DERRIDA RestitutionsTruthSize 1978

Restitutions Of Truth to Size, "De la vérité en pointure"
Author(s): JACQUES DERRIDA and John P. Leavey, Jr.

Source: Research in Phenomenology , 1978, Vol. 8 (1978), pp. 1-44
Published by: Brill
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/24654285
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Restitutions
Of Truth to Size,
De la vérité en pointure
JACQUES DERRIDA
for J.C.—sztejn
translated by John P. Leavey, Jr.*
POINTURE (Lat. punctura), s.f., old synonym of piqûre.

Printer's term. Small thin iron plate which is pointed and
serves to fix the sheet to be printed on the tympan. Hole that
this plate makes in the paper. Shoemaker's and glover's term.
Number of stitches [the size] of a shoe or a pair of gloves.
—Littré
I owe you the truth in painting, and I will tell you it.
— Cézanne, cited by Hubert Damisch
But the truth—and trying to create the true—is so dear to

me, that in the end I believe, I believe I still prefer being a
shoemaker to being a musician with colors.
— Van Gogh
— And yet. Who said, I no longer remember, "there are no phantoms in Van
Gogh's paintings"? But right there is a story of phantoms. Yet we'd have to wait
until there were more than two to begin.
— Better to match them. And even more than three.
—There they are. I begin. What shoes? Whatl shoes? Whose shoes are they?
* I would like to thank Professor Derrida for his usual kind assistance, as well as Professor
Emilia Kelley for her judicious help with certain renderings of this text. A portion of this
text was delivered at Columbia University in Fall 1977. A French version is to be published
in Macula. — Tr.

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Restitutions Of Truth to Size
What are they made of? And also what are they? There they are—the ques
tions—that's all.
— Are they going to stay there, set down, left in utter neglect, abandoned?
Like those apparently empty, unlaced shoes, waiting with a certain detachment
as someone Comes and speaks, as someone comes to say what is necessary for
refastening, for reattaching them [pour les rattacher]}
— What I mean is, there will have been something like the pairing of a cor
respondence between Meyer Schapiro and Martin Heidegger. And, if I take the
trouble to formalize a bit, it—this correspondence—would return to the ques
tions set down a moment ago.
This correspondence would return to them. Return [revenir] will be of great
import [portée] in this debate (also its scope [portée]). At least if the question is
knowing whom and what these particular shoes, and perhaps shoes in general,
haunt or return to [reviennent]. To whom and to what, accordingly, we'd need,
in paying our debt, to restore'them, to render them [les restituer, les rendre],
— Why is it always said of painting that it renders, that it restores?
— in paying our more or less phantom debt, to restore the shoes, to render
them to their rightful owner. If the question is knowing where they return
from—the town (Schapiro) or the fields (Heidegger), like the mice I think they
resemble1 (what then is man to these mice of mice?), unless they resemble more
pièges à lacets, snare traps, waylaying the stroller in the full museum (can one
avoid hastening one's step, in order to set one's feet down there?). If the question
is knowing what revenue their out-of-use dereliction still produces, what surplus
value lets loose the nullification of their use value: outside the painting, «h the
painting, and thirdly as the painting. Or to say it in a very equivocal word, in
their truth as painting [dans leur vérité en peinture]. If the question is knowing
what ghost's [revenant], townsman's or peasant's, step still comes to haunt them
("a ghost of my other I," the other I of Vincent the signer suggests Schapiro as he
cites Knut Hamson ["SL," 207]*—Heidegger also does this elsewhere). If the
question is knowing whether the shoes in question are haunted by the phantom
or are the ghostly returning [la revenance] itself (but then what are, who actual
ly are, and whosesoever are, these things?). In short, pa revient, it returns to
what? To whom? To whom, to what restore, reattach, readjust correctly
— to what size correctly, by measuring, adequately
— and from where? How? If the question is at least knowing, the return will be
from a long distance [portée].
What I mean is, there will have been correspondence between Meyer Schapiro
and Martin Heidegger.
One of them said in 1935: pa revient, it—this pair—returns from the fields to
some peasant, indeed to some peasant woman
—where does he get the certitude that the question involves a pair of shoes?
What is a pair?

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Jacques Derrida
— I don't know yet. In any case, Heidegger has no doubt on the matter, it's
a peasant's-pair-of-shoes, ein Paar Bauernschuhe. And it, this indissociable
whole, this thing-pair, returns from the fields and to some peasant, indeed to
some peasant woman. Thus Heidegger doesn't reply to any question, he's sure of
the thing before every other question. So it seems. The other one, not at all
agreeing, said after close consideration, 33 years later while presenting objects in
evidence (but without questioning himself further or asking any other question):
no, there's error and projection, if not fraud and false testimony. Ça revient,
it—this pair—returns from town.
— where does he get the certitude that the question involves a pair of shoes?
What is a pair in this case? Or in the case of gloves and other similar things?
— I don't know yet. In any case, Schapiro has no doubt on the matter and
doesn't let any appear. And according to him, ça revient, it—this pair—returns
from town, to a townsman, and indeed to that "man of the town and city"
["SL," 205], to the signer of the painting, to Vincent, bearer of the name Van
Gogh as well as of the shoes which thus seem to complete him, himself or his first
name, the moment he would consequently recapture in a "ça me revient, " in an
"it comes back to me," those convex objects that he's taken off his feet.
—or those hollow objects from which he's withdrawn.
— It, ça, only causes us to begin, but already thert's the impression that the
pair in question (if it is a pair) could really return to no one. And indeed from
this fact they could, even if they weren't made to disappoint or exacerbate the
desire for attribution, for reattribution with surplus value, for restitution with
the benefit of retribution. They could indeed be made to stay there \pour rester
là].
— But what does stay mean in this case?
— Let's suppose as an axiom that the desire for attribution is a desire for ap
propriation. In matters of art as everywhere else. To say this (this painting or
these shoes) returns to X, that amounts to saying: ça me revient, it comes back to
me through the detour of the "ça revient à (un) moi, " the "it comes back to me
(to a self)." Not only: it comes back en propre, in its own right, to this man or
that woman, to the bearer, male or female. "Die BOuerin auf dem Acker trftgt
die Schuhe. . . . Die Bttuerin dagegen trâgt emfach die Schuhe": "The peasant
woman wears her shoes in the field. . . . The peasant woman, on the other
hand, simply wears them" [O, 33-34], says the one in 1935. "They are clearly
pictures of the artist's own shoes, not the shoes of a peasant" ["SL," 205], replies
the other in 1968. My emphases. But actually: it comes back to me in its own
right by a brief detour [un bref chemin de détournement]: the identification,
among many other identifications, of Heidegger with the peasant and of
Schapiro with the townsman. Of Heidegger with the rooted and settled, of
Schapiro with the uprooted and emigrant. Since it's so obvious, we should con
tinue with this demonstration. In this legal process of restitution, shoes also walk

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there, indeed some wooden shoes, and, if we go back for the moment to just a
few seconds ago, the feet of two illustrious Western professors, no more no less.
—The question is certainly one of feet and of many other things, supposing
that feet are some thing and self-identifiable. Without even going to search
elsewhere or above, restitution reestablishes the rights or ownership of—and
restores it to its stance, its institution—the standing subject. "The erect body,"
writes Scnapiro.
— Let's consider the shoes as an institute, a monument. There's nothing
natural in this product. In the analysis of this example, Heidegger is interested
in the product, Zeug. (Through a handy simplification, let's retain the transla
tion of Zeug as "produit" —product. It's used in Chemins qui ne mènent nulle
part for the translation of L'Origine de l'oeuvre d'art. We need to add and then
remember that Zeug is undoubtedly a "product," an artifact, but it's also a uten
sil, a generally useful product, hence Heidegger's first question on "utility.")
One spoke of this artifact even before questioning himself or asking any other
question: this pair returns to someone (or to some woman). To some other per
son, responds the other, proof in hand but without any further ceremony, and
the first doesn't refer to the second. But in both attributions it—ςα—returns
perhaps to the same thing, by a brief detour, to a subject who says (my)self, to
an identification.
—And these shoes look at them. They look at us. Their detachment is evi
dent. Unlaced, abandoned, detached from the subject (porteur, bearer, wearer,
holder, or owner, indeed author-signer) and detached in themselves (the laces
are untied, détachés).
—detached from each other, even if matched, but with un supplément de
détachment, a detaching supplement, if we suppose that they don't make a pair.
For where do both of them (I mean Schapiro on one side, Heidegger on the
other) get the certitude that the question involves a pair of shoes? What is a pair
in this case?
—detached in every way, they look at us, stopped up, i.e., mute, letting us -
chat, nonplussed before those who make them speak ("Dieses hat gesprochen, "
said one of the two great interlocutors) and whom they truly make speak. They
come alive to the point of an imperturbably wary but uncontrollable laugh, to
the point of the comedy of the thing. Before a walk [une démarche] so sure of
itself, which can't be taken apart, the thing, a pair or not, laughs.
—We'd have to return to the thing itself. And I don't know yet where to start.
I don't know whether I should speak or write. To address its subject at length,
whatever it may be, is perhaps the first thing to avoid. I've been asked for an ad
dress. I was sent a picture (but exactly which one?) and the two texts you see. I've
just read (for the first time) "The Still Life as a Personal Object—A Note on
Heidegger and van Gogh." And just reread (once more) Der Ursprung des
Kunstwerkes. I won't give a chronicle of my earlier readings. In order to begin, I

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Jacques Derrida
retain only this: I've always been convinced of the strong necessity of Heidegger's
questioning, even if here he repeats, in the worst as well as the best sense of the
term, the traditional philosophy of art. And perhaps even to the extent he does
so. But each time, I perceived the famous passage on "a well-known painting by
Van Gogh" as a moment of touching, laughable, and symptomatic collapse,
signifying.
—Signifying what?
—Not so fast. No mad dash [Pas de précipitation] toward the response. Step
ping hastily [Ια précipitation du /nu], that's perhaps what no one will ever know
how to avoid before the provocation of this "well-known painting." This collapse
interests me. Schapiro also detects it in his own manner (which is also a detec
tive's), and his analysis thereby interests me, even if the analysis itself doesn't
satisfy me. To respond to the question of what such a collapse signifies, will we
have to reduce it to a dispute over the attribution of the shoes? Will we have to
dispute, in painting or reality, the shoes? And only ask ourselves: "who(se) are
they?" I haven't thought about this, but now I start imagining, despite the ap
parent poverty of this quarrel about restitution or about this trading of shoes, a
certain bargain struck [un certain marché conclu] could indeed do away with
everything here. In its enormity, the problem of the origin of the art work could
well pass through the holes for the laces, through the eyelets of the shoes (of a
painting) by Van Gogh. Yes, why not? But provided, of course, this treatment
isn't left either to the hands of Martin Heidegger or Meyer Schapiro. I inten
tionally say isn't left, because we also intend to avail ourselves of their hands, in
deed, moreover, of their feet.
The choice of what course [démarche] to take is difficult. It's slippery. The
sure thing is that Heidegger and Schapiro will have corresponded with each
other. Likewise, there's pairing in the dispute, the enigma of a complementary
adjustment of both sides, from one edge to the other. But I still don't know
where to start, whether I should speak or write, or, above all, in what tone, ac
cording to what code, with a view to what dispute [scène]. Or with what rhythm,
that of the peasant or the townsman? At the age of the artisan or of industrial
technology? Neither these questions nor these scruples are outside the debate
Heidegger engaged in on the work of art.
But am I really inclined to undertake this course?
I'll begin by establishing a certain axiomatic pace. Settling myself someplace
where it, ça, appears not to budge, where it's, ça, no longer slippery, I'll start
(very quickly) from there, after having blocked one of my feet, its tip [une de
mes pointes], immobile and bent over double before the starter's shot. This
place that I begin by slowly occupying, before the race, can only be a place of
language.
Here are the facts. Questions of the hampered walk [la démarche embar
rassée] (limping or squinting?), questions of the type: "Where should I put my

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feet?" "Comment ça va marcher·. How's it going to work?" "Et si ça ne marche

pas: What if it doesn't work?" "Qu'est-ce qui se passe quand ça ne marche pas:
What happens when it doesn't work (ou quand on met ses chaussures au vestiaire
ou les pieds à côté de ses pompes: or when one puts his shoes in the locker or his
feet beside his shoes)?" "Quand ça s'arrête—et pour quelle raison—de marcher:
When—and why—does it stop walking or working?" "Who walks?" "With
whom?" "Sur les pieds de qui: On whose toes?" "Quifait marcher quoi: Who sets
whom going, who leads whom on?" "Quoi fait marcher qui ou quoi: What sets
going or leads on whom or what?" Etc. All these idiomatic figures of the question
seem to me necessary, particularly here
Necessary: it's an attribute
—The shoes too. It—ça—is attributed to a subject, reattached to it by an
operation whose logico-grammatical equivalent is more or less in fashion.
—Necessary remains an adjective that's still a little vague, loose, open, spread
out. Rather we'd have to say: some idioms of the question whose form is very
apt, whose form adapts itself. In a precise, terse, well-laced fashion, gluing
tightly but with suppleness, in the current vocabulary, the letter or figure, the
form fits itself to the very body of what we've a mind to make our subject [objet],
namely feet. Both feet, that's of capital importance.
— But one doesn't say a pair of feet. We say a pair of shoes or gloves. What is a
pair in this case and where do both of them get the idea that Van Gogh painted
a pair? Nothing substantiates this.
— For my part, I've often treated merc/ie-walking-border in every
sense—and, they're nearly the "same" word, the "same" sense, marque-mark
and Marges-Margins (which I used as a title). Pas-step was another such word.
Did I ever speak of feet? I'm not sure (I'd have to look). Nor am I sure about a
certain necessity, there's the name, of the walk, la marche, namely that nearest
the ground, the lowest, most subjective or underlying degree of what is called
culture or institution, the shoe. More strictly, the pair of shoes
—"La Double Séance" turns around the point work [des pointes] of the female
dancer, analyzes "the syntax of the point and step," states how "each pair in this
circuit will always have referred to something other, signifying over and above
the operation of signifying" [D, 274],
— But the pointe doesn't bear the foot in contact with any surface. It doesn't
spread the foot out there. More strictly, the pair of shoes or even, limiting
ourselves to what supports the sole of the foot above the ground—whether of
town or field doesn't much matter— the shoe's pair of soles [la paire de semelles].
Its exterior surface, and thus below, supports at the very lowest, and I don't
think I've ever spoken about this surface. It is lower than the foot.
So I bring forward: what about shoes when no one—ça—walks? When they're
put aside, resting, for a more or less long time (indeed forever), unused or out of
service, hors d'usage? What do they signify? Of what value are they? More or

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Jacques Derrida
less, and in what economy? Toward what does their surplus (or minus) value
point [fait signe]? Against what can they be exchanged? In what sense or direc
tion (who? what?) do they set one walking, do they lead one on? Or set one
speaking?
That's the subject which announces itself.
It returns slowly. But always too quickly—a mad dash—the first head to oc
cupy standing up (instantly) the abandoned space. To invest and appropriate
for ourselves the unused places as if they remained unoccupied only by accident,
and not by structure.
Since the subject has been announced, let's leave the shoes here awhile.
Something happens, something occurs when shoes are abandoned, vacant, for a
while or forever out of service, apparently detached: from feet (which wear or
are borne by them), in themselves if they have laces, always the one from the
other but with that detaching supplement, if we suppose them to be unpaired
— Yes, let's suppose, for example, two right or two left shoes (with laces). It,
ça, no longer makes a pair, it squints or limps (I don't know) in a strange, dis
quieting, perhaps threatening, and a bit diabolical way. Now and then I get this
impression with shoes like those of Van Gogh, and I wonder if Schapiro and
Heidegger don't rush to make them a pair in order to reassure themselves.
Before all reflection, the pair reassures us.
— So we know how to be oriented in thought.
—Since these abandoned shoes no longer have any strict relation with a sub
ject who wears or is borne by them [un sujet porteur ou porté\, they become the
anonymous, lightened, emptied support (but a support all the heavier since it's
left to its own opaque inertia) of an absent subject whose name returns to haunt
the open form.
—The form is never quite completely open. It keeps a form, the foot's form.
Informed by the foot, it is a form, it traces the exterior surface or envelope of
what is called a "form," to wit (I again cite Littré) a "piece of wood having the
shape of the foot and which serves to make up a shoe." This form or figure of the
foot
—Schapiro will see the figure of Van Gogh in "his" shoes.

— This "form" or figure of the foot in wood replaces the foot, like a prosthesis
by which the shoe always remains informed. All these phantom limbs come and
go, fit more or less well, not always adapting themselves—
—So what do we do when we attribute shoes? When we give or restore them?
What do we do when we attribute a painting or identify a signer? And above all,
when we go to the point of attributing some painted shoes (as painting) to the
presumed signer of the same painting? Or conversely, when their ownership is
disputed?
— Perhaps that's where the correspondence between Meyer Schapiro and

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Martin Heidegger will have occurred. I'm interested in the fact that it took
place. Apparently. But we don't yet know what is this place or what taking place
signifies in this case, where, how, etc.
We just asked: what do we do when we attribute (real) shoes to the presumed
signer of a painting presumed to represent those same shoes? Let's be more
specific. Shoes: the subject, the support destined to bear their wearer on the
ground, in town or field, a support which would typify here the first substratum,
unless the wearer used them for something other than walking, in which case the
word "use" would risk (according to some) being perverted; but also the subject
itself of a canvas which constitutes in its turn its centered subject or support.
And this double subject (the shoes as painting) is what both litigants want to see
restored to the true subject: the peasant or peasant woman on one side, the city
dwelling painter on the other—who's a little more liable [sujet] to be the signer
of the painting supposed to represent his own shoes, indeed himself in person: all
the subjects here are nearest themselves, seemingly.
Where is the truth of this "taking place"? The Origin of the Work of Art
belongs to a great discourse on place and truth. By everything just announced,
we see that this work is connected to, communicates with (is this without the
knowledge of its "author"?) the question of fetishism. A question drawn beyond
its "political economy" or its "psychoanalysis" in the strict sense, indeed beyond
the simple and traditional opposition of the fetish to the thing itself.
All this happens as if the truth about the fetish is meant, is what one wants to
tell. Shall we risk doing that ourselves right now?
—To do that we'd have to place this debate between the two great professors
in resonance with so many other texts. Marx, Nietzsche, Freud
—who speaks more strictly of the fetishism of the shoe. In the first part, or the
first movement, of his 1927 essay on "Fetishism." The genealogy of the fetish he
proposes at that time (as the substitute of the woman's or mother's phallus) ac
counts, according to him, for the privilege accorded to the foot or the shoe.
—shoes or the shoe?
— the shoe. This preference would result from the fact that, in the terrifying
experience that he'd made of what he lived as his mother's "castration," the
"young boy" looked "from below."
—The shoe, a reassuring compromise or substitute, would then be a "form" of
prosthesis, but always as penis and woman's penis. Detachable and reat
tachable. So how do we explain, in the "Symbolism of Dreams" of the Introduc
tory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, that the shoe and the slipper are classed
among the symbols of the woman's genital organs [S£, XV, 158]? Ferenczi
sometimes recognizes them as the vagina (Sinnreich Pariante des Schuhsymbols
der Vagina, 1916), but that's only an individual variant, and we'll need to state,
conversely . . .
—would this be because, like a glove turned inside out, the shoe sometimes

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Jacques Derrida
has the convex "form" of the foot (penis), sometimes the concave form which
envelops the foot (vagina)?
— In these last texts, the question is not fetishism (the mother's phallus), and,
when the question is such, Freud doesn't say that the foot (or shoe) replaces what
is supposed to be missing because of its form but because of its oriented situa
tion, the syntax of a movement toward the high, afterwards the very low, the
lowest, a system of relations in the alleged generation of the fetish. And Freud
doesn't then designate some thing, a more or less detachable whole, for example
"the foot" or "the shoe." He adds: "or a part of them," the part relatively
detachable from an always divisible ensemble.
—The big toe, for example? Doesn't the shoe by itself alone play the part of a
detached big toe? In this market of size [ce marché de la pointure], the
resonance of offers, demands, and stocks on the rise or decline should be
augmented by a speculation on Bataille—"The Big Toe," "Sacrificial Mutila
tion and Van Gogh's Cut-Off Ear," "Van Gogh—Prometheus."
— In any case, for Freud the shoe is no more the penis than the vagina. He un
doubtedly recalls, against Stekel, that certain symbols cannot at once be
masculine and feminine. To be sure, he states that long and firm objects
couldn't symbolize female genital organs (arms, for example), nor hollow objects
(cases, boxes, chests) male organs. But only in order to admit immediately after
wards that bisexual symbolization remains an irrepressible, archaic tendency,
going back to the child who doesn't know the difference between sexes (The In
terpretation of Dreams, VI, 5). "Moreover, a whole number of dream-symbols
are bisexual and can relate to the male or female genitals according to the con
text" (On Dreams, 12; [SE, V, 684]). According to the context, i.e., also accor
ding to a syntax irreducible to some semantic or "symbolic" substantiality.
—Consequently, we must always reserve a sort of interpretative excess, a sup
plement of reading, which, to tell the truth, is decisive for the idiom of a syntac
tic variation. Even if the absolute idiom is the name of a decoy. The "idiomatic
step" [le "pas d'idiome"] doesn't authorize—exactly the opposite—being content
with symbolic equivalences that are always ready-to-wear or with ready-made
universale. That perhaps is the sense of a short parenthetical remark
postscripted to the end of Ferenczi's note: there he distinguishes the individual
variants of universal symbols. That distinction results from the richness of
associations ("sich an sie reichlich Exnfàlle assoziiren"), but the economic
criterion concerns variations which are also general divergences, écarts, restruc
turations, redistributions. And divergences without any essential norm. Just a
network of differential traces. (I add, also parenthetically, that the case invoked
by Ferenczi doesn't put forth any shoes, supplements or overshoes, sur
vêtements, Gummi-Ûberschuh, Galoschen—which don't adapt themselves to
our feet but to our shoes. When it rains or snows, we leave them at the entrance
to the house while nevertheless keeping on our shoes. And—an important if not

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sufficient trait for the interpretation—this over (or surplus) shoe is rubber.
Hence, in Ferenczi, the symbolism of the vagina.) It remains to be seen, to be
continued, whether this sheathing effect [cet effet de gaine] . . .
—Having taken into account what was just said about the "idiomatic step"
and what was said against symbolic universals, we'll naturally stay far, very far,
from any idiomatic reading of Van Gogh, of his signature, or a fortiori of that
painting. We'll only be dealing, as was said and done apropos Genet, Ponge, or
Blanchot, with some preliminaries to the positioning of such a question. Aren't
we clearly agreed, then, that the question is to be completely reelaborated?
—Agreed or not, I propose to postpone this question until later. Besides, it's
made to be postponed, it concerns the deferment [la remise] until later, until
farther on, if we ever do arrive. I sense it as both very scientific and as anti
scientific.
— Since there are two types of object, the "form" of the shoe has another
privilege: it systematizes the two types of object defined by Freud: elongated,
solid or firm on one surface, hollow or concave on the other. It—pa—turns itself
inside out
— Like a pair of gloves. Van Gogh painted a pair of gloves (in January 1889 at
Aries). And in a note devoted to this, Schapiro once more seems to consider
them "personal objects." He «appropriates them, hastens to pair them and even
to pair them with the cypress of the same still life ("The choice of objects is odd,
but we recognize in it Van Gogh's spirit. In other still lives he has introduced ob
jects that belong to him [my emphasis] in an intimate way — his hat and pipe and
tobacco pouch. . . . His still lives are often personal subjects, little outer pieces
of the self exposed with less personal but always significant things. Here the blue
gloves, joined like two hands [my emphasis] in a waiting passive mood, are
paired in diagonal symmetry with a branch of cypress, a gesticulating tree that
was deeply poetic to van Gogh . . . the gloves and the branch belong together
[my emphasis]" [ Van Gogh, 92]).
— I propose we don't yet risk directly treating this question of fetishism, of the
gloves' reversibility, or of the orientation into a pair. For the moment I'm in
terested in the correspondence between Meyer Schapiro and Martin Heidegger.
— We're just stamping our feet about. We're not even skidding, we're just
floundering with a little indecent complacency. To what should we relate this
word—correspondence— which incessantly returns? To that exchange of letters
in 1965?
— I'm interested rather in a secret correspondence, evidently: evidently secret,

encrypted or encoded in the ether of evidence and truth, too evident because the
cipher in this case remains a secret since it's not concealed.
In short, still entrusted to le facteur de la vérité, to the purveyor of truth, this
correspondence is a secret for no one. Its secret should be read in an open letter.
The secret correspondence could be deciphered right in the public cor
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Jacques Derrida
respondence. The correspondence hasn't taken place somewhere else, nor is it

inscribed elsewhere. Each one says; I owe you, am indebted to you for, the truth
in painting, and I'll tell you the truth. But the accent must be placed on the debt
and on the owe, truth without the truth's truth. What do both owe, and what
must they pay back themselves by this restitution of the shoes, one pretending to
render them to the peasant woman, the other to the painter?
Yes, there was in fact this exchange of letters in 1965. Schapiro reveals it in
"La Nature Morte," since that's how we French must translate "The Still Life"
you've just read. This "Dead Nature"—the essay bearing this title is a hommage
rendered to, a present made for, a deceased, a gift dedicated to the memory of
Kurt Goldstein. In his lifetime, Goldstein attracted Schapiro's recognition and
gratitude at least by this deed: giving Schapiro the occasion for reading The
Origin of the Work of Art ("It was Kurt Goldstein who first called my attention
to this essay . . ." ["SL," 203]). Schapiro pays off, in a certain fashion, a debt
and a duty of friendship by dedicating his "Nature Morte" to his dead friend.
This fact is far from being indifferent or extrinsic (we'll come back to this), or at
least the extrinsic always intervenes, as parergon, within the action [la scène].
Keep in mind the following facts and dates. In the meantime, I'll dryly isolate
some of them. Emigrating very young, Schapiro taught at Columbia in New
York, where Goldstein, fleeing Nazi Germany in 1933 (he was first imprisoned,
then freed, provided he leave the country), will also teach him from 1936 to
1940. Goldstein lived in New York after exactly one year's troublesome stay in
Amsterdam, where he wrote Der Aufbau des Organismus. These are the very
years Heidegger gave his lectures on The Origin of the Work of Art and his
course on the Introduction to Metaphysics, two texts in which he refers to Van
Gogh.
So this last act occurred in New York, at Columbia University, where Schapiro
was already living and teaching, if I'm not mistaken, when Goldstein arrived to
teach in his turn, from 1936 until his death, with an interruption during the war
at Harvard and Boston from 1940 to 1945. This last act
— Is this the last?
—As of this date, the last act is in New York at this great academic institution
of Columbia University, which welcomed so many emigrated professors, but
what a route, what a history, for nearly a century, for these shoes of Van Gogh.
They've not budged or said anything, but what they'll have started walking and
talking! Goldstein, himself a man of aphasia, a mortaphasic, will have nothing
to say about them. But everything happened as if Schapiro (in New
York—where he will also give Goldstein's funeral oration in 1965) was contend
ing for them, these shoes, with Heidegger, and was recapturing them in order
to restore them, via Amsterdam and Paris (Van Gogh in Paris) to Van Gogh, but
by the same token he was contending with Goldstein, who had attracted his at
tention to Heidegger's misappropriation. And Heidegger keeps them. And
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when, all told, both say, "I owe you the truth" (for both pretend to speak the
truth, indeed the truth's truth—in painting and in shoes), they also say: I Owe
the shoes, I must render them to whom they belong, to their proper proprietary
relationship [appartenance propre]: to the peasant or peasant woman on the
one side, to the city-dwelling painter and signer of the painting on the other.
But really to whom? And who will believe this episode is only a theoretical or
philosophical dispute for the sake of the interpretation of a work or of the work
of art? Indeed a quarrel between experts on account of the attribution of a paint
ing or a model? In order to restore them, Schapiro keenly contends with
Heidegger for the shoes, with "Professor Heidegger," who would have wanted all
told, through an interposed peasant, to put them on, to replace [remettre]
them, on the feet of a landsman [terrien], with that pathos of "the call to the
earth" of Feldweg (The Pathway) or of Holzwege (The Forest Path), and who in
1935-36 was no stranger to what pushed Goldstein to undertake his long trek
[mercAe] to New York via Amsterdam. There's much to pay back, to render, to
restore, if not to expiate in all this. Everything happens as if Schapiro, not
content with thanking the deceased for what he's given Schapiro himself the oc
casion to read, was offering to the memory of his colleague, his like and friend,
nomad, émigré, city-dweller,
— a detached part, a cut-off ear, but whose?
— the pair recaptured, removed, indeed uprooted from the common enemy,
in any case from the common enemy's common discourse. The question for
Schapiro too, and in the name of truth, is to regain a foothold, to recapture the
shoes in order to replace the very feet needed in them. Although these shoes were
first alleged to be those of a migrant and city-dweller, of "the artist, by that time
a man of the town and city," things (before much longer) are dangerously com
plicated by the fact that this migrant never ceased to maintain the discourse of
the landed, artisan, and peasant ideology. All these great professors, as is said,
will have much invested in these shoes on more grounds than their being unused
or out of service. They have replaced them. Replace would be of great import in
this debate. The snares, les rets, of these shoes are formed of the re's of return
and replace. Remise des chaussures, replacement of the shoes. They are and can
always be detached (in all the senses we spoke of), abandoned, put on the shelf,
à la remise. A temptation, ever since then inscribed right in the object, to
replace it: to replace the shoes on his feet, to replace them on the subject, on the
authentic wearer or owner restored to his rights and reinstated in his standing
being. The structure of the thing and of the legal process thus compels, always,
adding more of them.
—Which is what this incredible reconstitution does. It's a delirious
dramaturgy which projects in its turn a collective hallucination. These shoes are
hallucinogens.
— Yes, I'm going a bit fast. Let's suppose all this happens as part of the
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Jacques Derrida
bargain, par dessus le marché, and give me credit for the moment. Grant me a
small advance, and let's say I espouse what was perhaps, on all sides, a delirium.
There's persecution in this tale, in this history of shoes to be identified, to be
appropriated, and who knows how many bodies, names, and anonymities
(nameable and unnameable) this story is made of. We'll come back to this.
What endures here, and what matters to me, is this correspondence between
Meyer Schapiro and Martin Heidegger.
—Are you going to nonsuit them both, reinstalling the pair?
— Is it really a pair?
—reinstalling both shoes to their "proper" abandonment, to their being
unlaced which, among themselves, right in the middle
—to their being remainders, left behind, leur restance?
—That would be impossible. La restance, being left as remnants, is never
complete repose, it's not substantial and insignificant presence. I also have to
deal with these shoes, perhaps give them away, even if I contented myself to say
at the end: quite simply, these shoes are not owned; there are some shoes, and
that's that.
—He tied those shoes.
—Es gibt, ça donne, it gives, these shoes.

—The literal correspondence, what you call the exchange of letters, is now a
(nearly) public phenomenon. Made public by Schapiro in his hommage to the
memory of Goldstein. This henceforward public exchange will apparently give
rise [donne lieu] to something like a disagreement. In any case, Schapiro, who
revealed and commented on this correspondence and thus kept the last word for
himself, concludes on a disagreement. He claims to be in possession of the truth
of the shoes (in the painting) by Vincent (Van Gogh). And since he owes the
truth, he restores it. He identifies (in every sense of this word) the painting and
the shoes (having assigned them their points or their proper pointure, their size),
names the work, and attributes the subject of the work to the subject of the
work, let's say, to its true subject. According to him, Heidegger was mistaken
both about the painting and the shoes. By attributing them to a peasant or a
peasant woman, he remains in error ("The error lies . . . "), in imaginary pro
jection, the very thing against which he claims to put us on guard ("He has in
deed 'imagined everything and projected it into the painting' " ["SL," 206]).
Heidegger would have replaced the shoes on the feet of some peasant or peasant
woman. He would have laced them beforehand, tightened them around some
peasant's ankles, that of a subject whose identity, in the very contour of its
absence, seems rather precise. Such would be his error, fantasy, or rash projec
tion. It would have multiple causes (Schapiro detects more than one of them),
but let's leave this for the moment.
— But why is this correspondence called public?

— Like every cause, and all legal proceedings, the nearest cause is some sort of
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trap. Schapiro sets it for Heidegger before he himself knows how to deal with his
own feet.
—And yet. He knows all about traps. He wrote with the most expert hand on
the trap in painting. For example, on the mousetrap that Joseph in the Master of
Flémalle's Annunciation*
— but that trap is set for the devil (Muscipula Diaboli) and the bait is Christ's
flesh.
— All the more reason to be suspicious. The diabolical is perhaps already cap
tured, a supplementary bait, in the limping of these two squinting shoes which,
if the double makes a pair, traps those who wish to replace their feet in them;
precisely because we can't—must not—place our feet in them and because
the pair would be a strange trap. As for the bait's christic shade [ombre
christique],-we'll see that it's not completely missing from among all these phan
toms. This strange trap . . .
— Another species of trap and of what was called paralysis in "Pas."
—Careless, then, Schapiro sets a trap for Heidegger. He already suspects "er
ror," "projection," "fantasy" in Heidegger's text, as his friend or colleague
Goldstein indicated to him. Having thus begun his preliminary investigation, he
writes Professor Heidegger (he calls him such when speaking of the colleague
and correspondent, and simply Heidegger, nothing more, when he names the
celebrated thinker and author of The Origin of the Work of Art): To exactly
what painting did you refer? The "obliging" response of Professor Heidegger
("In reply to my question, Professor Heidegger has kindly written me that the
picture to which he referred is one that he saw in a show at Amsterdam in March
1930. This is clearly de la Faille's no. 255 (see Figure 1)" ["SL," 105]) closes itself
on its author as a trap. We hear the snap; clearly. It's clear, clearly, the matter,
the affair, is settled, it's de la Faille 255, it—ça—cannot return to some peasant.
"They are the shoes of the artist, by that time a man of the town and city"
[ibid.]. Inquiry closed, sentence rendered, it will suffice to complete or polish
the report of these proceedings, all told very quickly expedited. The Professor is
caught. Confirmed in his suspicion, Schapiro can then reconstitute one of the
possible mechanisms of the mistake, itself at the service of a libidinal and
political pathos (the landed and peasant "ideology"): the mistake is a kind of re
soling with the help of the sole of another painting seen at the same 1930 exposi
tion. It was the first mistake, the first trap before the one Schapiro will set for the
Professor, in order to make the pair and to leave Heidegger no chance. All this
in order to respond to the question I asked a moment ago: all the causes of these
legal proceedings will have been traps (as represented beforehand by the ap
parent stake of the debate: to whom does the trap return?), shoe-traps, chausse
trapes, or if you prefer, springes, lacets, snare traps, pièges à lacets. Old Boots
with Laces (Vieux Souliers aux lacets) is the title given by the excellent
Catalogue of the Tuileries Exposition, 1971-72 (Collection of the National
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Jacques Derrida
Museum of Vincent Van Gogh in Amsterdam), to the painting that Professor

Schapiro claims to identify on the basis of Professor Heidegger's unsuspecting
response and which he, Schapiro, reproduced under the title Old Shoes. I don't
yet know what part returns to Van Gogh in the choice of this title. But since a
certain essential indétermination is part of our problem, which is also that of the
title and of the discourse held (for example by the author) on the subject of the
painting, perhaps it's suitable to leave some suspense to the thing. The authors
of the Catalogue I just cited took into account de la Faille, the very one who con
stitutes Schapiro's authority ("The titles of works given by Vincent in his cor
respondence, commonly adopted, have been stated precisely even when they
were not sufficiently explicit, hence some differences, either with the titles
formerly in use, or with those of the new Catalogue Raisonné of J. Baart de la
Faille . . . "). Named or not by Van Gogh, in a title or a letter, these laces (ty
ing/untying, more or less tightly, the subject who wears or is borne) outline the
form itself of the trap. As much fascinating as (even thereby) negligible for both
professors who don't allude to this in the least. There's one of the causes: le lacet,
the lace. A thing whose name is also a name for a trap: le lacet, the springe or
snare. This isn't only true of what passes through the shoe's or the corset's
eyelets.
— In fact I notice now this strange buckle
— ready to strangle
— of the undone lace. The buckle is open, even more than the detached shoes,
but after a kind of knot was outlined
—The buckle forms a circle in its outermost edges, an open circle, provi
sionally, ready to be closed up, like pliers or a key ring, like a leash. In the lower
right corner where the buckle faces, very symmetrically, the red signature of
"Vincent" that is underlined. There the buckle occupies a place very readily
reserved for the artist's signature. As if, on the other side, in the other corner, on
the other edge, but symmetrically, on a (quasi) par with it, it took the place of
the signature, as if it took its empty and open place . . .
— If the laces are untied or loosened, the shoes are indeed detached from the
feet and in themselves. But I return to my question: they are also detached (per
the above fact) from each other and nothing proves they make a pair. Now no ti
tle, if I understand right, said Pair of Boots for this painting. Whereas
elsewhere, in a letter that Schapiro cites in another connection, Van Gogh will
have spoken of another painting by specifying "a pair of old boots." Doesn't the
possibility of this "unpaired"—two shoes for the same foot, for example, are
more the double of each other, but this double confuses pair and identity at
once, prohibits complementarity, paralyzes orientation, casts a sidelong glance
at the devil—doesn't the logic of this false parity (rather than of this false identi
ty) construct the trap? The more I look at this painting, the less it—(«—seems
able to walk . . .
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— Yes, to do that, the "unpaired" must remain a possibility, at the limit, I'll
say, improbable. And besides, even if Van Gogh had entitled the painting and
had entitled it Pair of—, that would change nothing in the ef
fect produced, whether or not it be conscientiously investigated. A title doesn't
merely define the painting to which it's attached or from which it's detached ac
cording to numerous and occasionally overdetermined modes. The title can be
part of the painting and can play more than a role of, can secure there more
than, a rhetorical figure. Pair of —, for example, can lead us to think of parity,
the "truth of the pair," the moment the unpaired or le hors-pair, the outside
the-pair, comes into view. And then, another argument, the "unpaired" can say
and show parity, the truth of the pair, with much more force. Just like (as we'll
see) being out of use exhibits utility or being out of work exposes work.
— I find this pair, if that can be said, gauche, skew. Through and through.
Look at the details, the interior lateral face: you'd say two left feet. Different
shoes. And the more I look at them, the more they look at me, the less they
resemble an old pair. More an old couple. Is that the same thing? If we allow
ourselves to go to the easiness of the symbolism you spoke of a few minutes ago,
the self-evident bisexuality of this thing would depend on the passivity turned in
side out, opened like a glove, offering more to view, more undressed than the
left shoe (I mean on the left side of the painting)
—it's a peasant woman
— a woman eating potatoes or the Peasant Woman of Brabant (1885), the
empty hood of one or the other, whereas the other shoe (the left?), to the right of
the painting (how are we to orient ourselves in talking about this?), is straighter,
more confined, precise, less open. In short, you would have said, formerly, more
masculine, and it's this shoe which tightens the lace to a half-opened circle, op
posite the first name.
— If, as Schapiro advances, the signer is the owner or, an important nuance,
the wearer of the shoes, will we say that the half-opened circle of the lace calls
for reattachment: of the painting to the signature (to la pointure, the punctur
ing which makes a hole in the canvas), of the shoes to their owner, indeed of
Vincent to Van Gogh, in short a complement, a general reattachment like truth
to painting [comme vérité en peinture]?
—That's to go much too fast. From some of the proofs you claim to have at
your disposal, the signer of a painting can't be identified with the nameable
owner or an object essentially detachable and represented in the painting. You
can't proceed to such an identification without an incredible ingenuity, incredi
ble on the part of so authoritative an expert. Ingenuity in identifying the struc
ture of the painting, and even of an imitative representation in the simplest
sense of "copy." Ingenuity in identifying the structure of an object that's
detachable in general and the logic of its proprietary relationship in general.
What interest could bring about such a faux-pas, that's the question I wanted to
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Jacques Derrida
ask a few minutes ago concerning the strange scene of restitution of the three, all
three, great European academics. Why this sudden blindness? Why suddenly
put to sleep all critical vigilance? Why does the lucidity remain so very active,
hypercritical around this macula, but only on its edges? Why this hasty compul
sion, pushing one to give hommage to the second, the deceased, with a still life
uprooted from (not the least hasty and compulsive an interpretation) the other,
the third or the first as you wish, the fourth remaining, as always, excluded? Ça
donne, it gives, in order better to retake; ça prend, it takes, while giving, since
there are these laces
— of the purse or the fetish, if I understand right. We still don't know, if

I understand right, to what wearer \porteur\ the awkward gait, le dégainé,*
refers. But since you are interested in the wearer, I see for the moment, in this
snare, ce lacet, some sort of check made out to the bearer [porteur]. Some
checks made out to the bearer. The trap is that each one is in a hurry to fill it in,
with his name or the name of a corporation, a "company with limited liability"
(in French, société à responsabilité limitée, SARL), of which he is more or less
the shareholder or bondholder (Heidegger for an agricultural, landed, rural,
sedentary society; Schapiro for an industrial, urban, nomadic, or migrant socie
ty), without noticing that the check is cancelled. And as is often done, with two
lines, and perhaps even more: that which centers the painting, cutting it off
from its outside, placing it in a severely closed system, and that which delimits,
m the painting, the form of the shoes, in particular this undone, haunted,
unlaced vacancy . . .
— I'll add: that which separates one shoe from the other. For what proves that
we are dealing here with a pair?
— It's difficult, under these conditions, for any bearer to be paid. Or for any
donor to render hommage.
—And yet. There is hommage. Ça donne. It gives. There's an Es gibt that
Heidegger, better than any other, will have set us thinking about. The Es gibt
"before" being, the Es gibt literally, the Sein starting from (and returning to) Es
gibt Setn.
—But we haven't yet opened the dossier of this correspondence between
Meyer Schapiro and Martin Heidegger. Let's take our time. Anyway, wherever
they come from or return to, these shoes won't return safely [à bon port].
—Nor cheaply [d bon marché]. Despite the incredible bargaining, or by
reason of the interminable higher bidding of an analysis which never finishes
coupling, this time . . .
—They will have traveled much, traversed all sorts of towns and territories at
war. Several world wars and mass deportations. We can take our time. There
they are, made to wait. Made to start walking, led on [Pourfaire marcher]. The
irony of their patience is infinite; it can be held of no account. So we've reached
this public correspondence, and I was saying that sealing a disagreement, this
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seal held another correspondence under seal. Secreted there in the former,
although readable right in the other. A symbolic correspondence, an accord, a
harmonic. In this communication between two illustrious professors who both
have a communication to give on a "well-known painting of Van Gogh"
— one of the two is a specialist. Painting, and even Van Gogh, is really his
thing, he wants to preserve it, so it may be returned to him
— What do you notice? Through mutual consideration, the civility of a
reciprocal legitimation which seems to blunt the most deadly blows, one is sen
sitive to the effects of a common code, of an analogical (identical, identifiable)
desire, a resemblance in their eagerness (which is also an eagerness toward the
identifying resemblance), in short, a common interest and even a common debt,
a shared duty. They owe the truth in painting, the truth of the painting, and
even painting as truth, indeed as the truth's truth. (They ought to tell the truth
in painting. To be sure we must reckon with the debt or duty—"I owe you"—but
saying, what does it—pa—mean here? And saying in painting: the so-called
truth itself, as one says, "in painting"? Or the so-called truth concerning paint
ing, in the domain of painting? Or the truth so called in more than one manner
of speaking—a figure—painted, the silently painted truth, itself, in painting?)
For this, they both are interested in identifying, in identifying the subject of
(who wears or is borne by) the shoes, in tying, in tying again stricto sensu the
right way, these objects which cannot but—, in identifying and in refitting
(reappropriating) [(se) réapproprier], in order to use and enjoy in their turn this
strange out-of-service-ness [hors-d'usage], a product producing so much sup
plementary surplus value. At all cost we must find its pointure, its size, again,
even if this "subject" is not the same for one or for the other. They are in agree
ment, it's the contract of this tacit institution, in order to search for one, or seem
to search, both being assured beforehand of having found it. Since it's a pair,
first, and none of them has any doubt about this, there must be a subject. And
so the contract, the institution, in this shoe market is first the parity between
shoes, that very singularly dual relation which adjusts both parts of a pair (iden
tity and difference, total identity in concept or formal semantics, difference and
noncoincidence in the orientation of traits). If there's a pair, there's a possible
contract; the subject can be looked for, hope remains permitted. The colloque,
the discussion—and the collocation, the order of priority of creditors and sums
due them—can take place, the dispute can begin (be undertaken) [(s) engager].
We could appropriate, expropriate, take, give, retake, offer, pay, give hom
mage, or wrong. Otherwise
— Why do you say this correspondence is symbolic? Symbolic of what?
— Of the symbol. Of the symbolon. I said symbolic correspondence on ac
count of that preliminary and coded agreement, of this discussion contracted on
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Jacques Derrida
the basis of a common interest (the reattachment through a nexus, the annexa
tion of the shoes or, this is already sufficient, the simple formation of the state
ment, "whose shoes are they," or, what amounts to nearly the same thing in the
infantry of this slightly military preparation, "whose or of what feet are they,"
which are the object of the professors' constant attention). This implies a sort of
reciprocal recognition (of the pair), a (double and reciprocal) diplomatic ex
change, or in any case that law of nations which supposes a declaration of war.
To commemorate the mutual agreement, the shoes are divided, each one keep
ing a piece of the symbolon. And the same piece, or rather the piece resembling
and different from the same whole, the complementary piece. That's why the
pair is the condition for the symbolic correspondence. And not of the symbolic
contract in the case when a double wouldn't make the pair. Which wouldn't be
one (same) thing in two, but a two in identity.
—Then, finally, what's the subject of this correspondence? Correspondence?
The pair's parity?
— Ah, there you are. About what, on the subject of what. We'd like the ques
tion: "whose shoes are they?" to revert to: "whose feet are they?" But this sup
poses the following question resolved: "(of) what are feet?" Are they? Do they
represent? Whom or what? With or without shoes? Shoes are more or less detach
ed (in themselves, between themselves and feet), thereby released: from a task or
a real function. Both because visibly detached and because (let's never forget the
invisible ether of this trivial evidence) they are painted objects (out of work as
work) and the "subjects" of a painting. Not functioning, defunct, they are
detached (in this double sense) in still another double sense: that of déliaison or
disconnecting and that of detaching an emissary: diplomatic representation, if
you wish, by metonomy or synecdoche. And what's said of shoes can also be said,
although the operation is more delicate around the ankle and the neck, of feet.
So what's the subject of this correspondence? The subject of the subject of
reattachment. One hurries to resume relations with the subject. The detach
ment is unbearable. And the correspondence takes place on the subject of the
true subject of the subject of a "well-known painting." Not only on the subject of
the subject painting, as is said, but also on the subject of the subject of (who
wears or is borne by) the shoes which seem to form the chief subject of the paint
ing, of the feet of the subject from which feet, these shoes, and then this paint
ing itself seem here detached and adrift. It—pa—matters a lot. And it's very
complicated. The structure of detachment—and consequently of the subjectivi
ty of these different subjects—differs in each case. And we must clearly state
that the intent of the correspondence which interests us is to efface all these dif
ferences. Among which I've not yet counted what determines the (underlying)
subjectivity of the shoe on its most fundamental surface, the sole. Nor the still
more or less fundamental subjectivity of the ground (with or without the support
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of the canvas) with this contact step [pas de contact], this step of the subject,
which lifts, in rhythm, the grip in walking [d'une marche]. The step is not pres
ent or absent. And yet it, ça, walks badly without a pair . . .
— But I'm very surprised. Clearly Heidegger's text opened this debate. Now
doesn't it leave far behind all problems of subjectivity? In fact, subjectivity sup
poses what is here de-sedimented by him, among others, the determination of
the thing as "hupokeimenon," support, substratum, substance, etc.?
— That's one of the paradoxes of this exchange. Every discourse remains une
qual to this, inadequate to itself. In The Origin of the Work of Art, the passage
on "a well-known painting by Van Gogh" belongs to the chapter on "Thing and
Work." There one is busy withdrawing the thing (but the withdrawal is not suffi
cient) from the metaphysical determinations which would have fallen over it,
covering over the thing and wronging it at the same time — (lberfa.ll, insulting,
says the French translator, what is properly thing in the thing, product in the
product, work in the work (das Dinghafte des Diriges, das Zeughafte des Zeuges,
das Werkhafte des Werkes). These determinations of Oberfall proceed in pairs
or couples. Among them is the determination of the thing as underside
(hupokeimenon or hupostatis) in opposition to sumbebekota which befall it.
This oppositional couple will be transformed, in Latin, to subjectum (substan
tia) / accidens. That is only one of the pairs of oppositions fallen on the thing.
Two others would be that of aistheton / noeton (sensible / intelligible) and that
of hul'e / eidos-morph'e (matter / form-shape).
We need to follow Heidegger's course for a moment. It constitutes the context
immediately framing the allusion to the "well-known painting." And if Schapiro
is right in reproaching Heidegger for paying so little attention to the internal
and external context of the painting and to the differential series of the eight paint
ings of shoes, he himself should have avoided a rigorously corresponding, sym
metrical, and analogous excessive haste: clipping out, without any other precau
tion, about twenty lines from Heidegger's long essay, extracting them brutally
from their frame (about which Schapiro wants to know nothing), stopping the
essay's movement, and then interpreting the lines with a tranquility equal to
Heidegger's making the "peasant's shoes" speak. Therefore, preparing ourselves
to treat of shoes in painting and of the subjectum in its multiple senses, and of
the ground, foundation, support (the earth and the canvas, the earth on the
canvas, the canvas on the earth, the shoes on the earth, the earth on and under
the shoes, the feet in shoes on the earth, the subject supposed to wear (or be
borne by) some feet, shoes, etc., the subject of the painting, its subject-object
and its signing subject, the whole again on a canvas with or without underside,
etc.), in short, preparing ourselves to treat of being-undemeath, of soil and sub
soil—perhaps the time is right to mark a pause, even before beginning, next to
this subjectum. I reserve for another time the reading of clothes or fabrics or
veils, for example stockings, le bas, as the underside of this text. This isn't
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Jacques Derrida
unrelated, as we'll see, with the underside which occupies us just now concerning
the sole of the shoe.
— Is it opportune to accede or comply with [faire droit d] a sort of refined

assonance, like giving the tone, before speaking on the subject (in every sense) of
the "well-known painting?" Or indeed is it necessary to consider as essential and
necessary the tie between both "subjects," the two problematical places of the
subject?
— I believe it's opportune for two reasons. The question of the underside as
soil, earth, then as sole, shoe, sock or stocking, foot, etc., this question can't be
unknown to the "large question" of the thing as hupokeimenon, then as subjec
tum. Next, if it's granted that the course of The Origin of the Work of Art
claims to lead back to a point short, upstream, or on the verge of the constitu
tion of the "subjectum" in the apprehension of the thing (as such, as product, or
as work), then to ask the Origin the question of the "subject," of the subject of
such a pair of shoes, that perhaps would be to begin with a mistake, with an im
aginary, projective, or erroneous reading. Unless Heidegger is unaware (exclud
ed? foreclosed? denied? left implicit? unthought?) of another set of problems
concerning the subject, for example, in a displacement or a development of the
value "fetish." Unless, then, the question of the subjectum is otherwise displaced
outside the problems of truth and speech governing the Origin. The least we can
say is that Schapiro doesn't try this. He's caught there but apparently without
even having the least suspicion of it.
—And yet. If this "step backward," Schritt zuriick, on the path of thought
— There is the insistence on thought questioning as "Weg, " as path or ad
vance. In Heidegger this thought rules all, is difficult, and we'd have to har
monize it with the "subject" that occupies us in its own peculiar place, with its
landscape, its peasantry and stories [paysannerie], its "world," and this "thing"
which is neither the ground's nor the peasant's but between them—the shoes.
This would draw us along too far today, toward the shoes or stockings with which
thought advances, walks, thinks, speaks, writes, with its language provided with
shoes (or as road) [(comme) chaussée]·, and from what takes place when
thought's shoes are not (are they ever so?) laced in an absolutely precise way or
when the stockings of language are a little loose. Suppose Van Gogh's shoes
resemble those which have just walked (in the text) on the "path" which "leads to
the product quality of the product." ("Dock welcher Wegfiihrt zum Zeughaften
des Zeugen" is a sentence which precedes by four lines the evocation of the "well
known painting" and the sentences that Schapiro cites in beginning: "We are
most easily insured against this if we simply describe a product without any
philosophical theory. We choose as example a common sort of product—a pair
of peasant shoes" [O, 32], The question doesn't yet involve any product as a
work of art or in a work of art: a subtle and equivocal articulation which, before
long, we'll have to take into account, at least if we want to read this text.)
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— But, then, if this "step backward" on the path of thought had to return this
side of or prior to every "subjectum, " how can we explain the naive, impulsive,
and precritical attribution of the shoes of a painting to a likewise determined
"subject," the peasant, rather the peasant woman, an attribution and a deter
mination tightly knit together which orient all this discourse on the painting and
its "truth"? Would we be in agreement by qualifying this gesture as I just did:
naive, impulsive, precritical?
— Yes, and Schapiro's demonstration confirms what could be perceived very
quickly on this precise point. But there remains delimiting the place and the
function of this "attribution" in the text, the map of its effects on the long course
of the trek, its apparent noncongruence with the dominant motifs of the essay: a
climb in fact to this side of the subjectum, but also a critique of representation,
expression, reproduction, etc. We'll have to return to this, as to the logic of the
Ûberfall. Concerning all these questions and despite a negative and punctual
pertinence, Schapiro's demonstration seems very quickly winded, out of breath.
And its "impulsive or precritical naïveté" (I use those words again) completely
symmetrical or complementary to what he rightly denounced in Heidegger. The
correspondence will forward this effect even to the details. In a few minutes.
We agreed to pause next to subjectum, at least to turn over the underside of
this correspondence.
— At the Baltimore museum there's a pair of Van Gogh shoes (yes, a pair, this
time more surely), boots —like these here. Let's say ankle boots. But on the left,
one of the two is turned over, showing its bottom, its nearly new sole, embellish
ed with a studded design. The painting dates from 1887 (F. 333).
— Let's go back this side of the allusion to the "well-known painting," to
where the chapter "Thing and Work" names "the fundamental Greek ex
perience of the Being of beings in general" [0, 23]. I underline fundamen
tal— Gmnderfahrung. The interpretation of the thing as hupokeimenon, then
as subjectum, doesn't produce (isn't produced) only (as) a clever linguistic
phenomenon. The transforming translation of hupokeimenon as subjectum
would correspond to another "way of thinking" and of being-there. It would
translate, transport, transfer (Heidegger underscores the passage to Uber) over
and beyond the aforesaid fundamental Greek experience: "Roman thought
takes over (ubernimmt) the Greek words (WOrterj without a corresponding,
equally authentic experience of what they say, without the Greek word (WortJ.
The groundlessness (Bodenlosigkeit) of Western thought begins with this
translation" [ibid. ].
So (thought's) ground comes to be lacking when some words are deprived of
speech. The "same" words ( Winter) deprived of speech ( Wort) corresponding to
the authentic Greek experience of the thing, the "same" words, which conse
quently are no longer quite the same, phantom doubles of themselves, their
airy simulacra begin to walk above or in the void, bodenlos. Let's retain thisdif
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Jacques Derrida
ference of words to speech for a long time; it'll help us in a few minutes, and
later on again, to understand (beyond our limited debate on the attribution of
these attributes, of these accidents which feet, a fortiori shoes, would be) what
the thing says. What one makes or lets the thing say, what it makes or lets be
said.
—Should we believe that between this loss of ground and the place of these
shoes, their taking-place [avoir-lieu] or taking-the-place-of [tenir-lieu], there
was some common topos. In fact, the shoes seem to be a little in the air, whether
they seem without contact with the surface (as in lévitation), above what still sup
ports them (the right shoe, the most visibly "left" of the two, seems a little raised,
mobile, as if lifted for a step, whereas the other would be clinging more to the
ground). Or, left to their being-unlaced, the shoes suspend all experience of the
ground, the ground which supposes walking, the standing position or upright
posture, and that a "subject" is in possession of its feet. Or again, more "radical
ly," their status as represented-object in the plain frame of a painted canvas, in
deed hung on a museum wall, determines Bodenlosigkeit itself, provokes or
defines it, translates it, signifies it, or, as you wish, is it, there
— and the desire then to make them get another foothold on the soil of the
fundamental experience—
— No, no, at least not so fast. It's a question only, to begin, of discovering
some cave-ins in the terrain, also some abysses in the field where so tranquilly
advances—
—Why not tranquility? Why this persecution?

— the discourses of attribution, the declarations of ownership, performances
or investitures of the type: that's mine, those shoes or those feet belong to
someone who says "me" and can now be identified, they belong to the nameable
(in common nouns: the peasant or peasant woman, the townsman; or in proper
nouns: Vincent Van Gogh; and proper in both desires: Heidegger and Schapiro,
who require restitution). These abysses are not the "last word" and above all
they don't simply consist of this Bodenlosigkeit about which we just spoke. The
very moment Heidegger denounces the translation into Latin words, the mo
ment, in any case, he declares Greek speech lost, he also avails himself of a
"metaphor." At the very least a metaphor, that of the foundation or ground.
The ground of the Greek experience would be missing in this "translation."
(What I just called too quickly a "metaphor" concentrates all the difficulties to
come: do we speak "metaphorically" of the ground for anything whatever? And
of walking, la marche, or of the shoes—the clothing, tool, institution, the in
vestiture itself—for thought, language, writing, painting, and the remainder, le
reste?)
What does Heidegger say? He states: since the thing is no longer apprehended
as the Greeks did, namely the underside as hupokeimenon, but as substantia,
the ground happens to be missing. But this ground is not hupokeimenon, it's the
primordial and fundamental experience of the Greeks or of their speech which
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apprehends the thing as being-underneath. It's the ground of the hupo

keimenon. This (metaphorical?) reduplication must be questioned for itself.
And the underside of the underside leads to a thought of the abyss, rather than
of the mise-en-abyme, the representative placing-in-the-abyss,s and "here" abyss
would be one of the places or nonplaces ready to assume all this play [prêts à tout
porter de ce jeu].
—That's what removes us far from Schapiro's "Still Life" and from what was
named just a few minutes ago (if I remember correctly) the offering of the cut
off ear to Goldstein
— No, of a pair (which perhaps never existed and that no one ever had) of
things detached and put together again to make a gift. Was it—pa—removed?
Re-moval ent-femt, he says, re-moves the distance . . .
— I'm not digressing, I'm in the process, starting from there, of returning to
what the other one said. For the thing is still more hidden [dérobée] or covered
[enrobée] beneath its investiture than would be thought. The moment he calls us
back to the Greek ground and to apprehending the thing as hupokeimenon,
Heidegger gives us to think that this primordiality [originaire] still covers over
(by falling over) something. The hupokeimeon, this Greek underside, dissembles
another underside. Thus the Latin underside (substantia-subjectum) causes the
Greek underside (hupokeimenon), along with the Greek ground, to disappear,
but this Greek underside still hides or veils (the figure of veiling, of linen veiling
as the over-underwear [dessus-dessous] won't be long in appearing, and the
hymen which involves it in the undecidable won't be unrelated to the sock, the
bobby sock [soquette] or the stocking, between foot and shoe) a "more" primor
dial thingness, une choséité "plus" originaire. But if the "more" is removed, the
thing no longer has the shape or the value of "underside." Finding itself (or not)
"under" the underside, the thing wouldn't only open an abyss. It would
brusquely, discontinuously, with one strike, prescribe the change of direction or
rather a completely different topic.
— Perhaps that of this returning whose great distance, a few moments ago
— Perhaps. The topos of the abyss and a fortiori that of the representative
placing-in-the-abyss could also dissemble, in any case deaden a little, the
brusque and angular necessity of this other topic. And this other step. That's
what interests me "under" this correspondence concerning a "well-known paint
ing" of old unlaced walking shoes
— half unlaced
— and when (if one can tell) the question of its place is asked. How are we to
grasp that correspondence and that transfer, all those translations?
— I arrived late. I just heard the words "abyss," "offering" or "gift." Ça
donne, it gives, in the abyss; pe donne, it gives—the abyss. There is, es gibt, il y
a, the abyss. Now it seems clear to me that the Origin is also read as an essay on
the gift, Schenkung, on the offering; one of the three senses in which precisely
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Jacques Derrida
truth would come to its establishment, its institution, or its investiture

(Stiftung). One of the two other senses, grounding, GrUnden, is not unrelated to
the ground. In another connection, this truth which, Heidegger says, is "un
truth" and which "happens (Geschieht) in Van Gogh's painting" [0, 56] (a
phrase about which Schapiro speaks ironically), the Origin also states that its
essence opens rather to the "abyss." It has nothing to do with the attributive cer
titude about the secured ground of (Cartesian-Hegelian) subjectivity.
Therefore? Before applying these "concepts" (gift or abyss, for example) to the
debate (indeed to such an "object" as Heidegger's text would be), perhaps we'd
have to begin by deciphering them and restoring them in Heidegger's text,
which perchance is withdrawn in advance from the application that we want him
to do, to make problematic in advance all his instruments. Then a mocking and
agile application could well be revealed as ingenuous, clumsy, somnambulistic,
and the detective trapped
—Undoubtedly. Then we'd have to proceed in such a way that all of
discourse's inequalities to itself, meticulously . . .
—According to our agreement, we were assembled to talk about Schapiro's
"Still Life" and about a certain correspondence whose secret was promised us at
one time. I propose we finally come to it. Otherwise we'll never finish in the
limits proposed. Macula defines the limits, that's what remains to be seen, and,
if it's the law for us, we can't meddle with it.
—For myself, what interests me is to see explained, finally (from a certain
side), why I've always found Heidegger's passage on Van Gogh ludicrous and
lamentable. Then, admittedly, it was the naïveté that Schapiro accurately called
"projection." We're not only misled when academic seriousness and the severity
and the rigor of tone make room for this "illustration" (bildliche Darstellung).
We're not only misled by the consuming dash toward the content of a represen
tation, by the heaviness of pathos, by the coded triviality of this description at
once overloaded and indigent (a description of which we never know if it's busy
about a painting, some "real" shoes, or some imaginary—but outside the paint
ing—shoes), by the roughness of the frame line, the arbitrariness or barbarity of
the clipping out, the massive assurance of his identification: "a pair of peasant
shoes," like these, comme pal Where did he get that [pa]? Where does he explain
himself about it [pa]? So we're not only misled, we burst out laughing. The drop
in tension is too great. We follow the advance of a "great thinker" step by step; he
returns to the origin of the art work and of truth by traversing all of Western
history, and then suddenly, at the bend of a passage, we find ourselves again
right in the middle of an organized tour, as with school children or tourists. Some
one has gone to look for the guide on the adjacent farm. Full of good will. He
loves the earth and a certain painting when they find each other again. Aban
doning his habitual activity, he's going to get his key while making the visitors
who slowly get out of the car wait. (There's a Japanese among them who will
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presently ask some questions of the guide, in a stage whisper.) Then the tour
begins. In the local accent (Swabian), he tries to stir the clientele (he occasional
ly succeeds and each time trembles just as punctually, in time), he multiplies the
immediate associations and projections. From time to time, he points out the
fields through the window, and no one notices that he's no longer speaking
about painting. Good. And we're told that the scene, the choice of the example,
the procedure of treatment, none of that is fortuitous. The occasional guide is
that very one there who, before and after this incredible tirade, pursues his
discourse on the origin of the work of art and on truth. It's the same discourse,
he's never been interrupted by the least digression (besides, what all these pro
fessorial treks on shoes lack is the sense of digression: the shoes should make a
pair and walk on the path, forward or backward, at the limit, in a circle, but
without any digression, without a step to the side which accordingly would be
reprehensible; now the step's detachability is related to the possibility of digres
sion). I see you're shocked, by your deference, by the scene I've, how would you
say
— projected
— Then let's return to school. It—ça —is all academic, classique, a matter of
class, also of pedagogy and of classicness, classicité. Professor Heidegger, as Pro
fessor Schapiro says in hommage to Professor Goldstein, projects a transparency.
By this illustration, he wants to be interesting from the beginning of his lecture.
For the Origin was first a series of conferences before an Aesthetic Society, a
Kunstwissenschaftliche Gesellschaft, then before a Free German Diocese, a Freie
Deutsche Hochstift, and it feels the effects of these . . .
—The word "illustration" was just said. It was said many times previously. I
propose we begin there, if we must begin, and if we must read Schapiro's Note,
against which I intend to defend systematically, at least for the exercise now in
progress, Heidegger's cause (who, let's not forget, also gave—in the place where
he questioned the thing—an important lecture on causa). A great many dif
ficulties result from what illustration translates. In his protocol, Schapiro avails
himself of this word which also translates "hildliche Darstellung" in French ("II
suffit pour cela d'une illustration. Nous choisissons à cet effet un célèbre tableau
de VanGogh. . . "[Origine, 24]). Schapiro opens his text (and the Origin) with this
point (but by what right?) and he writes: "In his essay on The Origin of the Work of
Art . . . Martin Heidegger interprets a painting by Van Gogh to illustrate the
nature of art as a disclosure of truth. He comes to this picture in the course of
distinguishing three modes of being: of useful artifacts [products], of natural
things, and of works of fine art. He proposes to describe first, 'without any
philosophical theory ... a familiar sort of equipment [Zeug, translated as
equipment] — a pair of peasant shoes'; and 'to facilitate the visual realization of
them' [visual realization translates Veranschaulichung, an intuitive, sensible
presentation], he chooses 'a well-known painting by Van Gogh, who painted
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Jacques Derrida
such shoes several times.' But to grasp the 'equipmental being of equipment,' we
must know 'how shoes actually serve.' For the peasant woman they serve without
her thinking about them or even without looking at them. Standing and walking
in the shoes, the peasant woman knows the serviceability [utilité, Dienlichkeit] in
which 'the equipmental being of equipment consists.' But we ... " ["SL,"
203-04], And then Schapiro cites those two paragraphs you judge so ridiculous
or imprudent. First, let's read them, in German, in French, in English.
Solange wir uns degegen nur so im algemeinen ein Paar Schuhe

vergegenwârtigen oder gar im Bilde die bloss dastehenden leeren,
ungebrauchten Schuhe ansehen, werden wir nie erfahren, was das
Zeugsein des Zeuges in Wahrheit ist. Nach dem Gemâlde von van
Gogh kônnen wir nicht einmal feststellen, wo diese Schuhe stehen.
Um dieses Paar Bauernschuhe herum ist nichts, wozu und wohin sie
gehôren kônnten, nur ein unbestimmter Raum. Nicht einmal Erd
klumpen von der Ackerscholle oder vom Feldweg kleben daran,
was doch wenigstens auf ihre Verwendung hinweisen kOnnte. Ein
Paar Bauernschuhe und nichts weiter. Und dennoch.
Aus der dunklen Offnung des ausgetretenen Inwendigen des

Schuhzeuges starrt die Miihsal der Arbeitsschritte. In der derb
gediegenen Schwere des Schuhzeugs ist aufgestaut die Zâhigkeit
des langsamen Ganges durch die weithin gestreckten und immer
gleichen Furchen des Ackers, fiber dem ein rauher Wind steht. Auf
dem Leder liegt das Feuchte und Satte des Bodens. Unter den
Sohlen schiebt sich hin die Einsamkeit des Feldweges durch den
sinkenden Abend. In dem Schuhzeug schwingt der verschwiegene
Zuruf der Erde, ihr stilles Verschenken des reifenden Korns und ihr
unerklârtes Sichversagen in der Brache des winterlichen Feldes.
Durch dieses Zeug zieht das klaglose Bangen um die Sicherheit des
Brotes, die wortlose Freude des Wiederflberstehens der Not, das
Beben in der Ankunft der Geburt und das Zittern in der Um
drohung des Todes. Zur Erde gehOrt dieses Zeug und in der Welt
der Bâuerin ist es behfltet. Aus diesem behflteten Zugehôren ersteht
das Zeug selbst zu seinem Insichruhen (Ursprung, 22-23).
Par contre, tant que nous nous contenterons de nous représenter

une paire de souliers "comme ça", "en général", tant que nous nous
contenterons de regarder sur un tableau de simples souliers vides,
qui sont là sans être utilisés—nous n'apprendrons jamais ce qu'est
en vérité l'être-produit du produit. D'après la toile de Van Gogh,
nous ne pouvons même pas établir où se trouvent ces souliers.
Autour de cette paire de souliers de paysan, il n'y a rigoureusement
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rien où ils puissent prendre place: rien qu'un espace vague. Même
pas une motte de terre provenant du champ ou du sentier, ce qui
pourrait au moins, indiquer leur usage. Une paire de souliers de
paysan, et rien de plus. Et pourtant . . .
Dans l'obscure intimité du creux de la chaussure est inscrite la
fatigue des pas du labeur. Dans la rude et solide pesanteur du

soulier est affermie la lente et opiniâtre foulée à travers champs, le
long des sillons toujours semblables, s'étendant au loin sous la bise.
Le cuir est marqué par la terre grasse et humide. Par-dessous les
semelles s'étend la solitude du chemin de campagne qui se perd
dans le soir. A travers ces chaussures passe l'appel silencieux de la
terre, son don tacite du grain mûrissant, son secret refus d'elle
même dans l'aride jachère du champ hivernal. A travers ce produit
repasse la muette inquiétude pour la sûreté du pain, la joie silen
cieuse de survivre à nouveau au besoin, l'angoisse de la naissance
imminente, le frémissement sous la mort qui menace. Ce produit
appartient à la terre, et il est à l'abri dans le monde de la paysanne.
Au sein de cette appartenance protégée, le produit repose en lui
même (Origine, 24-25).
As long as we only imagine a pair of shoes in general, or simply

look at the empty, unused shoes as they merely stand there in the
picture, we shall never discover what the equipmental being of the
equipment in truth is. From Van Gogh's painting we cannot even
tell where these shoes stand. There is nothing surrounding this pair
of peasant shoes in or to which they might belong—only an
undefined space. There are not even clods of soil from the field or
the field-path sticking to them, which would at least hint at their
use. A pair of peasant shoes and nothing more. And yet—
From the dark opening of the worn insides of the shoes the
toilsome tread of the worker stares forth. In the stiffly rugged
heaviness of the shoes there is the accumulated tenacity of her slow
trudge through the far-spreading and ever-uniform furrows of the
field swept by a raw wind. On the leather lie the dampness and
richness of the soil. Under the soles slides the loneliness of the field
path as evening falls. In the shoes vibrates the silent call of the
earth, its quiet gift of the ripening grain and its unexplained self
refusal in the fallow desolation of the wintry field. This equipment
is pervaded by uncomplaining anxiety as to the certainty of bread,
the wordless joy of having once more withstood want, the trembling
before the impending childbed and shivering at the surrounding
menace of death. This equipment belongs to the earth, and it is
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Jacques Derrida
protected in the world of the peasant woman. From out of this pro
tected belonging the equipment itself rises to its resting-within-itself
(I0, S3-34).
— It's done.
— Before going any farther, I notice in Schapiro's protocolar clipping a cer

tain number of simplifications, in order to say a lot less. These simplifications af
fect all that follows. One simplifies by saying Heidegger interprets a painting to
illustrate the nature of art as the disclosure of truth. To prove this, we've no
need to refer ourselves to what the following pages state, namely (in the French
translation to begin with): "l'oeuxrre n'a nullement servi (diente garnichtj, com
me il pourrait sembler d'abord, à mieux illustrer ce qu'est un produit"[Origine,
27]. This time, what is translated in French as "illustrer" is Veranschaulichung
and not Darstellung (also translated earlier by illustration). Veranschaulichung,
the (in some sort) intuitive presentation, is what needs to be facilitated by invok
ing the example of the painting. But it's also what has not been done, although
it appeared to be. Heidegger clearly states: the work hasn't served us for that,
has not given us this service that all told we've imagined to expect from it. It has
done better than illustrate or present to sensible intuition—or worse, depending
on your point of view—it has shown, made to appear. Heidegger just recalled
that the work has not "served" as Veranschaulichung or Darstellung; he adds:
"Rather, the being-product of the product first genuinely (eigens) arrives at its
appearance through the work and only in the work" [0, 36]. This appearance of
the being-product wouldn't take place in some other place that the art work
could (by referring there) illustrate. It takes place properly (and only) in the
work of art. In its very truth. This can seem to aggravate the illusion denounced
by Schapiro and ascribe [mettre au compte] to presentation what was only im
puted to [au titre de] representation, as if Heidegger thought to see even more
directly what Schapiro reproaches him with inferring too quickly. But things still
aren't so simple, and we'll have to return to this.
First of all: the being-product is manifest not as peasant's-shoes, but as pro
duct, Zeug, or as shoes as product. The manifestation is that of the product's
being-product and not of such and such a species of product, like a shoe. Such
was the function of Darstellung. We really need to delimit Darstellung in this
passage and differentiate its various stages. Quite simply, Heidegger is not (as
Schapiro claims) in the process of distinguishing between three modes of the
thing's being.
— But what's involved, then, the moment the alleged "illustration" in
tervenes?
— Heidegger has just analysed the system of the three couples of determina
tions superimposed on the thing. They are connected, associated in a kind of
"conceptual machinery," Begriffsmechanik [0, 27], which nothing resists.
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Among the effects of this system, the couple matter/form and the concept of the
thing as informed matter have for a long time dominated every theory of art and
all aesthetics. Even today. Since he was interested here in the work of art,
Heidegger stresses and specifies his question: does this (dominating) form
matter complex have its origin in the thing's being-thing or even in the work's
being-work and the product's being-product (the participation of man is
understood, hence the temptation to take this matter-form complex for the im
mediate structure of the thing)? In other words, wouldn't the general (allegedly
general) interpretation of the thing as informed matter be secretly constituted
on the basis of the thing as work or as product? Now reread this chapter: in the
course of the inquiry concerning the product as informed matter, the example
of the pair of shoes occurs at least three times before and without the least
reference to an art work, whether pictorial or some other. Two times it's
associated with the examples of the ax and the jug.
—There's much to say about these examples and about Heidegger's discourse
on the jug, precisely apropos the thing.
— Yes, in Heidegger and in others before him (in his tradition) or after him
(Ponge, for example). But let's not let ourselves be diverted. Another time. After
having been at two repetitions associated with the jug and the ax, the third time
(but always before it involves the painting) the pair of shoes is detached from the
other examples. The pair is suddenly alone. No doubt it responds to a particular
need, but Heidegger will never thematize that need. Perhaps the fact is, unlike
the ax and the jug, this useful product is also clothing (Fussbekleidung), whose
mode of reattachment to the subject's—more rigorously let's say Dasein's—body
includes an originality which we'll make the best of in this context. Let's leave
this. In any case, for some long pages, this example very adroitly dispenses with
every aesthetic or pictorial reference. Now in the course of its last occurrence
before the allusion to the "well-known painting," an essential schema is put in
place. Without this schema nothing will be understood of the passage on this
work by Van Gogh or of its differential function, and its irreducible ambiguity
too. I said schema: all told, in a hardly displaced Kantian sense, the question in
volves the mixed, as well as a mediation, and a double proprietary relationship
or a double articulation. The product (Zeug) seems to stand between the thing
and the art work (the work is always art work in this context: Werk). The prod
uct partakes of both, although the work resembles (gleicht), more than the
product, the "mere thing." The example of shoes guides the analysis of this
schematism at the time of its first placement. Heidegger will take up the same
example again only a few pages farther on, in order to take one more step into
this question of the product's being-product: this time "within" an art work,
we'll see why and how this "within" is turned inside out with a single leap [d'un
seul pas franchi]. For the moment the pair of shoes is a paradigm
— in it's status as a paradigm, the pair has a very noble philosophical
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Jacques Derrida
genealogy, from Plato on. Thus we can understand here a sort of citation, as
cryptic as conventional, in a long chain of discourse.
—it's a paradigm of the thing as "product." The thing isn't yet "painted" or
"painting," and it exemplarily holds this "intermediate place," Zwischenstellung,
the place of the between, the inter-stele or inter-posture (as perhaps Lacoue
Labarth would say—whose "Typography" in Mimesis should be reread here)
between "the mere thing (blossen Ding) and the work (Werk). " When the "prod
uct" becomes the subject of a "work," when the thing as product (shoes)
becomes the "subject" presented or represented by a thing as work (painting by
Van Gogh), the thing will be too complicated to be treated as lightly and as
simply as Schapiro does. For we'll be dealing with a work (which resembles more
a mere thing than a product and than a product resembles a mere thing), with a
work presenting or representing a product whose status is intermediate between
the thing and the work, etc. The intermediate mode is in the middle of two
others that it resembles and divides in itself according to a structure of envelop
ing that's difficult to display. First, there's the schematism of the product. For
example: shoes in general. I set apart in advance and underscore some words:
"The product (Zeug), the product shoes (Schuhzeug) for instance, when finished
(fertig), is also self-contained like the mere thing, but it does not have, like the
granite boulder, this Eigenwiichsige [a word difficult to translate: not "spon
taneity" (French translation) nor "the character of having taken shape by itself'
(English translation), but compact sufficiency, dense and self-referring,
obstinate ownership]. On the other hand, the product displays an affinity (Ver
xuandschaft) with the art work, insofar as it is something produced (her
vorgebracht) by the human hand. However, by its self-sufficient presence (in
seinem selbstgeniigsamen Anwesen) the work of art is similar (gleicht) rather to
the mere thing which has taken shape by itself (zu nichts gedritngten) and is self
contained (eigenwiichsige). . . . Thus the product is half thing, because
characterized by thingliness, and yet it is something more; at the same time it is
half art work, and yet something less
— then a work like the painting represents its half and yet something less
—"and yet something less, because lacking the self-sufficiency of the art
work" [O, 29],
— then a work like the painting of shoes exhibits what is lacking in some thing
to be a work, it exhibits—in shoes—the lack of the work itself, we could nearly
say, its very own peculiar lack. And is it in this that the work would be self
sufficient? That it would achieve itself? Is it thus self-complete? Unless it
overflows (itself) in inadéquation, in the excessive or supplementary?
—Heidegger proceeds. "The product has a peculiar position intermediate
(Zwischenstellung) between thing and work, assuming that such a calculated
ordering of them is permissible" [l'èid. ].
This arithmetical tripleness is how Schapiro impudently sums up the whole
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context: "in the course of distinguishing three modes of being." Now if thing 2
(the product) is between thing 1 (bare, mere, pure and simple), and thing 3 (the
art work), thus partaking of both, what Heidegger himself feels limits the
legitimacy of this tripleness is that there remains no less than this: thing 3
resembles more thing 1. Also, further, the painting will be presented as a thing,
and its privilege will be recognized in the presentation that will be made there
(in the presence self-sufficient to itself) of thing 2 (shoes as product). Thus these
"three modes" are not in a relation of distinction among themselves, as Schapiro
believes. (A tightly interwoven relation, but one which can always be analyzed:
loose up to a certain point. Like a lace, each "thing," each mode of being of the
thing, passes inside then outside the other. We will often avail ourselves of this
figure of the lace: passing and repassing through the eyelet of the thing, from
outside in, from inside out, over the outer surface and under the inner one—and
vice versa when this surface is turned inside out like the top of the left shoe, the
lace remains the "same" on both sides, shows itself and disappears (fort/da) in
the regular crossing of the eyelet, insures the thing of its resemblance, bottoms
tied to top, inside fastened to outside, by a law of stricture. Unyielding and sup
ple at the same time.) Thus the work, which resembles more the pure and simple
thing than a product (shoes, for example), is also a product. The picture of the
shoes is a product (of art) resembling a thing, presenting (and not re-presenting,
we'll return to this) a product (shoes), etc.
Recourse to the "well-known painting" is first justified by questioning the
being-product and not the art work. As such, the work will seem to be spoken
about in passing and after the fact [en passant et après coup]. At the point
Heidegger proposes to turn toward the painting, he's not interested then in the
work, but only in the being-product of which some shoes—no matter which
ones—furnish an example. If what matters to him and that he thus describes
aren't the shoes as painting, we can't legitimately expect him to describe the
painting for itself, nor consequently can we criticize his impertinence. Then
what is he doing, and why does he insist so much on the being-product? He too
has a suspicion and an hypothesis: hasn't the mere thing, thing 1, been secretly
determined on the basis of thing 2, of the product as informed matter?
Shouldn't we try to think being-product "before," "outside," "under" this
supervening determination. "Thus the interpretation of'thing' by means of mat
ter and form, whether it remains medieval or becomes Kantian-transcendental,
has become current and self-evident. But for that reason, no less than the other
interpretations mentioned of the thingness of the thing, it is an encroachment
upon, a superimposition fallen over (Oberfall) the thing-being of the thing. The
situation stands revealed as soon as we speak of things in the strict sense
(eigentlichen Dingen) as mere things (bloss Dinge, as bare things). The 'mere'
(Das 'bloss), after all, means the removal of (Entblôssung: exposing which strips
bare) the character of usefulness (Dienlichkeit) and of being made.
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— If I understand right: not exposing the feet, for example, but exposing
[mise à nu] some shoes which become bare things again, without utility, stripped
of their use value? To present sopie shoes as things (1 or 3, without 2), that
would be to exhibit a certain nudity, indeed an obscenity
— obscenity? Isn't that to exaggerate just a bit? Let's say nttdity, okay. Heideg
ger continues: . . ofbeingmade. The bare thing {blosse Ding) is a sort of prod
uct (Zeug), albeit a product undressed (entkleidete) of its being-as-product.
Thing-being consists in what is then left over (was noch iibrigbleibt). But this
remnant (Rest) is not actually (eigens) defined in itself ..." [0, 30],
—The remainder: these bare shoes, these things of uncertain use, returned to
their abandonment of the thing with nothing to do.
— Perhaps it's still too much to think them starting from their use value. To
think this "remnant" otherwise and "properly" (eigens), Heidegger then takes
another step. He wants to interpret the being-product without or short of the
couple matter-form, since he was convinced that this remainder won't be reach
ed by subtracting the "product" but by opening another path toward what is
properly product in the product, toward the Zeughaften des Zeuges. The
reference to Van Gogh is inscribed in this movement, in what this movement can
possess of the very strictly singular. That said, within this movement,
Heidegger's action speaks at times of the painting in itself, at other times of every
other thing outside the painting, with the skilled subtlety of a shoemaker quickly
passing a short awl from inside to outside. In its first and essential moment, the
question which provokes the reference to the painting doesn't involve painting.
And yet, by this movement of the lace of which we spoke (from the inside out,
from outside in, traversing with its metalled tip the surface of the leather or the
canvas—in both senses—par piqûre et pointure, by puncturing and perforating,
the course [trajet] of reference is divided and multiplied. No doubt in a fashion
both cunning and naive, but according to a necessity that Schapiro's pro
ceedings seem completely to disregard.
— Does it involve rendering justice to Heidegger, of restoring to him his due,
his truth, the possibility of his own walk and his own advance?
— That question comes a little early. I'm only beginning.
— Let me interrupt one minute to recall, in "Le Parergon," that blank space
of the opened angle frame which separated the passage cited a moment ago—on
the "bare," the "undressed product," and the "remainder" — from a series of
questions I'd like to cite ["P," 46-47]:
what if
the Oberfall had the structure of the parergon? The violent

superimposition which aggressively falls over the thing, "insults" it
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(as the French translator, rather strangely but not without per
tinence, says of Oberfall), enslaves it, and literally conjugates it
under matter/form—is that superimposition the contingency of a
case, the fall of an accident, or a necessity which remains to be
questioned? What if, as parergon, it was neither one nor the other?
What if the remainder, le reste, could never, in its structure as rem
nant, be allowed to determine itself "properly," if we must no
longer even wait or question in this horizon
Will you say that, here, we are in the same problematic space, that of the
border, the frame, the place of the signature, and, in general, of the parergonal
structure as described "starting from" a certain reading of the Critique of Judg
ment?
— Yes, "starting from" and then also outside that reading, yes, in a strictly
necessary fashion, it seems to me. Let's inscribe everything interchanged here
concerning a painting and some correspondence right here in this blank space of
the dislocated frame. All the motives which kept this place waiting for that in
scription cannot, I would hope, be analyzed. The place was set there in all rigor
but with that certain suppleness of chance, of the bet, which could have left the
place empty. We'd have to reread it all again and still some other things . . .
— Should ergon be translated by product or by work? And parergon by
outside-the-work, by hors-d'oeuvre?
— "Le Parergon" responds to that question. What interests me now isn't the
necessity to return to "Le Parergon," but what's now added to it. In an, of
course, parergonal fashion, as an outside assigned within the inside and yet ir
reducible.
— What, for example?

— Oh well, if for Kant, along with the frame and the column, clothing is an
example of the parergon in its aesthetic representation, and if then the proper
body or the proper subject of representation is the "nude" [le nu], then where
will such Old Boots With Laces range? Don't they have, this time, the parergon,
all alone, as their principal subject with all the ensuing consequences? A
parergon without ergon? A "pure" supplement? Clothing as "bare" supplement
of the "nude" [comme supplément "nu" du "nu"]? A supplement with nothing
to supplement, naming, on the contrary, what it supplies or supplants [supplée]
as its own proper supplement? How are the consequences related to the "bare"
thing? To the "bare" and the "remainder" about which we just spoke? And yet,
in another sense, we called them "nude" just now, we saw them completely naked.
Is it by chance that the clothing "metaphor" comes so easily to Heidegger in
speaking of the "pure and simple" thing? "The 'mere' ('bloss'), after all, means
the removal (Entblossung) of the character of usefulness (Dienlichkeit) and of
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Jacques Derrida
being made. The bare thing (blosse Ding) is a sort of product (Zeug), albeit a
product undressed (entkleidete) of its being-as-product. Thing-being consists in
what is then left over. But this remnant (Rest) is not actually defined in its on
tological character. It remains doubtful (Es bleibt frâglich) whether the thingly
character comes to view at all in the process (auf dem Weg) of stripping off (A b
zug) everything equipmental (ailes Zeughaften)" [O, 30], A stripping off (the
being-product) won't restore to us the "remainder" as "bare" thing [en tant que
chose "nue"]. The remainder is not a mere thing [une chose nue]. We need "to
think" the remainder differently [autrement].
— I always have the impression that while commenting on Heidegger, while
restoring him in an apparently rigorous fashion, he's made to say something
completely different [foui autre chose]·, all the accents are changed, and his
language is no longer recognizable. The commentary becomes obscene and to
think differently becomes thinking differently than he who wants to think the
remnant "properly." Otherwise [autrement], here, that would be to think
differently [autrement] than "properly." But then what would be proper to this
other?
— Let's return rather to the "well-known painting." A product-thing, some

shoes, is found there as represented (Heidegger will say elsewhere that it is not
represented, re-produced, but let's leave those questions for the moment, we'll
take them up again). This "product" has at least these singular characteristics
that even now we can indicate: it is of the genre "clothing" (parergonal in that
sense), and such is not the case with all products. It outlines a movement of
return to the thing called, by metaphor or transfer, "bare": as unuseful product,
currently unused, abandoned, unlaced, offered as thing (1 and 3) and as pro
duct (thing 2) in a kind of out-of-work-ness, désoeuvrement. However, as
(useable) product and above all as product of the clothing genre (and what a
garment), it is invested, inhabited, informed
— haunted
— by the "form" of some other bare thing from which it's (partially and provi
sionally?) detached
— "Le parergon se detache . . . tht parergon is detached . . ." ["P," 43]
— and to which the product seems to wait (to keep waiting) to be reattached,
reappropriated. That "product" seems made for reuniting. But the line of
detachment (and then of the out of service as out of work) isn't only what goes
round the shoes and thus gives them their form, cutting them out. This first line
is already a trace of going there and back between the outside and the inside,
notably when this line follows the movement of the lace. Then it isn't simple, it's
an internal border and an external border incessantly turned inside out. But
there's another line, another system of detaching traits: the work as a painting in
its frame. The frame acts as an out-of-work supplement [fait oeuvre de
désoeuvrement supplémentaire]. It cuts out but also sews up again.
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With an invisible lace which perforates the canvas (as la pointure,

the "tympan spur," "perforates the paper"), it passes in then out of
the canvas to sew it up again in its middle, in its internal and external worlds.
From then on, if the shoes are no longer of use, that's because they are surely
detached from some bare feet and from their subject of reattachment (owner,
usual custodian, borne wearer). Also because they're painted: within the limits
of a painting but also within the limits we must think their laces. Hors d'oeuvre
dans l'oeuvre, hors d'oeuvre en tant qu'oeuvre, outside the work within the
work, outside the work as work: the laces pass through the eyelets (which also
proceed in pairs) in order to pass to the invisible side. And when they return
from there, is it from the other side of the leather or the other side of the canvas?
The puncturing [la piqûre] of their metalled tip, through the metal-bordered
eyelets, simultaneously perforates the leather and the canvas. How can the two
be distinguished beyond invisibility? Perforating them d'une seule pointure,
with a single puncture
— then there would be une pointure, a tympan spur, of the laces in that other
sense of pointure . . .
' — Perforating them d'une seule pointure,
— does the pointure belong to the painting? I think of the tacks [/es pointes]
which nail the canvas on the stretcher. In the case when one paints the
nails (what Klee does in Constructif impressionnant, 1927) as figures on the
background—figure sur fond, what is their connection? To what system do they
belong?
— The nails aren't part of the "principal" figure, like the laces. Their func
tioning requires another analysis . . .
— Perforating them with a single puncture, d'une seule pointure, the figure of
the laces will have sewn the leather on the canvas. If the two thicknesses, the two
textures, are passed through by a single thrust divided in two, the fact is they are
henceforward indiscernible. Everything is painted on leather, the canvas has
both shoes and none—bare feet [chaussée et déchaussée], etc. At least such is the
appearance in the play of appearing/disappearing.
Briefly, in order to precipitate the ellipse of "Le Parergon" and "Le Sans de la
coupure pure" that I leave here: what remains of a bare foot? And who? Do
these questions make sense? Would the bare foot—more or less tied behind the
scenes and which does or does not make (become) the pair — be the thing here?
Not the thing itself, but the other one? And what is its relation with aesthetics?
With the word "beautiful"?
— a "beautiful" foot, a sublime foot like Balzac's Unknown Masterpiece?

— I said, in a more dubious and lame fashion, a word.
— What, moreover [du reste], of feet or shoes—that's a question much too
open. I propose that it be narrowed, and that we return more specifically to the
subject [l'objet] of the debate, such as it's been transformed by the two cor
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respondents: the figure of the peasant for one, of the painter for the other, who
makes it a portrait of the artist. The subject of the debate
—The baseness [L'abject] of the debate: shoes are also what we let fall.
Especially old shoes. A process [instance] of falling down, of the dropped or the
fallen. One lets fall such things as an old shoe, an old worn-out boot, an old
sock. The remainder is also this lower part, le bas.
— "Se faire du reste cadeau, to give oneself the gift of the remnant" (Glas),
perhaps that's Van Gogh's stage
— and the stage of the three eminent colleagues. But let's return to the subject
of the debate. Why and by what right is Heidegger "authorized" (concerning the
"well-known painting") to say "peasant shoes"? Why should the feet or the shoes
belong or return to a peasant? Is Schapiro right or wrong to object to
Heidegger's action? So punctually?
— I'll make the question more specific: to a peasant or a peasant woman? Let's
stay at this threshold (limen) of the debate a little while longer: why does
Heidegger at times say "a pair of peasant shoes (ein Paar Bauerschuhe) and
nothing more (und nichts weiter)," without any sexual determination or by let
ting the masculine get a foothold by means of this neutrality; at other times,
and more often besides, to designate the "subject," he says "the peasant woman"
(die Bàuerin)? He never explains himself on this, and Schapiro, for his part, doesn't
pay the least attention to it. To what sex do these shoes return? This isn't exactly
the same question as before, when we asked ourselves if there was or was not a
symbolic equivalence between the supposed "symbol" shoe and such and such a
genital organ. Or if a differential and idiomatic syntax alone could impede
bisexuality, conferring on it such a seductive or dominant value, etc. This isn't
the same question, and yet the attribution of the shoes (as painting) to a subject
bearer-wearer
—of the shoes and of a sex
—masculine or feminine, this attribution is not without resonance with the

first question. Let's not forget that the Origin treats the essence of truth, the
truth of the essence and of the abyss (Abgrund), which plays the role there of
some "veiled" fate (fatum) paralyzing Being.
Grafting sex on the shoes. This isn't impeded by the Origin: sometimes the in
détermination slides by dint of language toward the masculine, sometimes the
feminine overcomes. There's some peasant, and there's the peasant woman, but
there's never a peasant man. On Schapiro's side, it—pa—returns without any
possible discussion to the masculine ("a man of the town and city"), there's no
doubt about the sex of Vincent Van Gogh for the signer of the "Still Life."
— It's true that neither Heidegger nor Schapiro seems to accord any thematic
attention to the sex of the reattachment. The one reattaches, before all ex
amination, to some peasant, but he passes without warning from the peasant to
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the peasant woman. The other, after examination, reattaches to some city
painter, but he never asks himself why they would be a man's shoes nor why the
other one, not content to say "some peasant," occasionally adds "the peasant
woman." Occasionally and even most often.
— But what is thematic attention? And what does it seem to exclude (the im
plicit? the foreclosed? the denied? the unthought? the encrypted? so many dif
ferent functions), what is allowed to be excluded from the field?
— From what field? Bordered by whom? By what? By some peasant or peasant
woman?
— However, there's almost a rule in the peasant woman's appearing. Heideg

ger designates as such the woman who wears [la porteuse] the shoes outside the
painting (if we can say that), when the lace of discourse passes outside the edge
of the frame, into this outside-the-work, hors-d'oeuvre, that Heidegger claims to
see presented right in the work. But each time he speaks of the exemplary prod
uct in the painting, he speaks in a neutral, generic, i.e., in grammar,
masculine way: "ein Paar Bauerschuhe, " a pair of peasant shoes. Why are the
feet of the thing, here some shoes, thus presented as the feet of a (peasant)
woman? The implication of such an action is all the more overdetermined since
the painting, consequently, in these passages, is no longer the law. No doubt this
implication has been facilitated by so many other "peasant women" of Van
Gogh, which is to go in the direction of the contamination indicted by Schapiro.
Many paintings would have come to compose Heidegger's imaginary model. We
shall reexamine this grievance farther on. Elsewhere I'll also propose to put in a
series, in a gallery, all the figures of woman which punctuate with their discreet,
furtive, and nearly unnoticed apparitions Heidegger's discourse on the thing:
the peasant woman, the Thracian servant woman, the woman museum attend
ant, the "young girl" as "a young thing, still too young" in the locution cited at
the beginning of our chapter [on "Thing and Work"] and encountered again,
like the first examples on the path, en chemin, am Weg: "Der Stein am Weg ist
ein Ding und die Erdscholle auf dem Acker. Der Krug ist ein Ding und der
Brunnen am Weg. . . . The stone in the road is a thing, as is the clod in the
field. A jug is a thing, as is the well beside the road. ... A man (Mensch) is not
a thing. It is true that we speak of a young girl who is faced with a task too dif
ficult for her as being 'a young thing, still too young for it' (ein zujunges Ding),
but only because we feel that being human (Menschsein) is in a certain way miss
ing and think that instead we have to do here with the factor that constitutes the
thingly character of things (das Dinghafte der Dinge) . . ." [0, 20-21]
— Le piège à lacets, the snare trap, the springe, or the shoe-trap from a little
while ago begin to resemble a G-string, perhaps a girdle [une gaine],
— No, no, the question, of course, concerns this thing which must go on the
foot. And which Heidegger pulls on one side, Schapiro on the other, the one
before all examination, the other after a rapid examination; which both, with so
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much compulsive violence and artifice, want to try on, to adjust

— to arrange: a rendez-vous
—by forcing, at any cost. There's the foot of a townsman who is not very far
from him, there's the foot of a peasant quite nearby. A mirror speculation
[Spéculation en miroir] to secure the thing. Which assists again and again, here a
woman, there a man, in a duel to the death, implacable and cruel, to be sure,
despite the academic courtesy, the mutual consideration of the two men, the
rules of honor, and all the witnesses assembled on the field. The weapon chosen,
since we must force on tht par ergon, is the shoehorn, le chausse-pied. As for the
terrain: a meadow full of traps for the scholars, they both risk remaining there.
Surviving witnesses: the shoes in the painting remain, shoes which look at them
with the detachment of an imperturbable irony
— I asked: is Schapiro right?
—A little too much so in my opinion. There we must give the details, word for
word. It's a matter, in this dealing [marché], of detachment and the uncut
[détaille]. Schapiro extracted this long passage—rhythmical in its strange use of
"And yet, und dennoch. " Then he writes: "Professor Heidegger is aware that
van Gogh painted such shoes several times, but he does not identify the picture
he has in mind, as if the different versions are interchangeable, all presenting
the same truth" ["SL," 205]. Schapiro is right, only he's too right. Heidegger
doesn't try to specify what painting is in question. He dashes into reference—so
vague a reference ("a well-known painting"), as if the thing were so sure and so
clear, and pays no attention to the differential series which not only
discriminates possible references but also makes each painting a latent, lateral,
and differential reference of the others. We can even find an index of this series
in one of the paintings, Three Pairs of Shoes (F. 332). On the extreme left, the
shoe with undone laces has un col, a "collar" (if we can say that) opened and
turned inside out like a glove, whose likeness we see on the left of F. 255, the
painting Schapiro identifies as that in the Origin. In the center, another "turned
over" shoe exhibits its sole. I say "col" because of the neck (from head to toe)
— or because of the uterus [col = cervix]
—All that aggravates Heidegger's referentialistic, mono-referential naïveté.
This has to be underscored about any discourse on The Origin of the Work of
Art. Nor can this be unrelated to the whole enterprise. And yet:
a. Heidegger "is aware," and Schapiro knows that he's aware: "Van Gogh . . .
painted such shoes several times (solches Schuhzeug mehrmals gemahlt hat)"
[O, 33]. Why didn't he take it into account? Is his mistake a more or less clumsy
one? Would he have inferred a kind of "general painting" keeping, through
abstraction or subtraction, the common traits or those presumed as such from
the whole series? This hypothesis—the worst—is excluded by everything of
Heidegger's we can read. He's always been hard on this conceptualism which
would be doubled with an empiricist barbarism. So?
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In Heidegger's defense, there's an extenuating circumstance: his "intention"

was not to be interested in this painting, to describe and question its singularity
as an art critic. So let's read once more the opening passage. It really involves
"simply describing]" (einfach beschreiben) not a painting but "a product,"
"without any philosophical theory." "We choose as example a common sort of
product—a pair of peasant shoes." Not yet a painting, nor a work of art, just a
product. Let's proceed. "We do not even need to exhibit actual pieces of this sort
of useful article in order to describe them. Everyone is acquainted with them.
But since it is a matter here of direct description, it may be well to facilitate the
intuitive presentation (Veranschaulichung) of them. For this purpose [As a
helpful accessory: Fur diese Nachhilfe, words omitted in the French (and
modified in the English) translation] a pictorial (re)presentation (bildlich
Darstellung) suffices. We shall choose a well-known painting by Van Gogh, who
painted such shoes several times." Clearly, the painting is for the moment, by
supposition, an intuitive accessory. We can reproach Heidegger for this il
lustrative course, but that would be something different than acting as if he
wanted to describe the painting itself, then reproaching him with his mistakes in
reading (in this hypothesis which isn't for the moment his own). For the mo
ment, the object to be described, to be interpreted, is not the painting or even
the object as painted ((re)presented), but a familiar product everyone
recognizes. Nothing that follows concerns or claims to grasp the pictorial
specificity, or even the specificity of these shoes as different from other shoes. In
order to sustain attention and facilitate intuition, we have before our eyes the
image of a pair of shoes, whatever they be, peasant or not, painted or not. We
can notice in all of them the same traits: being-product, utility, belonging to a
world and to the earth (in the very determined senses Heidegger recognizes in
these two words of no interest to Schapiro, and to which we'll have to return).
But then, you'll say, why did he choose a painting? Why did he explain so clum
sily what results from the problematic identification of these shoes as peasant
shoes? In the stage where we in fact are now, and Heidegger says this, some real
shoes (peasant or not) or shoes vaguely sketched with chalk on the board render
the same service. The blackboard would have sufficed.
— That's what Schapiro reproaches Heidegger for.

— But Heidegger says it ("But what is there to see here? Everyone knows
what shoes consist of'), and he can only be reproached for this by supposing that
he is first of all interested in a painting, that he wanted to analyze it as such,
which isn't the case. For the use he first wanted to make of them, the canvases
were in effect interchangeable without damage. If his attribution of the thing to
some peasant is indeed (we'll still have to examine up to what point) imprudent
and precipitous, at least we know that he could pursue (as what mattered in the
analysis of the being-product) the same discourse about some shoes in the town:
the relation of the wearer to this strange product (very near and yet detachable
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Jacques Derrida
from its body), the relation to walking, to la marche, to working, to the ground,
to the earth, and to the world. In this respect everything that returns to the
"peasant" world is an accessory or secondary variable, even if this derives
massively from "projection" and corresponds to Heidegger's pathetico
phantasmico-ideologico-political investments.
b. The "same truth," what the painting presents, isn't for Heidegger "pea
sant" truth, a truth whose essential content would derive from the attribution
(even imprudent) of the shoes to some peasant. The "same truth" could be
"presented" by every painting of shoes, indeed every experience of shoes, and
even of every "product" in general: the "same truth" is that of a being-product
returning from "a more distant source" than the couple matter-form, even than
"their distinction." This truth returns to a "deeper origin" [O, 35] and isn't a
relation (of adequation or attribution) between this product and that owner,
user, custodian, borne wearer. The proprietary relation of the product "shoes"
doesn't refer tb any particular subjectum, nor even to any particular world.
What is said of this proprietary relation to the world and the earth is true for the
town and the field. Not indifferently, but equally.
So Schapiro is mistaken about the first function of the pictorial reference. He
also ignores Heidegger's argument that should ruin in advance his proper
restitution of the shoes to Van Gogh: art as "truth setting itself to work" is
neither an "imitation," nor a "depiction of reality," nor a "reproduction" [O,
36], rather it represents a singular thing or a general essence. For, in return, all
Schapiro's proceedings appeal to real shoes: the painting is supposed to limit,
represent, reproduce them. Then we must determine their proprietary relation
to a real (or claimed to be) subject, to an individual whose extremities, outside
the painting, shouldn't remain long without shoes [déchaussées].
— like old teeth. But he doesn't avoid the bridge. He's unaware that the shoe
already forms a prosthesis. And perhaps the foot too. It —pa—can always be
another. So many locutions go through all that, in order to say the dislocation of
the inadequate, when we're on the side of our shoes, or the abuse of the usurper:
"to 'be in someone's shoes' " ["SL," 207-08].
— Schapiro tightens the laces of the painting around some "real" feet. I
underscore: "They are clearly pictures of the artist's oum shoes, not the shoes of a
peasant. . . . Later in Aries he represented, as he wrote in a letter of August
1888 to his brother, "une paire de vieux souliers" which are evidently his oum
..." ["SL," 205]. They are: the lace goes through there in the copula, it couples
the painted shoes and the feet of the painter. It is pulled outside the painting,
which presupposes a hole in the canvas . . .
—However, was it necessary to wait for Heidegger to become suspicious? To
avoid considering a painted object as a copy? To avoid, worse, attributing to it
an adequate model (real shoes) and, in addition, attributing an adequate sub
ject to this model (Van Gogh) —which makes two attributions saved? Then the
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word evidently and the word clearly intervene still farther on, when a painting in
a catalogue is identified; the words "his own," which occur several times, declare
ownership so tranquilly; and there are propositions of the type "this is that," in
which the copula ties a "real" predicate to a "painted" object. All this dogmatic
and precritical language is surprising on the part of an expert. Everything hap
pens as if the hammering of the values of evidence, clarity, and ownership must
have been reverberating so loudly as to preclude hearing that nothing here is
clear, evident, or proper to whomever or to whatever. And no doubt Schapiro
knows this or says it to himself, more or less clearly. But only at this price can he
have the shoes, acquire them with a view to restitution, uproot them from one to
give to the other. To whom he doesn't think he's a stranger. Then to pass t^«pi
on. To the feet which are the other's feet. Like clothing or an object that one
passes on. The "passing on" of this passage [passe] is also what makes the shoes
rest there as remainders, en restance. That's what happens here.
— I would distinguish three dogmas in Schapiro's credo or interested—and
quite occasional—credulousness, when he speculates in this manner on the occa
sion of these old shoes. Three distinctly structured dogmas, but analogous in
their functional finality: 1. Some painted shoes can actually belong and let
themselves actually be restored to a real, identifiable, and nameable subject.
This illusion is facilitated by the closest identification between the alleged custo
dian of the shoes and the so-called signer of the painting. 2. Shoes are shoes,
whether they be painted or "real," simply and only shoes which are what they
are, "adequate" to themselves, and first of all adaptable to feet. Shoes belong in
their own right, en propre. In their structure as replaceable product, in the stan
dardness of their size, their pointure, in the detachabilty of this clothing-like in
strument, shoes don't have the wherewithal to derive every strict proprietary
relation and every strict ownership. 3. Feet (painted, phantom, or real) belong
to a specific body, un corps propre, their own body. They aren't detachable
from it. These three assurances don't withstand the least questioning. They are
immediately dismantled, in any case, by what happens, what there is in this
painting.
— Although they bear on some distinct articulations, these three assurances
tend to efface those articulations for the benefit of one and the same continuum.
They tend to reattach the détachables according to an absolute stricture.

— No more laces, why not even any visible knots, neither holes nor eyelets, just
some filled shoes, absolutely adhering to the foot.
—As in Magritte's Red Model. But there, too, we need to take into account an
effect of the series and of citationality. Magritte has painted many of them, let
alone La philosophie dans le boudoir (1942). There, there's uncontestably a
pair; we see the orientation of the toes which with the ankle boots form one and
the same body. They make the pair and the soldering.
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Jacques Derrida
—for all that, The Red Model mimics and derides this decoy. It even cuts off
the foot-shoe at the ankle, at the neck. This trait, added to the horizontal and
regular traits of the wooden bottom, then to the traits of the frame, indicates
that this pair of climbing boots (climbing toward what?) [souliers montants (vers
quoi?)] still defers their supplement of ownership, the revenue of their usury,
their wear and tear, leur usure. This pair, now out of use with an empty and
unlaced collar (differently unlaced from one model to the other), cites perhaps
the witnesses of Van Gogh for comparison. The boots' speechlessness makes the
expert speak, the expert who isn't going to delay saying, as Heidegger said of
Van Gogh's painting, "It—pa—spoke" [O, 35]. Two psychoanalysts (from Lon
don of course, it—pa—wouldn't cross the Channel) said to Magritte: "The Red
Model is a case of castration." The painter accordingly addressed to them "a real
psycho-analytical drawing" which will prompt in them the same
discourse.— (····)
TRANSLATOR'S NOTES
1. [Derrida is playing off the common French phrase: le rat de ville et

des champs, and its tale, the town mouse and the country mouse.]—Tr.
2. [All references will be placed in the text. The following abbreviation
be used:
D: Jacques Derrida. La Dissémination. Paris: Seuil, 1972.

Ο: Martin Heidegger. The Origin of the Work of Art. Tr. Albert Hofstadter.
In Heidegger's Poetry, Language, Thought. New York: Harper and Row, 1971.
Pp. 15-87. An earlier version of Hofstadter's translation—this is the version that
Schapiro quotes—appeared in Philosophies of Art and Beauty, ed. Albert
Hofstadter and Richard Kuhns (New York: The Modern Library, 1964), pp.
649-701. The two versions account for Schapiro's differences in citing from
Heidegger and those contained herein. Also, all translations of Heidegger have
been modified where necessary to elucidate Derrida's reading.
Origine: Martin Heidegger. L'Origine de l'oeuvre d'art. In Chemins qui ne
mènent nulle part. Tr. Wolfang Brokmeier. Paris: Gallimard, 1962. Pp. 11-68.
Ursprung: Martin Heidegger. Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes. In Holzwege.
Frankfurt aM: Vittorio Klostermann, 1957. Pp. 7-68.
"P": Jacques Derrida. "Le Parergon." Digraphe, No. 2 (1974), 21-57. The
second part of this article is: "Le Sans de la coupure pure (Le parergon II)."
Digraphe, No. 3 (1974), 5-31.
SE: Sigmund Freud. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological
Works of Sigmund Freud. Tr. ed. James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press and
Institute of Psycho-Analysis.
"SL": Meyer Schapiro. "The Still Life as a Personal Object—A Note on
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Heidegger and van Gogh." In The Reach of Mind: Essays in Memory of Kurt
Goldstein. Ed. Marianne L. Simmel New York: Springer Publishing Company,
1968. Pp. 203-09.
Van Gogh: Meyer Schapiro. Vincent Van Gogh. New York: Abrams, n.d.
In the course of this dialogue, Derrida refers and at times cites from two other
works of his own: Glas and the essay on Blanchot entitled "Pas."] —Tr.
3. [Meyer Schapiro. " 'Muscipula Diaboli,' the Symbolism of the Mérode
Altarpiece." In Renaissance Art. Ed. Creighton Gilbert. New York: Harper and
Row, 1970. Pp. 21-42.] —Tr.
4. [In using dégaine, Derrida is playing off the resonances of this term with
gaine (sheathing) and dégainer (to unsheathe), as well as with his "argument of
the gaine" in Glas (Galilée, 1974), pp. 235-53.] —Tr.
5. [Mise-en-abyme, particularly when written with a "y," denotes the tech
nique of representation: the play within the play, the story within the story, the
picture within the picture, etc. For that reason, I have translated this expression
as "representative placing-in-the-abyss."]—Tr.
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DERRIDA RestitutionsTruthSize 1978

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Restitutions Of Truth to Size, "De la vérité en pointure"

Author(s): JACQUES DERRIDA and John P. Leavey, Jr.

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/24654285

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translated by John P. Leavey, Jr.*

POINTURE (Lat. punctura), s.f., old synonym of piqûre.

But the truth—and trying to create the true—is so dear to

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feet?" "Comment ça va marcher·. How's it going to work?" "Et si ça ne marche

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—Schapiro will see the figure of Van Gogh in "his" shoes.

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— I'm interested rather in a secret correspondence, evidently: evidently secret,

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respondence. The correspondence hasn't taken place somewhere else, nor is it

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—Es gibt, ça donne, it gives, these shoes.

— But why is this correspondence called public?

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Museum of Vincent Van Gogh in Amsterdam), to the painting that Professor

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— of the purse or the fetish, if I understand right. We still don't know, if

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— Is it opportune to accede or comply with [faire droit d] a sort of refined

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—Why not tranquility? Why this persecution?

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apprehends the thing as being-underneath. It's the ground of the hupo

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truth would come to its establishment, its institution, or its investiture

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Solange wir uns degegen nur so im algemeinen ein Paar Schuhe

Aus der dunklen Offnung des ausgetretenen Inwendigen des

Par contre, tant que nous nous contenterons de nous représenter

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fatigue des pas du labeur. Dans la rude et solide pesanteur du

As long as we only imagine a pair of shoes in general, or simply

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— Before going any farther, I notice in Schapiro's protocolar clipping a cer

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the Oberfall had the structure of the parergon? The violent

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— What, for example?

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— Let's return rather to the "well-known painting." A product-thing, some