matt

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and Pictorial Logic in Derrida’s

Matthew Ancell
Memoirs of the Blind
Credo Ergo Sum: Faith, Blindness,

ncell
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1. Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays of
Montaigne, trans. by Donald M. Frame (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1965), p. 610.
2. Subsequent exhibitions in the series were
curated by Peter Greenaway, Jean Starobinski, and
Julia Kristeva. For a review of the exhibition, see
Meyer Raphael Rubenstein, ‘Sight Unseen’, Art in
America, vol. 79, no. 4, April 1991, pp. 47–53.
3. Jacques Derrida, Mémoires d’aveugle:
L’autoportrait et autres ruines (Paris: Réunion des
musées nationaux, 1990); Jacques Derrida,
Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins,
trans. by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993),
p. 106n.
4. Michael Newman, ‘Derrida and the Scene of
Drawing: A Discussion of Jacques Derrida,
Mémoires d’aveugle. L’autoportrait et autres ruines’,
Research in Phenomenology, vol. 24, no. 1, 1994,
p. 229. Interestingly, in his Vite, Bellori
characterises the Conversion as a kind of non-painting
because its action does not pertain to istoria. See
Lorenzo Pericolo, Caravaggio and Pictorial Narrative:
Dislocating the Istoria in Early Modern Painting
(London: Harvey Miller, 2011), pp. 257–61.
5. Derrida, Memoirs, p. 3.
6. On pictorial thought, see Hanneke
Grootenboer, ‘The Pensive Image: On Thought in
Jan Van Huysum’s Still Life Paintings’, Oxford Art
Journal, vol. 34, no.1, 2011, pp. 13– 30, as well as
her The Rhetoric of Perspective: Realism and Illusionism
in Seventeenth-century Dutch Still-life Painting
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005);
Hubert Damisch, The Origin of Perspective, trans. by
John Goodman (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1994), pp. 443 –47; Mieke Bal, Quoting Caravaggio:
Contemporary Art, Preposterous History (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 117.
# The Author 2014. Published by Oxford University Press; all rights reserved
doi:10.1093/oxartj/kcu007 Advance Access publication 22 July 2014
Credo Ergo Sum: Faith, Blindness, and Pictorial Logic
in Derrida’s Memoirs of the Blind
Matthew Ancell
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Others form man; I tell of him and portray a particular one, very ill-formed, whom I should
really make very different from what he is if I had to fashion him over again. But now it is
done. Now the lines of my painting [les traits de ma peinture] do not go astray, though they
change and vary . . . Stability itself is nothing but a more languid motion.
– Michel de Montaigne1
Introduction: Transgressing the Law
In 1990 Jacques Derrida curated an exhibition at the Louvre, entitled Mémoires
d ′ aveugle: L ′ autoportrait et autres ruines [Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and
Other Ruins], inaugurating the museum’s Partis Pris series.2 Provisionally
entitled ‘L’ouvre où ne pas voir’ [The Louvre/opening where one does not
see], the exhibition consisted of forty-four works, all drawings from the
Louvre, with the exception of four paintings, two of which were on loan. The
catalogue of the same title contains seventy-one works, including eight that
violate what Derrida calls the law of this exhibition: ‘to keep to the body of
drawings housed at the Louvre’.3 One of the works in the catalogue that are
outside the ‘law of the exhibition’ is Caravaggio’s The Conversion of St. Paul
(1600 –1601; Rome, Santa Maria del Popolo, Fig. 1). This famous Baroque
work depicting revelation as the opposite of blindness falls outside Derrida’s
‘law’ in a three-fold way as it is neither in the Louvre, nor borrowed for the
exhibition, nor a drawing, and with Michael Newman, I would raise the
question as to why, when it comes to revelation, does Derrida turn to painting
as opposed to drawing?4 I would argue that Derrida’s turn to Caravaggio is
intentional, and a significant moment for understanding not only his text but
for examining the manner in which the operations of visual art enact thought
and what the structure of that kind of pictorial thought implies. What is at stake
in Memoirs of the Blind is what Derrida sees as the origin, or the thought of
drawing, or what he calls its ‘pensive pose’.5 How is it that drawing ‘thinks’,
and what does it mean to move from the thought of drawing to the revelation of
painting? The answer to this question lies in Caravaggio’s painting. It is a
conversion (like Paul’s), a turning away from the logic of drawing and design –
which traditionally function along with linear perspective as figures for
rationality – to painting as a logic of belief. If perspective functions as pictorial
thought, revelation participates in a different logic structured as fidelity.6 As
I will demonstrate, this fidelity is not representational but rather relational.
Derrida characterises this relational quality as covenantal, and structures the
exhibition and his writings on Memoirs of the Blind as a non-linear dialogue so
that it reveals its message only as we read it through the lines of the discourses
of faith, scepticism and their pictorial analogues. While belief and faith are not
synonymous, I am using them somewhat interchangeably for now, precisely
OXFORD ART JOURNAL 37.2 2014 193 –210
Matthew Ancell

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Fig. 1. Caravaggio, The Conversion of St. Paul, 1600 –1601, oil on canvas, 230 × 175 cm. Santa Maria del Popolo, Rome. (Photo: Scala / Art Resource, NY.)

196 OXFORD ART JOURNAL 37.2 2014


7. See Michael Fried, ‘Between Realisms: From
Derrida to Manet’, Critical Inquiry, vol. 21, no. 1,
Autumn 1994, pp. 1– 36; J. Hillis Miller, ‘What do
Stories about Pictures Want?’, Critical Inquiry, vol.
34, no. 5, Winter 2008, pp. S59– S97.
8. Derrida, Memoirs, p. 117.
9. Derrida, Memoirs, p. 121.
10. Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, Caravaggio’s
Secrets (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), p. 59.
11. Leo Steinberg, ‘Observations in the Cerasi
Chapel’, The Art Bulletin, vol. 41, no. 2, June 1959,
p. 186.
Faith, Blindness, and Pictorial Logic in Derrida’s Memoirs of the Blind
because the logic of belief will make, as we see, the movement to fidelity. Art
historians such as Michael Fried and theorists like J. Hillis Miller have
commented on Memoirs of the Blind, however, the centrality of perspective to
the argument of the text, and its philosophical ramifications, has remained a
critical blind spot.7
I would like to posit a double hypothesis that Renaissance perspective and
early modern scepticism reveal not only a forceful critique of the Western
philosophical project in the text, but also establish Derrida as a sensitive
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curator and interpreter of art in that Memoirs of the Blind makes a profound yet
overlooked contribution to the discourse on perspective. The catalogue has
the elliptical structure of a dialogue which suggests Derrida’s struggle with
Judaism and a movement to a personal position of faith figured as a kind of
anamorphic fideism as a supplement to monocular Enlightenment thought as
expressed by linear perspective and Cartesian rationalism. Derrida draws a
complex outline of the structure of faith itself and what it means for figures,
such as Caravaggio and Dürer grappling, it seems, with the epistemological
ramifications of failures of representation and perception. I suggest that in
Memoirs of the Blind a self-portrait of Derrida emerges, similar to the one
Michel de Montaigne attempted in his Essays: a kind of autobiographical vision
blinded by tears that distort reason, an entrance into the logics of blindness
and belief, and a picture of a disfigured self that takes shape from the
contingent nature of experience.
Conversion and Covenant
After including in his catalogue two drawings of the theme of Paul’s conversion
without further comment, Derrida turns to Caravaggio’s interpretation of the
biblical accounts of the Damascene conversion and its previous artistic
renderings. In the book of Acts, Paul (Saul of Tarsus) is assaulted by a heavenly
flash of light, interrogated by the Lord, and blinded for three days. Fallen from
his horse, Paul now lies at the edge of the picture plane, perhaps at our feet. It
seems that we, with Paul, are facing upward, yet we are unable to look past the
steadied horse into the light of heaven (emanating from its invisible complement).
Caravaggio has depicted the very moment that Paul turns towards what has
bowled him over in a kind of ‘sunflower blindness, a conversion that twists the
light and turns it upon itself to the point of dizziness’.8 As with many works in
Memoirs, what we see is a moment in the process of conversion, which involves,
Derrida claims, ‘learning to see the divine condition of the picture itself . . .
which is possible only in hymn or prayer’.9 This conversion effects a turning away
from sketching, from design, which function along with linear perspective as
figures for rationality. The space before us, the ‘extraordinary jumble of human
and animal arms and legs’, defies perspectival construction.10 All is foreground,
with no horizon or vanishing point to ground the figures in the composition.
While the figures are embodied, they are also strangely dismembered. Notably,
the servant’s legs do not match up with the body that emerges above the horse,
and Paul’s left leg appears rather disjointed from his hip, while his right leg, from
the knee down, disappears altogether.
Leo Steinberg has argued that the painting (like its counterpart, The Crucifixion
of St. Peter, 1600 –1601) was not intended to be viewed from a right angle, and
suggests that Caravaggio could have been influenced by anamorphic techniques
during his apprenticeship in Milan (he rightly does not call Caravaggio’s work
an anamorphosis, as it is not in the strict sense).11 My own in situ analysis,
from all permitted oblique angles in the Cerasi Chapel, also did not resolve the
OXFORD ART JOURNAL 37.2 2014 197
Matthew Ancell

distortions. Rather, it reinforced a corporeal cognizance in harmony with sceptical

arguments about the embodied, and therefore positional, nature of our
knowledge, something that anamorphosis forces the viewer to acknowledge as
well. Fried suggests that, possibly, the viewer ‘was imagined by the artist as
possessing binocular vision’, that is, natural vision.12 Such binocularity goes right
to the point of Memoirs and its so-called ‘double hypothesis’, as for Derrida,
neither natural vision nor the vision of the mind’s eye of reason can ultimately
overcome the blindness of empiricism. As Caravaggio demonstrates so
12. Michael Fried, The Moment of Caravaggio
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010),
p. 148. Pericolo notes that ‘Caravaggio pushed
transgression much farther’, and calls the
composition a ‘bipolar field of interaction’, but for
different reasons than Fried, Caravaggio and Pictorial
Narrative, pp. 260–2.

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dramatically, revelation requires the sacrifice of one kind vision for another. 13. Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida,
Caravaggio’s painting – breaking the law of this catalogue of drawings – Jacques Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago
dramatises the major themes of Memoirs of the Blind, all of which are interrelated Press, 1993), p. 169.
and include conversion, the self-portrait, faith and scepticism, blindness, 14. John D. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques
perspective, and anamorphosis. Derrida’s combination of discourses on faith and Derrida: Religion without Religion (Bloomington:
the pictorial become two antennae that, like Paul’s outstretched arms, grope into Indiana University Press, 1997), p. 294.
the darkness and make possible an illumination that falls outside the strictly 15. For a review of the debate about perspective
rational order. In other words, the ‘double-focus with-without monocular and its philosophical implications, see Margaret
vision’13 finds full expression in Memoirs, in that the catalogue talks around, but Iversen, ‘The Discourse of Perspective in the
Twentieth Century: Panofsky, Damisch, Lacan’,
always towards, the doubleness of linear perspective. In its basic structure, the Oxford Art Journal, vol. 28, no. 2, 2005, pp. 191–
vantage point and vanishing point of linear perspective constitute a dual-foci 202.
system with one focus embodied, the other rationally conceived in the picture 16. James Elkins, The Poetics of Perspective (Ithaca:
plane. Just as circumcision structures Judaism, partitioning the spheres of heaven Cornell University Press, 1994), p. 263.
and earth, the transcendental and the mundane, Derrida examines the line or
17. Damisch, The Origin of Perspective, p. 47.
trait in drawing and equates it with the cut, the division between these two
worlds.14 Memoirs of the Blind explores the space partitioned in the cut between
the spaces on both sides of the picture plane. For Erwin Panofsky, the invention
of linear perspective forecasts Descartes’s notion of rationalised space and the
disembodied self. As Caravaggio’s Conversion dramatises, single-point perspective
is monocular in providing a singular point of view, something that applies
specifically to the vision of the Cartesian subject. Conversely, as this essay will
show, perspective loses its monocularity when its configuration is anamorphic and
includes two legitimate points of view. This binocularity, in fact, draws attention
to the embodied nature of perception, to the epistemological limits of artifice,
and to fragmented subjectivity.15 Memoirs of the Blind employs the Conversion in its
dialogue to mount a critique of the limits of rational monocularism by showing
how the perspectival systems that operate in drawing – and therefore painting,
writing, etc. – are blind or abocular, outside the realm of empirical vision, yet
constitutive of faith.
Derrida draws upon two gendered epistemologies, figured as the male gaze of
rational empiricism and the feminine tears of faith and revelation. The pictorial
analogue of reason is the depth, clarity, and coherence of linear perspective,
with its fixed point of view and infinite vanishing point; while the distorted,
awry view of anamorphosis articulates the logic of belief that emerges from the
failure of the perspectival system. As James Elkins has observed, ‘Perspective
has always been hermaphroditic, part convention and part invention. There has
always been doubt about its origins, and it has always beckoned to writers who
want to see a single, ruling order in its originary discord’.16 In the history of
perspective, Hubert Damisch points to a movement towards the logic of
perspective.17 This movement, a return to the historical, mythical, and logical
origins of perspective, is resumed in the double hypothesis of Memoirs of the
Blind. By exhibiting the deconstruction of drawing, Derrida gestures at the
enactment of philosophical thought in art. He also shows that the logics at work
in drawing touch on the origin of art itself, and are predicated on, as we will
see, faith. The discourse of the origin of art, and its inaccessibility, parallels the

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18. The video connected to the exhibition features
an off-screen, skeptical female voice who questions
Derrida. See Jean-Paul Fargier (dir.), Jacques
Derrida memoires d’aveugle (Bibliothèque publique
d’information Centre Pompidou éd., 2009);
Newman, ‘Derrida and the Scene of Drawing’,
pp. 219–20.
19. Derrida, Memoirs, p. 1. Mémoires, p. 9.
20. Michael Naas, Taking on the Tradition: Jacques
Derrida and the Legacies of Deconstruction (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2003), p. 120. A
pictorial analogy here is the manner in which
Caravaggio’s frames extend to envelop elements
that fall outside.
21. Derrida, Memoirs, pp. 1–2.
Faith, Blindness, and Pictorial Logic in Derrida’s Memoirs of the Blind
invisible deity that supplements and organises the logic of belief, of revelation in
blindness. That is, both perspective and faith must make recourse to the infinite
(the vanishing point and Deity, respectively); in other words, the way
perspective ‘thinks’ (especially in its extreme form of anamorphosis) mirrors
the discourse of faith. Belief is not necessarily irrational, but rather must
somehow account for the fragmented limbs in its field of vision and assemble
them from different and conflicting points of view. Faced with the absence of a
grounding origin, the monocularism of Enlightenment reason, the disembodied
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Cogito, or rational self-formed from the Cartesian mind –body dualism,
converts to the believing, abocular or binocular subject. Derrida invokes a new
vocabulary of belief for talking about this invention, ‘in all senses of the word’,
that explains the operations of drawing as an act of faith and the operations of
faith as the picturing of the world.
Vous croyez . . . ?
If art thinks, then it also believes, argues Derrida. Memoirs begins, after an epigraph
from Diderot, in the middle of a dialogue between a philosopher and interviewer,
implicitly male and female, respectively.18 At the ostensible ‘conclusion’ of the
printed text, which ends in an ellipsis, we find that the conversation continues
with the quotation by Diderot. In the French version, the text resumes with the
quotation followed by another ellipsis, giving the conversation a circular, or
more precisely, elliptical structure, which is meant to foil the dialectical,
rational, and linear structure of the philosophical dialogue.
I write without seeing. I came. I wanted to kiss your hand . . . This is the first time I have
ever written in the dark . . . not knowing whether I am indeed forming letters. Wherever
there will be nothing, read that I love you. – Diderot, Letter to Sophie Volland, June 10,
1759 (. . .)19
If we connect the dots by joining the ellipses, Diderot’s epigraph could, on the one
hand, appear to fall outside the circuitous structure, as its complement. On the
other hand, as Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (the translators of Memoirs
of the Blind) ask, ‘Doesn’t the rest of the book draw this epigraph into it, so to
speak, so that the book is a sort of circle or ring or, as one says in French, an
alliance?’20 ‘Alliance’ evokes the religious, specifically covenantal aspects of
faith, but the discussion at this stage in the text is explicitly about scepticism,
playing on its modern sense of doubt and critique of faith in particular, and
drawing upon its pre-Cartesian and pre-Socratic positions:
- Do you believe this [vous croyez]? You’ll observe from the very beginning of this
interview I’ve had problems following you. I remain sceptical . . .
- But scepticism is precisely what I’ve been talking to you about: the difference
between believing and seeing, between believing one sees [coire voir] and
seeing between, catching a glimpse [entrevoir] – or not. Before doubt ever
becomes a system, skepsis has to do with the eyes. The word refers to a visual
perception. . . . The judgment depends on the hypothesis. So as not to forget
them along the way, so that everything be made clear, let me summarize:
there would be two hypotheses.
- You seem to fear the monocular vision of things. Why not a single point of view?
Why two hypotheses?
- The two will cross paths, but without ever confirming each other, without the
least bit of certainty, in a conjecture that is at once singular and general, the
hypothesis of sight, and nothing less.21
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Matthew Ancell

The statement ‘The judgment depends on the hypothesis’ could also be rendered ‘the
judgment suspends or defers the hypothesis’.22 We must talk around the suspended
or deferred object, even as we depend on it. To think of this dependence of judgment 22. Newman, ‘Derrida and the Scene of
as ‘suspension’ and ‘deferral’ makes explicit the relationship between sceptical Drawing’, p. 220.
epistemology (the suspension of absolute judgments) and Derrida’s deconstruction
23. Bennington and Derrida, Jacques Derrida,
in the context of faith and its object. pp. 154–55n.
The translators note that a reading of Memoirs of the Blind depends on the elided
24. See Caputo, Prayers and Tears, pp. xvii–xxi.
direct object (i.e. ‘this’) of its first and penultimate lines ‘Do you believe [vous

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croyez]?’ Much like Paul thrown on his back, whether or not you see this poses a 25. Derrida, Memoirs, p. 39, 53. Derrida does
explicitly announce that ‘the point of view will be
double hypothesis, a double vision in a sceptical mode. While the texts or my theme’, Memoirs, p. 2.
objects in which Derrida locates his discussion are the drawings and paintings
included in the Parti Pris exhibition, two of the subtexts or absent objects of his
discussion – that is, the this of the text – in the catalogue are drawn from early
modern discourses: one thesis, then, views fideistic scepticism as opposed to
Cartesian rationalism, and the other, their pictorial analogues – anamorphosis
as the logical undoing of Albertian perspective (as later appropriated as a model
of Cartesian thought). These two discourses enact the tensions at work in
Memoirs of the Blind. Linear perspective, often taken as a figure for disembodied
rationalism, reveals its own representational failures when taken to its logical
extreme, that is, anamorphosis, which in turn is predicated on that very
technique and which posits a suspension of judgment. Similarly, Derrida
dismantles the claims of reason even as he reincorporates reason into the very
structure of faithful self-reflection.
John Caputo has argued for reading Derrida as religious – deconstructively
unconventional, sans religion as it were, but religious nonetheless. Claiming to
have been ‘read less and less well over almost twenty years, like my religion
about which nobody understands anything’, Derrida reports that ‘the constancy
of God in my life is called by other names, so that I quite rightly pass for an
atheist’.23 This initially baffling confession of ‘religion’ prompts Caputo to
reconstruct a Derridean religion from his texts, starting with the increasingly
religiously oriented works of the late 1980s. Oft-analysed affinities between
deconstruction and negative theology are ultimately superficial, Caputo
demonstrates. Instead, Derrida’s desire for ‘the impossible’ is messianic and
prophetic, theology being too systematic to withstand the interruptive force of
God or the (W)hol(l)y Other (tout autre). Deconstruction, Caputo states,
‘repeats the movements of faith, of expecting what we cannot know but only
believe . . . of the blindness of faith . . . in the impossible, but without the
dogmas of the positive religious faiths’.24 Caputo’s compelling argument
overlooks, however, the ways in which Derrida’s religion, while perhaps sui
generis, repeats the non-dogmatic early modern sceptical discourses and their
contemporary pictorial analogues – discourses that Memoirs of the Blind relies
upon elliptically as it articulates these movements of faith in pictorial terms.
I view fideism and linear perspective as Derrida’s ‘subtexts’, then, not because
they are hard to identify or that one would be surprised to find them there, but
because while these discourses are only elliptically present, recognising what a
very patient reader like Derrida is reading is crucial in our own reading of his
texts. Contrary to expectations, or maybe entirely consonant with them,
fideism is never explicitly mentioned in Memoirs of the Blind, and linear
perspective, as such, only briefly (and only if we count the term ‘aperspective’
and a discussion of the prefix ‘per-’ which implies perspective without naming
it).25 Another way to posit my thesis is that in Memoirs of the Blind Derrida
addresses the question of faith and the absence of the direct object of faith by
eliding two discourses: early modern scepticism and its visual counterparts in

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26. Naas, Taking on the Tradition, p. 118.
27. Heb. 11.1 NRSV.
28. Derrida, Memoirs, p. 54.
29. Maria Scott, ‘Textual Trompe-l’oeil in Jacques
Derrida’s Memoirs of the Blind’, in Martin Heusseu
and others (eds), On Verbal/Visual Representation:
Word & Image Interactions 4 (Amsterdam: Rodopi,
2005), p. 246.
30. For an insightful summary and analysis of
Memoirs of the Blind, see Caputo, The Prayers and
Tears, pp. 308– 29.
31. Derrida, Memoirs, p. 2.
32. Derrida, Memoirs, p. 41.
33. Derrida, Memoirs, p. 55. Scott glosses that
‘Not only does the trait permit vision, it also exerts
a fascination which threatens distinct, coherent
vision, as implied by the comparisons of the acts of
viewing and drawing to an act of voyeurism’, Scott,
‘Textual Trompe-l’oeil’, p. 241.
34. Derrida, Memoirs, p. 56.
35. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears, p. 320.
36. Derrida, Memoirs, p. 92.
Faith, Blindness, and Pictorial Logic in Derrida’s Memoirs of the Blind
perspectival practice. This elliptical movement mirrors the problem that gives rise
to it, namely ‘the relationship between faith and the object of faith, the relationship
between belief and the absence or disappearance of a direct object’.26 Such a
relationship is the structure of faith, as the author of Hebrews formulates it,
‘the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen’.27
Marking the Trait
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The most employed term in Memoirs of the Blind is trait – a trait or feature, mark, line,
or stroke. Like other Derridean terms of differentiation, the trait is not a thing,
although it does things. It delimits and ‘joins and adjoins only in separating’.28 It
has no thickness, marking the interior and exterior of a figure. It is, in this sense,
invisible. The trait functions not just for drawing, but for writing, analogous to the
trace, différance, pharmakon, and other deconstructive terms. The argument in
Memoirs of the Blind, then, is about the logic at the very origin of representation,
the way art thinks, explored in a discussion of the self-portrait. Maria Scott notes:
the text of Memoirs of the Blind shares the same self-eclipsing logic of “retrait” which it
attributes to drawing. Like the graphic trait which never presents itself as such but which,
by its power of reference, haunts drawing as its condition of possibility, Derrida’s text is
allusive and elliptical throughout ... the logic that dictates the recurrence of [Memoirs’]
themes is infuriatingly elusive.29
The logic is allusive, I would agree, but that is part of the point, infuriating or not.
Let me attempt to trace out the elusive logic of Memoirs of the Blind.30
Derrida’s hypothesis of sight includes the crossing of two further hypotheses
that inform each other. The first, as exemplified by the epigraph from Diderot,
is that drawing is blind, blind at its origin, structurally blind. The second is that
a ‘drawing of the blind is a drawing of the blind’, that is, representations of the
theme of blindness reflect the blindness of the draughtsman.31 Some of this is
counter-intuitive. Derrida calls the first type of blindness ‘transcendental’ – ‘the
invisible condition of the possibility of drawing, drawing itself, the drawing of
drawing’.32 This is never the theme or the object of a drawing, Derrida insists.
There are three aspects of transcendental blindness. First, in simple terms, the
artist must turn from the object to the paper and work from memory. The object
then recedes or withdraws from visible presence. Second, once traced, the trait,
as an outline, becomes invisible, serving merely indexically to the figures.
Derrida refers to the drawing presenting ‘a jalousie (a blind) of traits cutting up
the horizon, traits through which, between which, you can observe without being
seen’.33 The third aspect concerns what Derrida calls ‘the rhetoric of the trait.’34
Seeing is reading. There is always a verbal supplement (cf. the invisible
complement of the incarnate Logos in the Cerasi Conversion). In a self-portrait,
for example, we must retreat to language in that we must have faith in the title,
and, regarding the canvas, how can we know that what the artist is drawing is
him or herself?35
The discussion of the transcendental logic of the invisible leads to the
second logic, the ‘narrative or spectacle of representation of the blind’, what
Derrida terms the ‘sacrificial’ logic of the invisible, the representation of the
‘unrepresentable’. Sacrificial refers to the economic operation in which
blindness is exchanged for a different form of sight and this ‘sacrifice always
implies some sort of violence (the violence of ruse or deception, the violence
of punishment, the violence of conversion and of martyrdom, the blindness
that comes from wounded eyes or from bedazzlement)’.36 These theses will
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Fig. 2. Dürer. Draughtsman Drawing a Recumbent Woman, c. 1600, woodcut, 7.7 × 21.4 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. (# The Metropolitan
Museum of Art, Image Source: Art Resource, NY.)

later converge in the catalogue on scenes of wounds, blindness, and conversion that
exemplify the second logic, just as Caravaggio’s Paul receiving revelation also 37. See Albrecht Dürer, The Painter’s Manual: A
exemplifies this sacrificial blindness. Manual of Measurement of Lines, Areas, and Solids by
Means of Compass and Ruler Assembled by Albrecht Dürer
for the Use of All Lovers of Art with Appropriate
Illustrations Arranged to be Printed in the Year MDXXV,
The Vanishing Point trans. by Walter L. Strauss (New York: Abaris,
1977).
In order to illustrate the first or transcendental logic of blindness, that drawing is
blind, I′ d like to discuss a famous image that Memoirs of the Blind could have
38. The erotic connotations of musical
instruments are an early modern commonplace.
included, as a second breaking of the law: Dürer’s Draughtsman Drawing a
39. Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form,
Recumbent Woman (Fig. 2). This representation of the act of representation trans. by Christopher S. Wood (New York: Zone
dramatises the gendered epistemology of the dialogue/dialectical philosophical Books, 1991), pp. 29– 31.
mode – upon which Memoirs plays – and demonstrates the logics of blindness
40. See Svetlana Alpers, ‘Art History and its
put forth in Derrida’s double hypothesis. Read straightforwardly, this woodcut Exclusions: The Example of Dutch Art’, in Norma
illustrates one of the several perspectival techniques from Dürer’s Painter’s Broude and Mary D. Garrard (eds), Feminism and Art
Manual. 37 The artist peers through a frame crossed by a grid that corresponds History: Questioning the Litany (New York: Harper &
Row, 1982), pp. 185– 7; See also Ulrike Stutz,
to a paper grid on which he can draw the figure in front of him, which is, ‘Beteiligte Blicke—Ästhetische Annäherungen in
instead of the lute depicted in several other representations of technical qualitativen empirischen Untersuchungen’, in
proficiency in perspective, a reclining woman.38 His point of view is fixed by Winfried Marotzki and Horst Niesyto
the obelisk-like tool, guaranteeing the accuracy of the coordinates he transfers (eds), Bildinterpretation und Bildverstehen:
Methodische Ansätze aus sozialwissenschaftlicher, kunst
from the frame, a sort of window on the world. His attitude is dispassionate – und medienpädagogischer Perspektive (Berlin:
and his position objective, despite the fact that the woman is nearly nude and Springer, 2006), p. 144; Margaret Iversen and
extended seductively before him. But the operations of perspective deconstruct Stephen Melville, Writing Art History: Disciplinary
the rationalist aims that are often imputed to it. Evidently, perspectiva artificialis Departures (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2010), pp. 109– 10.
differs from perspectiva naturalis (or optics): it assumes a fixed, single viewpoint
instead of our binocular and constantly moving eyes, and the image projects
onto a flat surface as opposed to a concave retina.39 Read closely, this woodcut
enacts the representational failure of perspective, as well as, proleptically, the
epistemological failure of Enlightenment reason.40 First, the draughtsman is
blind in the way we have seen that all artists are blind, in that his gaze must
leave the object to trace the figure on the paper. There is still a gap between the
picture plane and the surface of the paper, requiring memory to recall the
image. In trying to render nature or truth, of which this almost naked woman
is a symbol, the artist is frustrated. The disembodied mind or eye of Cartesian
rationalism, as the vantage point is often taken to be, confronts embodied

202 OXFORD ART JOURNAL 37.2 2014


41. Or as Gian Casper Bott notes, ‘no ink flows
from his quill’. Der Klang Im Bild: Evaristo Baschenis
und die Erfindung des Musikstillebens (Berlin: D.
Reimer, 1997), p. 101.
42. Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art
in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1983), p. 70.
43. Svetlana Alpers, ‘Interpretation without
Representation, or, the Viewing of Las Meninas’,
Representations, vol. 1, February 1983, pp. 36–7.
44. Of course, the picture is not a passive object.
See Maria H. Loh, Titian Remade: Repetition and the
Transformation of Early Modern Italian Art (Los
Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2007), p. 33.
Also, Mary D. Garrard, Brunelleschi’s Egg: Nature,
Art, and Gender in Renaissance Italy (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2010), pp. 215ff.
45. See Lyle Massey, ‘Anamorphosis through
Descartes or Perspective Gone Awry’, Renaissance
Quarterly, vol. 50, no. 4, 1997, and Picturing Space,
Displacing Bodies: Anamorphosis in Early Modern
Theories of Perspective (University Park, PA:
Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007).
46. Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form, p. 66; see
Norman Bryson, Vision and Painting: The Logic of the
Gaze (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983),
p. 107, for an opposing view.
Faith, Blindness, and Pictorial Logic in Derrida’s Memoirs of the Blind
reality Embodied truth becomes phenomenal and the female figure crowds the
frame, exceeding its boundaries and leaving the viewer with traces of the ideal.
Moreover, if we reconstruct the visual pyramid extending from the
phallogocentric fixed point to the body of the woman, the centric ray would
appear to transverse her body near her genitalia, about where her left hand
touches her thigh. It is difficult to know this with certainty, since the centric
ray from our point of view, perpendicular to the plane of the woodcut, is right
of centre of the gridded window, and therefore not perpendicular to the table.
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This only furthers the point, however, since the embodied state of the viewer,
just eye-balling the woodcut, so to speak, obviously prevents entry into the
purely geometrical realm of the perspectival scheme in order to establish the
vanishing point corresponding to the draftsman’s point of view.
While the presence and immediacyof the body in the image ostensibly present the
unobscured ‘truth’ of the matter to the viewer, the woodcut discloses the fact of
structural blindness. That is, knowledge of the other, the originary secret,
remains cut off from view, foregrounding an alternative method of knowing, the
abocular sense of touch, which falls outside the limits of empirical rationalism.
We see that the vanishing point, the origin of perspectival representation, is
perhaps veiled by cloth if not completely obscured by the model’s leg – hardly
the intended object of the draughtsman’s monocular gaze. The vanishing point –
the infinite, the transcendental, truth as such – retreats from his view, and
the draftsman’s failure to appropriate, to ‘know’, is testified by the absence of
any marks (traits) on his page.41 Knowledge of the woman, the woodcut
indicates, requires not just mental and optical engagement, but a corporeal
commitment, a fidelity to a relationship to the other that will always exceed
coldly analytical attempts to comprehend its totality.
Venetian Blindness
Memoirs of the Blind constantly questions the privileged status of the viewer, equated
with the thinking subject who, within the perspectival system, stands outside the
contingencies of space. Svetlana Alpers offers Dürer’s Draughtsman as an example
of a ‘commanding’, Albertian mode of representation, wherein the artist or
viewer is ‘prior’ to the world, as opposed to the northern mode in which ‘the
world prior to us [is] made visible’.42 She gives a further illustration of the first,
or Albertian, mode in Titian’s Venus of Urbino,43 the naked female body in the
field of vision in both of these examples ostensibly offered to the viewer/artist
as subordinate nature to male control.44 This commanding mode draws upon
the problematic ‘Albertian window’ metaphor, with the isomorphism of the
Albertian window and the Cartesian plane facilitating the association of linear
perspective with Enlightenment rationalism. Artificial perspective seems to
rationalise space, with all figures in the plane coherently relating to each other
in reference to the vanishing point. Thus, the analogy of the vanishing point as a
precursor to Descartes’s cogito as a philosophical ground has been widely
assumed and unchallenged until relatively recently, notably by Lyle Massey.45
Panofsky has been quite influential in making this association, assuming a shared
conception of space between pre-Cartesians and post-Cartesians.46 As Massey
has demonstrated, however, both of these assumptions are problematic because
of the embodied position of the viewer, something from which even Descartes’s
discourse never truly thought its way out. Moreover, taking perspective to its
logical extreme, the process of anamorphosis demonstrates the distorting
effects inherent in perspective. With two irreconcilable viewpoints, or foci, or
at least one extremely oblique point of view, anamorphosis exposes the vantage
OXFORD ART JOURNAL 37.2 2014 203
Matthew Ancell

point as contingent on the body: ‘In effect, anamorphosis shows that there is a
conflict between being and appearing, between phenomenal space and
geometric space’.47 This is precisely the argument assayed by Derrida in 47. Massey, Picturing Space, p. 66.
Memoirs of the Blind, which demonstrates how blindness, or abocularity, is also
the distorted, or contingent vision proper to human experience. 48. Derrida, Memoirs, p. 55.

Indisputably, the association of linear perspective with the cogito is anachronistic 49. Derrida, Memoirs, p. 55
for the Renaissance – Descartes being sui generis – but what Dürer’s Draughtsman 50. Vocabolario degli Accademici della Crusca,
shows is that the pretence of rationalisation formed an integral part of the (1612), s.v. ‘linea’.

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development of perspectival techniques. That is, whatever its conception of space, 51. On the structural invisibility of perspective,
Renaissance linear perspective did aspire to render objects truthfully in reference see Grootenboer, The Rhetoric of Perspective.
to the artist/viewer in an epistemologically commanding position, with the 52. Derrida, Memoirs, p. 55.
vanishing point (or corresponding vantage point) functioning as a stable point of
reference. The further ramification is, precisely, that such pretences and systems
– proto-Cartesian, non-Cartesian, genuinely Cartesian – founder on their own
logic and make recourse, or at least appeal, to a point outside the system. Even
though Derrida’s discussion of perspective in Memoirs of the Blind repeats the
metaphysical assumptions about linear perspective, it does so in order to make a
similar argument as Massey’s rethinking of the identification of perspective and
Cartesian rationalism. In other words, the viewing subject cannot escape the logic
of the perspectival structure into an a priori, disembodied position. Rather,
perspective undoes itself when its logic is followed to its extreme, anamorphosis,
which implies an embodied, contingent self. Let us consider an integral passage in
Derrida’s discussion of the trait:

For the same reason, the trait is not sensible, as a patch of color would be. Neither
intelligible nor sensible . . . For if we left the Platonic cave a while back, it was not in order
finally to see the eidos of the thing itself after a conversion, anabasis, or anamnesis. We
left the cave behind because the Platonic speleology misses, is unable to take into
account if not to see, the inappearance of a trait that is neither sensible nor intelligible. It
misses the trait precisely because it believes that it sees it or lets it be seen. The lucidity of
this speleology carries within it another blind man, not the cave dweller, the blind man
deep down, but the one who closes his eyes to this blindness—right here.48

Derrida responds to the rationalist tradition by illustrating its inability to see its own
blindness, to note what is truly invisible. As Derrida’s text indicates, he is ‘speaking
here of graphic and not color blindness, of drawing and not painting’.49 One is
reminded of the seventeenth-century definition of ‘linea’ as ‘lunghezza senza
larghezza [length without width]’.50 Rather than the Form of the intelligible
realm, accessible through dialectic reason, the trait is the generative ellipse, the
difference that cannot be perceived between the forms of objects in the sensible
world. The Platonic opposition between the sensible and the intelligible, as
connected here to linear perspective, recalls the early modern debate over disegno
and colore. Serving to render objects in the picture plane in a coherent relationship
to each other and the viewer, the system of orthogonal lines, transversals,
horizon, and vanishing point of Albertian perspective are theoretically invisible
since they form the substratum, part of the disegno, the sketch or overall design of
a work developed from perspective.51
The reference by Derrida to ‘a jalousie (a blind) of traits cutting up the horizon,
traits through which, between which, you can observe without being seen’,52
invokes several related images connected to perspective (from perspectiva, ‘seeing
through’). In the introduction to A Derrida Reader, Peggy Kamuf connects the
partially obstructed view of the jalousie (that is, the slats of a venetian blind) to
the various and partial selections of Derrida’s corpus that constitute the
collection. The introduction ‘is not exactly a dialogue’ that explores the richness

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53. See Peggy Kamuf, ‘Reading Between the
Blinds’, in Peggy Kamuf (ed.), A Derrida Reader:
Between the Blinds (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1991), pp. xiii– xlii.
54. Derrida, Memoirs, p. 54.
55. Brian Rotman, Signifying Nothing: The Semiotics
of Zero (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1987), p. 19.
56. Derrida, Memoirs, p. 55.
57. Derrida, Memoirs, p. 55.
58. Derrida, Memoirs, p. 56.
59. This is mentioned in: Jacques Derrida, Points ...
: Interviews, 1974–1994. Elisabeth Weber (ed.),
trans. Peggy Kamuf and others (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1995), p. 428.
60. One might wonder if Derrida is not calling
Nietzsche’s bluff regarding faith. See the conclusion
of Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. by
David Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1995).
61. On Caravaggio’s underdrawings, see Roberto
Bellucci and others, ‘Finding Caravaggio’s
Preparatory Drawings’, in Claudio Strinati (ed.),
Caravaggio (Milan: Skira, 2010), pp. 234– 5.
Faith, Blindness, and Pictorial Logic in Derrida’s Memoirs of the Blind
of the image of the jalousie (and notion of the jealousy of the monotheistic God) as a
differential term.53 God enters the picture at this point in that, when speaking of the
trait, Derrida asks if it is
by chance that in order to speak of the trait we are falling back upon the language of
negative theology or of those discourses concerned with naming the withdrawal [retrait] of
the invisible or hidden god? . . . It is theological through and through, to the point,
sometimes included, sometimes excluded, where the self-eclipsing trait cannot even be
spoken about, cannot even say itself in the present, since it is not gathered, since it does
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not gather itself, into any present, “I am who I am” (a formula whose original grammatical
form, as we know, implies the future).54
The traits in a one-point perspective scheme are ordered by the vanishing point
(‘sometimes included, sometimes excluded’), as if it were the invisible,
unnameable god indicated by the Tetragrammaton, the deus absconditus from
which meaning emanates but is always in retreat from comprehension. Thus, our
interactions with Deity are with the phenomena, expressions, representations,
signs that decline from it in the divine grammar. As Brian Rotman observes, the
vanishing point has a ‘dual semiotic character’, since within the scene in the
picture plane it signifies a specific location, but one that, as it is infinitely distant,
‘is unoccupiable’. In its external position, the vanishing point organises other
signs ‘in a meta-linguistic relation’. Meaning, then, is inseparable from the
process of depiction itself.55 The trait and vanishing point are generative, but not
present.
As is typical of his style, Derrida is speaking from inside the discourse, pointing
toward an exterior of the structure that cannot be named but inhabits a position
‘“Before” [“avant”] all the “blind spots” that, literally or figuratively, organize the
scopic field and the scene of drawing’.56 At this point in the dialogue in Memoirs,
the female interlocutor notes that ‘Derrida’ seeks ‘to transcendentalise, that is, to
ennoble an infirmity or an impotence.’57
Would you not claim in your jealous, even envious passion, in our wounded impotence, to
be more faithful to the trait, to the trait in its most refined end or finality? As for the “great
draftsman”—to follow your suggestion—does he not also try in vain, up to the point of
exhausting a ductus or stylus, to capture this withdrawal [retrait] of the trait, to remark it,
to sign it finally—in an endless scarification.58
Sight and blindness are bound together. Recognising the impotence of reason, its
inability to penetrate beyond the lines of logical representation, beyond artifice,
Derrida ‘confesses’ the valorisation of blindness as a structural feature of drawing
and therefore of all representation. To be sure, Derrida is not an irrationalist, or
even anti-Enlightenment, yet his project questions the certainties and axioms
of Enlightenment in order to think them better.59 As Nietzsche pronounced,
the Enlightenment’s greatest casualty is faith, or at least the object of faith. The
object of faith is, here, the missing object, the unseen subject, the subjectile or
subjectum of Memoirs of the Blind, which illustrates the blind impotence of reason
severed from the blindness of faith.60
L′ ouvre où ne pas voir
As opposed to Dürer’s careful draughtsman and his logical perspectival system,
Caravaggio looks and paints. This is not to say that Caravaggio does not ever
take advantage of drawings or marks in his work, but that his process allows
for, if not encourages, the errors inherent in sensory perception to creep in.61
The glaring discrepancies between representation and what we should expect to
OXFORD ART JOURNAL 37.2 2014 205
Matthew Ancell

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Fig 3. Caravaggio, Incredulity of Saint Thomas, c. 1602, oil on canvas, 107 × 146 cm. Schloß Sanssouci, Potsdam. (Photo: Gerhard Murza / Art Resource, NY.)

see in both artificial and natural perspective dramatise distortions that occur in
Derrida’s self-portrait or revelation of the self. Two of the distortions I have in 62. On Caravaggio’s distortions, see Alfred Moir,
‘Le sviste di Caravaggio’, in Maurizio Calvesi (ed.),
mind for this claim (in addition to those we have seen in the Conversion, but that L’Ultimo Caravaggio e la cultura artistica a Napoli in
are not in the exhibition) are the following. In the Calling of St. Matthew (1599 – Sicilia e a Malta (Siracusa: Ediprint, 1987), p. 139–
1600), Christ’s legs are awkwardly turned in the opposite direction of his torso. 45.
Consider also the impossible angle of Christ’s (apparently detached) hand in the 63. Fried, The Moment of Caravaggio, p. 134. For an
Potsdam Incredulity of Saint Thomas (c. 1602), which allows for a natural grasp insightful discussion of the fragmented body and
as he guides the disciple’s touch and, significantly, a clear view of the stigma.62 violation of pictorial norms in Caravaggio, see Todd
P. Olson, ‘Pitiful Relics: Caravaggio’s Martyrdom of
This bodily fragmentation leads Fried to conclude that ‘Caravaggio was never St. Matthew’, Representations, vol. 77, no. 1, 2002,
simply—perhaps not even primarily—an optical realist . . . in Paul Valéry’s pp. 107–42.
phrase, as cited by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, he always “took his body with 64. Itay Sapir, ‘The Visible, the Invisible, and the
him”’.63 Knowing the only object that we can know, the self (inasmuch as it is Knowable: Modernity as an Obscure Tale’, in Silke
knowable), takes place in an act of self-representation that cannot depend on Horstkotte and Karin Leonhard (eds), Seeing
strictly rational procedure, as figured by the perspectival sketch. As Itay Sapir Perception (New Castle: Cambridge Scholars
Publishing, 2007), p. 203. Sapir productively
has observed, Caravaggio’s tenebrism ‘substitutes precisely for the now- places Caravaggio alongside Montaigne as
inexistent perspectival structure’.64 This substitution buries the vanishing point, deconstructors of Renaissance humanist
the infinite, into the space of darkness and incertitude. Consequently, all conceptions of knowledge, representation, and
perception, p. 210. See also Sapir’s Ténèbres sans
knowing is provisional, embodied, and phenomenal. leçons: esthétique et épistémologie de la peinture
With this in mind, and breaking with the ‘law of the exhibition’ again, let us ténébriste romaine, 1595– 1610 (Bern: Peter Lang
examine the Incredulity of Saint Thomas (Fig. 3) in more detail, as it serves along AG, 2012).

206 OXFORD ART JOURNAL 37.2 2014


65. Fried, The Moment of Caravaggio, 84; Catherine
R. Puglisi, Caravaggio (London: Phaidon Press,
1998), p. 216; Marianne Koos, ‘Kunst und
Berührung. Materialität versus Imagination in
Caravaggios Gemälde des "Ungläubigen
Thomas", in Johann Anselm Steiger and others
(eds), Passion, Affekt und Leidenschaft in der Frühen
Neuzeit, vol. 2 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag,
2005), p. 1141.
66. John T. Spike, Caravaggio (New York:
Abbeville Press, 2001), p. 213. Spike also discusses
the philosophical dimension of the experience by
noting the influence of Sextus Empiricus (the
primary source of Pyrrhonian scepticism for
Montaigne and others) in Rome through the
advocacy of Francisco Patrizi.
67. Pericolo, Caravaggio and Pictorial Narrative,
p. 459.
68. Pericolo, Caravaggio, p. 459.
69. Malvasia quotes Lodovio Carracci expressing
his disappointment in this painting because ‘it was
too obedient to nature, lacked decorum, was of
little grace and intelligence, and was clearly ruinous
to good design’, Walter Friedlaender, Caravaggio
Studies (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1974), p. 161.
70. Howard Hibbard, Caravaggio (New York:
Harper & Row, 1983), pp. 167– 8; Bal, Quoting
Caravaggio, p. 32.
71. Nicola Suthor, ‘Bad touch? Zum
Körpereinsatz in Michelangelo/Pontormos “Noli
me tangere” und Caravaggios “Ungläubigem
Thomas”’, in Valeska von Rosen, Klaus Krüger, and
Rudolf Preimesberger (eds.), Der Stumme Diskurs
der Bilder (Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2003),
p. 271.
72. Pericolo, Caravaggio and Pictorial Narrative,
p. 460.
Faith, Blindness, and Pictorial Logic in Derrida’s Memoirs of the Blind
with the Conversion as an emblem of the entire argument of Memoirs of the Blind. The
painting sets up what is at stake in the logics of blindness. That is, empirical vision and
knowledge are set in relief to blindness, revelation, and conversion. In perspectival
and epistemological terms, the disembodied rational viewpoint must concede its
insufficiency and enter into an embodied and relational position to know the
other. In the painting, in this moment of conversion, incarnate divinity is thrust
into the foreground, almost into our space, the embodied realm, in visceral
detail. Several critics give the painting’s portrayal of sight an empirical reading,
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emphasising that Thomas stares into the wound.65 John Spike concludes that
‘Thomas peering unblinkingly into the slashed flesh is the image of an empirical
scientist who will not be satisfied with second-hand information. The theory
under examination was the physical resurrection of the Lord’.66 But, to describe
Thomas as ‘an empirical scientist’ misses the point, just as Thomas’s gaze misses
the wound entirely. Lorenzo Pericolo’s recent analysis of the Postdam painting
supports an abocular, non-linear, and anamorphic reading. He observes that
Christ and Thomas occupy different planes and, therefore, the apostle’s stare is
not toward the wound67 Thomas’s demand for ocular proof is thwarted. Not even
gazing at the surface of the wound at this point, Thomas is blind. Here it is
important to remember the distinction between Renaissance scepticism and what
would become the colloquial sense of scepticism later on, as I noted Derrida uses
the term (knowingly) at the beginning of Memoirs of the Blind. Thomas’s
scepticism, while perhaps initially of the sort of disbelief, converts into a sceptical
fideism, an epistemological position that acknowledges the impossibility of
absolute knowledge but that depends on the assurance of an experiential
relationship with the object to be known. The ‘scientific’ detail that fascinates
many critics, has occluded Thomas’ condition of blindness, or abocularity.
Pericolo argues that perceptually ‘the beholder reroutes Thomas’ gaze toward
Jesus’ side’ to compensate for Caravaggio’s intentional misalignment of the two
figures.68 The rational impulses of the viewer reconstruct a perspectival pyramid
that connects Thomas’s eye to the wound.
Moreover, if the vanishing point from Thomas’s viewpoint is supposed to be the
wound – which perspectiva naturalis would dictate if he were staring into it – then
Caravaggio presents us with another disruption of the perspectival system.69 In the
absence of perspective, the viewer is inevitably drawn to the wound, which elicits
visceral reactions. Contra Howard Hibbard’s ‘classicizing’ composition of the four
heads in a ‘concentrated diamond’ that reassures him against the ‘unbearable’
realistic detail by counterbalancing the ‘shocking’ wound, Mieke Bal argues that
the ‘centripetal pointer’ of the wound is emphasised and sucks us in.70 The
incoherent nexus of hands intensifies these transgressions of perspectival law,
and foregrounds the philosophical implication that our pictures of the world are
subject to perceptual and rational error. We stare at the mark, the organising
principle of the composition, the substitute vanishing point, blind to what
might lie beyond. For Nicola Suthor, the viewer’s gaze both penetrates but is
also ‘disturbed [or hurt, shocked]’.71 There is a doubling of viewpoints, ours
and Thomas’s, and both go astray or are blind.
But that is not to say that this is not a scene of sight and knowledge, for as Thomas
gropes, he is guided by Jesus’ touch. Pericolo notes that, ‘in a sense, Thomas sees
through his finger’.72 Once again, drawing upon Diderot, Derrida observes the
possibility of a providential gift passing through the hands of the blind:
It is inscribed on the inside of these hands, which are guided by the hand of God, as if
Yahweh’s design were mapped out on the surface of their skin, as if it had, to use an
expression of Diderot’s, “traced the portrait on the hand.” Diderot’s Letter on the Blind for
OXFORD ART JOURNAL 37.2 2014 207
Matthew Ancell

the Use of Those Who See describes in two places this vision “by the skin.” Not only can
one see “by the skin,” but the epidermis of the hands would be like a “canvas stretched
taut for drawing or painting”: . . . [quoting the letter] Thus the blind have likewise a painting,
in which their own skin serves as canvas.73 73. Derrida, Memoirs, pp. 100–1.
74. Koos, ‘Kunst und Berührung’, p. 1146.
Thomas misses the mark visually, even as the canvas of Christ’s body is revealed to
him. Christ’s body is ‘scened’ as a painting, his shroud a curtain that reveals the 75. Gal. 6.17 NRSV.
picture.74 The scene is doubled, though, as the traits of the stigmata are 76. Ann Hartle, ‘Montaigne and Skepticism’, in
inscribed, in a sense, on Thomas in his conversion, his epistrophe or turning to Ullrich Langer (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to

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Montaigne (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Christ. He recognises Deity’s design which is transferred to him, the small tear Press, 2005), p. 204.
in his robe establishing a compositional and bodily correspondence between
77. Richard H. Popkin, The History of Scepticism:
Christ and himself. Paul, after his own conversion, would declare ‘I carry the From Savonarola to Bayle (Oxford: Oxford
marks of Jesus branded on my body’.75 Humanity draws upon Christ’s bodily University Press, 2003), p. 51.
canvas and he in turn inscribes a new law on the inner parts of believers, 78. Fried, The Moment of Caravaggio, p. 85.
obviating but not erasing the mark of circumcision. Paul and Thomas find
themselves both inside and outside the Law (figured in Memoirs as linear 79. John 20.28 NRSV.
perspective, disegno, and the ‘law of the exhibition’). 80. Derrida, Memoirs, p. 30.
Thomas’s tactile knowledge follows Ann Hartle’s characterisation of Michel de 81. Hartle, ‘Montaigne and Skepticism’, p. 204.
Montaigne in which he ‘transcends both simple credulity and learned
presumption, and that, in philosophical terms, would be called “learned
ignorance”’.76 As Richard Popkin has observed, it is the sceptic, and not the
dogmatist, who is in a position to receive revelation.77 In the moment of desired
rational confirmation, figured by sight, Thomas is blind, simultaneously touching
his own hip as if to verify the experience. As Fried observes, only the viewer sees
the naked haunch of the newly resurrected Christ.78 Again, nudity is occluded
from the view of the depicted observer, as in Dürer’s Draughtsman, but now
Christ opens up his shroud and wound to be experienced (if not seen) by the
disciple, who now knows God and exclaims his recognition, according to the
Johannine account, ‘My Lord and my God’.79 Here, there is a play of sensuality,
in all senses of the word, that borders on a kind of reverse mysticism. That is,
knowledge comes in and through the senses and phenomena, even as the sense
we most rely upon for knowledge fails. The intimacy is not figured as eroticism
strictly speaking, but it is a moment of love that gives knowledge to the
believer-doubter of an order that eludes the dispassionate draughtsman. Thomas
occupies the unoccupiable vanishing point but in an asymmetrical relationship in
that the viewpoint does not correspond to it. And it is a relationship, the implied
covenant of belief, that makes it possible. The order of knowledge ‘acquired’,
though, is precisely not an acquisition, but a renewal of a relationship and a
promise of return, of what Derrida calls the avenir or the ‘to come’. This is not a
moment, then, of full presence, since the wound is a sign, a mark, or an absence
(in short, a trait) in the incarnated Word through which Thomas assures himself
of his salvation, corporeal and spiritual, through a new covenant or alliance. As
Derrida explains:

the thanksgiving grace [grâce] of the trait suggests that at the origin of the graphein there
is a debt or gift rather than representational fidelity. More precisely, the fidelity of faith
matters more than the representation, whose movement this fidelity commands and thus
precedes. And faith, in the moment proper to it, is blind. It sacrifices sight, even if it does
so with an eye to seeing at last.80

What one really believes always remains hidden from others, if not to the
individual as well. But, in Memoirs of the Blind, Derrida seems to go beyond
mere ventriloquism of religious discourse, as could be claimed, and emulates
Montaigne’s integration of scepticism ‘into the faith which transcends it’.81

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82. Derrida, Memoirs, p. 126.
83. Caputo, Prayers and Tears, p. xxi.
84. See Gary Kuchar, ‘Andrew Marvell’s
Anamorphic Tears’, Studies in Philology, vol. 103,
no. 3, Summer 2006, pp. 345–81.
85. Derrida, Memoirs, p. 129.
86. Derrida, Memoirs, p. 130.
87. Montaigne, Essays, p. 2.
88. Bennington and Derrida, Jacques Derrida.
89. Bennington and Derrida, Jacques Derrida,
p. 169.
Faith, Blindness, and Pictorial Logic in Derrida’s Memoirs of the Blind
Faith becomes the supplement to reason, pointing towards an invisible
complement that lies in a position outside the system, as opposed to being part
of the chain of reason; it makes possible the movement of reason, which must
proceed from that act or moment of belief, just as the self-portrait is only
guaranteed, as such, by belief in the supplementary inscription of its title.
I have only been able to trace out the problem here, the interrelationship
between reason and faith, but I end with the question of what to make of
Derrida’s religion? What does it mean for him to believe? Memoirs of the Blind,
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this abocular rejoinder to the monocular Circumfession, this self-portrait of a
Jewish post-modern Paul-Augustine-Montaigne-Thomas, is a response to the
polyvalent question, ‘Vous croyez?’ (Do you believe? Can you believe it? Do
you believe this? Do you think?). The response to ‘do you think?’ converts
‘cogito’ into ‘credo’. But the ‘this’, the object of belief, is absent, necessitating
faith. Derrida’s alliance with the religion of his mother is broken, but what does
it mean for him to cry tears of belief, that which is proper to the eyes, that
which blinds them?82 Memoirs of the Blind follows the structure of faith.83 This
structure of the double hypothesis, as I have explored it pictorially, is intent on
opening up the possibilities that lie beyond the horizon of reason and the limits
of scepticism, in its modern sense of religious doubt as opposed to the fideistic
scepticism of the early modern period. The sexual difference in the dialogue of
Memoirs of the Blind culminates in the relationship between the masculine sight
of reason and the feminine tears of faith, repeating the movement between
linear perspective and anamorphosis. The poem ‘Eyes and Tears’ by Andrew
Marvell, on the last page of Derrida’s text points toward the complex, bodily,
blind, elliptical, distorted, and anamorphic structure of the double hypothesis:
‘These weeping eyes, those seeing tears’.84
--Tears that see . . . Do you believe?
--I don′ t know, one has to believe . . .85
--Des larmes qui voient . . . Vous croyez?
--Je ne sais pas, il faut croire. (. . .)86
The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins
‘It is myself that I portray’ Montaigne declares at the outset of the Essays,
establishing a pictorial metaphor that runs throughout the work and parallels
Derrida’s autobiographical self-portrait in Memoirs.87 If it were possible, the
portrait he paints of the self would be ‘wholly naked’, the truth, so to speak, of
the self. In the spirit and even style of Montaigne’s Essays, Memoirs of the Blind is a
companion piece to the autobiographical Circumfession, a religious confession that
reveals a ‘conversion’ of sorts and displays Derrida’s circumcision in dialogue
with Geoffrey Bennington’s ‘biography’ Jacques Derrida.88 Both texts adopt a
position similar to the Essays as Derrida fills in the lines of his self-portrait and
mounts a critique of Enlightenment thought as monocular or perspectival.
Bennington’s side of the conversation, entitled Derridabase, consists of a logically
systematic exposition of Derrida’s philosophy without any direct quotation. Cut
off from Bennington’s remarkably lucid synthesis by a horizontal dotted line,
Derrida’s text, Circumfession, seeks to undercut the coherence of Derridabase with
an account that is highly biographical, contextually specific, and explicitly frank in
its bodily detail. Rather than an integral ego, the self-portrait Derrida presents is
a fragmentary being, or a monster, of sorts, but not what he calls a ‘double-focus
with-without monocular vision’.89 This enigmatic formulation provides an
interpretative key for Memoirs of the Blind, and also marks an important moment
in Derrida’s career in that, apart from The Truth in Painting, originally published in
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Matthew Ancell

1978, it is his most sustained treatment of visual art. It would be followed by The Gift
of Death, signalling a turn to religion in his writing that would confound many critics.
This turn deserves renewed scholarly attention because it inaugurated the final phase 90. Montaigne, Essays, p. 504.
of Derrida’s philosophical project. The monocular portrait of the subject of
Circumfession, then, becomes a self-portrait of the blind man of faith in Memoirs, a 91. Montaigne, Essays, p. 135.
figure reminiscent of Montaigne, who argues that our vision of the world is
distorted and refracted by our fallible reason and bodily emotions.
In ‘Of Giving the Lie’, Montaigne describes the effect of self-portraiture:

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‘Painting myself for others, I have painted my inward self with colours clearer
than my original ones. I have no more made my book than my book has made
me—a book consubstantial with its author’.90 The composition of the self (a
repository of phenomena derived from the senses, memories, fantasies, and
reason) is a continual process of revision, wherein the self is shaped by its own
figuration. Here the inward self is painted (not drawn) in all its passions and
imperfections with ‘colours clearer’ than the original, as if Montaigne were
retreating from disegno, distorting for effect, his fidelity given to what he sees in
front of him, not to an internal ideal image of the self.
Montaigne confesses, in ‘Of Friendship’: ‘And what are these things of mine, in
truth, but grotesques and monstrous bodies, pieced together of divers members,
without definite shape, having no order, sequence, or proportion other than
accidental?’91 Montaigne’s Essays portray self-knowledge as natural knowledge,
for inasmuch as the mind is inextricable from the body, our being expresses the
experience of the unstable world. Assaying experience, for Montaigne, is to
participate in it and to represent it in a manner that enacts the epistemological
and ontological problems that Descartes attempted to resolve. Ultimately, the
self-portrait for both Derrida and Montaigne is a kind of anamorphosis in
which the representation of the self is both commensurate and incommensurate
with the embodied self. That is, the knowledge of the self is positional,
revealing different aspects from different angles, as opposed to the fixed,
commanding modes of Cartesian rationalism or linear perspective. Derrida
conflates these modes, but then exposes that their deconstruction (i.e. fideistic
scepticism and anamorphosis) lies avant la lettre within the operations of their
own systems. Memoirs becomes a Derridean withdrawal into reflection and
memory, a self-portrait, an essay on the self, and a dialogue with a friend and
fellow sceptic of dogmatic rationalism in Montaigne.
If we recall Caravaggio’s Conversion, with its fragmentary composition, invisible
complement, and corporeal emphasis, we can now see it as a self-portrait in the
autobiographical Memoirs of the Blind that remarks on the movement from drawing
to painting, linear perspective to anamorphosis, blindness to revelation, law to
love, and thought to belief.

Too many friends and colleagues are to thank for help in writing this article to mention
here, but I am especially grateful to Maria Loh, Hanneke Grootenboer, Laura Hatch, and the
anonymous reviewers for their feedback.

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