidden from others, if not to the
individual as well. But, in Memoirs of the Blind, Derrida seems to go beyond
mere ventriloquism of religious discourse, as could be claimed, and emulates
Montaignes integration of scepticism into the faith which transcends it.81
208 OXFORD ART JOURNAL 37.2 2014
Matthew Ancell
1978, it is his most sustained treatment of visual art. It would be followed by The Gift
of Death, signalling a turn to religion in his writing that would confound many critics.
This turn deserves renewed scholarly attention because it inaugurated the final phase
of Derridas philosophical project. The monocular portrait of the subject of
Circumfession, then, becomes a self-portrait of the blind man of faith in Memoirs, a
figure reminiscent of Montaigne, who argues that our vision of the world is
distorted and refracted by our fallible reason and bodily emotions.
In Of Giving the Lie, Montaigne describes the effect of self-portraiture:
Painting myself for others, I have painted my inward self with colours clearer
than my original ones. I have no more made my book than my book has made
mea book consubstantial with its author.90 The composition of the self (a
repository of phenomena derived from the senses, memories, fantasies, and
reason) is a continual process of revision, wherein the self is shaped by its own
figuration. Here the inward self is painted (not drawn) in all its passions and
imperfections with colours clearer than the original, as if Montaigne were
retreating from disegno, distorting for effect, his fidelity given to what he sees in
front of him, not to an internal ideal image of the self.
Montaigne confesses, in Of Friendship: And what are these things of mine, in
truth, but grotesques and monstrous bodies, pieced together of divers members,
without definite shape, having no order, sequence, or proportion other than
accidental?91 Montaignes Essays portray self-knowledge as natural knowledge,
for inasmuch as the mind is inextricable from the body, our being expresses the
experience of the unstable world. Assaying experience, for Montaigne, is to
participate in it and to represent it in a manner that enacts the epistemological
and ontological problems that Descartes attempted to resolve. Ultimately, the
self-portrait for both Derrida and Montaigne is a kind of anamorphosis in
which the representation of the self is both commensurate and incommensurate
with the embodied self. That is, the knowledge of the self is positional,
revealing different aspects from different angles, as opposed to the fixed,
commanding modes of Cartesian rationalism or linear perspective. Derrida
conflates these modes, but then exposes that their deconstruction (i.e. fideistic
scepticism and anamorphosis) lies avant la lettre within the operations of their
own systems. Memoirs becomes a Derridean withdrawal into reflection and
memory, a self-portrait, an essay on the self, and a dialogue with a friend and
fellow sceptic of dogmatic rationalism in Montaigne.
If we recall Caravaggios Conversion, with its fragmentary composition, invisible
complement, and corporeal emphasis, we can now see it as a self-portrait in the
autobiographical Memoirs of the Blind that remarks on the movement from drawing
to painting, linear perspective to anamorphosis, blindness to revelation, law to
love, and thought to belief.
Too many friends and colleagues are to thank for help in writing this article to mention
here, but I am especially grateful to Maria Loh, Hanneke Grootenboer, Laura Hatch, and the
anonymous reviewers for their feedback.
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