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mattncellCredo Ergo Sum: Faith, Blindness,and Pictorial Logic in DerridasMemoirs of the BlindMatthew Ancell

Credo Ergo Sum: Faith, Blindness, and Pictorial Logicin Derridas Memoirs of the Blind

Matthew Ancell

Others form man; I tell of him and portray a particular one, very ill-formed, whom I shouldreally make very different from what he is if I had to fashion him over again. But now it isdone. Now the lines of my painting [les traits de ma peinture] do not go astray, though theychange 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 Memoiresdaveugle: Lautoportrait et autres ruines [Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait andOther Ruins], inaugurating the museums Partis Pris series.2 Provisionallyentitled Louvre ou` ne pas voir [The Louvre/opening where one does notsee], the exhibition consisted of forty-four works, all drawings from theLouvre, with the exception of four paintings, two of which were on loan. Thecatalogue of the same title contains seventy-one works, including eight thatviolate what Derrida calls the law of this exhibition: to keep to the body ofdrawings housed at the Louvre.3 One of the works in the catalogue that areoutside the law of the exhibition is Caravaggios The Conversion of St. Paul(16001601; Rome, Santa Maria del Popolo, Fig. 1). This famous Baroquework depicting revelation as the opposite of blindness falls outside Derridaslaw in a three-fold way as it is neither in the Louvre, nor borrowed for theexhibition, nor a drawing, and with Michael Newman, I would raise thequestion as to why, when it comes to revelation, does Derrida turn to paintingas opposed to drawing?4 I would argue that Derridas turn to Caravaggio isintentional, and a significant moment for understanding not only his text butfor examining the manner in which the operations of visual art enact thoughtand what the structure of that kind of pictorial thought implies. What is at stakein Memoirs of the Blind is what Derrida sees as the origin, or the thought ofdrawing, 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 ofpainting? The answer to this question lies in Caravaggios painting. It is aconversion (like Pauls), a turning away from the logic of drawing and design which traditionally function along with linear perspective as figures forrationality to painting as a logic of belief. If perspective functions as pictorialthought, revelation participates in a different logic structured as fidelity.6 AsI will demonstrate, this fidelity is not representational but rather relational.Derrida characterises this relational quality as covenantal, and structures theexhibition and his writings on Memoirs of the Blind as a non-linear dialogue sothat it reveals its message only as we read it through the lines of the discoursesof faith, scepticism and their pictorial analogues. While belief and faith are notsynonymous, I am using them somewhat interchangeably for now, precisely

1. Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays ofMontaigne, trans. by Donald M. Frame (Stanford:Stanford University Press, 1965), p. 610.

2. Subsequent exhibitions in the series werecurated by Peter Greenaway, Jean Starobinski, andJulia Kristeva. For a review of the exhibition, seeMeyer Raphael Rubenstein, Sight Unseen, Art inAmerica, vol. 79, no. 4, April 1991, pp. 4753.

3. Jacques Derrida, Memoires daveugle:Lautoportrait et autres ruines (Paris: Reunion desmusees 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 ofDrawing: A Discussion of Jacques Derrida,Memoires daveugle. Lautoportrait et autres ruines,Research in Phenomenology, vol. 24, no. 1, 1994,p. 229. Interestingly, in his Vite, Belloricharacterises theConversion as a kind of non-paintingbecause its action does not pertain to istoria. SeeLorenzo Pericolo, Caravaggio and Pictorial Narrative:Dislocating the Istoria in Early Modern Painting(London: Harvey Miller, 2011), pp. 25761.

5. Derrida, Memoirs, p. 3.

6. On pictorial thought, see HannekeGrootenboer, The Pensive Image: On Thought inJan Van Huysums Still Life Paintings, Oxford ArtJournal, vol. 34, no.1, 2011, pp. 1330, as well asher The Rhetoric of Perspective: Realism and Illusionismin Seventeenth-century Dutch Still-life Painting(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005);Hubert Damisch, The Origin of Perspective, trans. byJohn Goodman (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,1994), pp. 44347;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 OXFORD ART JOURNAL 37.2 2014 193210doi:10.1093/oxartj/kcu007 Advance Access publication 22 July 2014

Fig. 1. Caravaggio, The Conversion of St. Paul, 16001601, oil on canvas, 230 175 cm. Santa Maria del Popolo, Rome. (Photo: Scala / Art Resource, NY.)

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because the logic of belief will make, as we see, the movement to fidelity. Arthistorians such as Michael Fried and theorists like J. Hillis Miller havecommented on Memoirs of the Blind, however, the centrality of perspective tothe argument of the text, and its philosophical ramifications, has remained acritical blind spot.7

I would like to posit a double hypothesis that Renaissance perspective andearly modern scepticism reveal not only a forceful critique of the Westernphilosophical project in the text, but also establish Derrida as a sensitivecurator and interpreter of art in that Memoirs of the Blind makes a profound yetoverlooked contribution to the discourse on perspective. The catalogue hasthe elliptical structure of a dialogue which suggests Derridas struggle withJudaism and a movement to a personal position of faith figured as a kind ofanamorphic fideism as a supplement to monocular Enlightenment thought asexpressed by linear perspective and Cartesian rationalism. Derrida draws acomplex outline of the structure of faith itself and what it means for figures,such as Caravaggio and Durer grappling, it seems, with the epistemologicalramifications of failures of representation and perception. I suggest that inMemoirs of the Blind a self-portrait of Derrida emerges, similar to the oneMichel de Montaigne attempted in his Essays: a kind of autobiographical visionblinded by tears that distort reason, an entrance into the logics of blindnessand belief, and a picture of a disfigured self that takes shape from thecontingent nature of experience.

Conversion and Covenant

After including in his catalogue two drawings of the theme of Pauls conversionwithout further comment, Derrida turns to Caravaggios interpretation of thebiblical accounts of the Damascene conversion and its previous artisticrenderings. In the book of Acts, Paul (Saul of Tarsus) is assaulted by a heavenlyflash of light, interrogated by the Lord, and blinded for three days. Fallen fromhis horse, Paul now lies at the edge of the picture plane, perhaps at our feet. Itseems that we, with Paul, are facing upward, yet we are unable to look past thesteadied horse into the light of heaven (emanating from its invisible complement).Caravaggio has depicted the very moment that Paul turns towards what hasbowled him over in a kind of sunflower blindness, a conversion that twists thelight and turns it upon itself to the point of dizziness.8 As with many works inMemoirs, 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 awayfrom sketching, from design, which function along with linear perspective asfigures for rationality. The space before us, the extraordinary jumble of humanand animal arms and legs, defies perspectival construction.10 All is foreground,with no horizon or vanishing point to ground the figures in the composition.While the figures are embodied, they are also strangely dismembered. Notably,the servants legs do not match up with the body that emerges above the horse,and Pauls left leg appears rather disjointed from his hip, while his right leg, fromthe knee down, disappears altogether.

Leo Steinberg has argued that the painting (like its counterpart, The Crucifixionof St. Peter, 16001601) was not intended to be viewed from a right angle, andsuggests that Caravaggio could have been influenced by anamorphic techniquesduring his apprenticeship in Milan (he rightly does not call Caravaggios workan 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

7. See Michael Fried, Between Realisms: FromDerrida to Manet, Critical Inquiry, vol. 21, no. 1,Autumn 1994, pp. 136; J. HillisMiller, What doStories about Pictures Want?, Critical Inquiry, vol.34, no. 5, Winter 2008, pp. S59S97.



10. Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, CaravaggiosSecrets (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), p. 59.

11. Leo Steinberg, Observations in the CerasiChapel, The Art Bulletin, vol. 41, no. 2, June 1959,p. 186.

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Faith, Blindness, and Pictorial Logic in Derridas Memoirs of the Blind

distortions. Rather, it reinforced a corporeal cognizance in harmonywith scepticalarguments about the embodied, and therefore positional, nature of ourknowledge, something that anamorphosis forces the viewer to acknowledge aswell. Fried suggests that, possibly, the viewer was imagined by the artist aspossessing binocular vision, that is, natural vision.12 Such binocularity goes rightto the point of Memoirs and its so-called double hypothesis, as for Derrida,neither natural vision nor the vision of the minds eye of reason can ultimatelyovercome the blindness of empiricism. As Caravaggio demonstrates sodramatically, revelation requires the sacrifice of one kind vision for another.

Caravaggios painting breaking the law of this catalogue of drawings dramatises the major themes of Memoirs of the Blind, all of which are interrelatedand include conversion, the self-portrait, faith and scepticism, blindness,perspective, and anamorphosis. Derridas combination of discourses on faith andthe pictorial become two antennae that, like Pauls outstretched arms, grope intothe darkness and make possible an illumination that falls outside the strictlyrational order. In other words, the double-focus with-without monocularvision13 finds full expression in Memoirs, in that the catalogue talks around, butalways towards, the doubleness of linear perspective. In its basic structure, thevantage point and vanishing point of linear perspective constitute a dual-focisystem with one focus embodied, the other rationally conceived in the pictureplane. Just as circumcision structures Judaism, partitioning the spheres of heavenand earth, the transcendental and the mundane, Derrida examines the line ortrait in drawing and equates it with the cut, the division between these twoworlds.14 Memoirs of the Blind explores the space partitioned in the cut betweenthe spaces on both sides of the picture plane. For Erwin Panofsky, the inventionof linear perspective forecasts Descartess notion of rationalised space and thedisembodied self. As Caravaggios Conversion dramatises, single-point perspectiveis monocular in providing a singular point of view, something that appliesspecifically to the vision of the Cartesian subject. Conversely, as this essay willshow, perspective loses its monocularity when its configuration is anamorphic andincludes two legitimate points of view. This binocularity, in fact, draws attentionto the embodied nature of perception, to the epistemological limits of artifice,and to fragmented subjectivity.15 Memoirs of the Blind employs the Conversion in itsdialogue to mount a critique of the limits of rational monocularism by showinghow the perspectival systems that operate in drawing and therefore painting,writing, etc. are blind or abocular, outside the realm of empirical vision, yetconstitutive of faith.

Derrida draws upon two gendered epistemologies, figured as the male gaze ofrational empiricism and the feminine tears of faith and revelation. The pictorialanalogue 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 thefailure of the perspectival system. As James Elkins has observed, Perspectivehas always been hermaphroditic, part convention and part invention. There hasalways been doubt about its origins, and it has always beckoned to writers whowant to see a single, ruling order in its originary discord.16 In the history ofperspective, Hubert Damisch points to a movement towards the logic ofperspective.17 This movement, a return to the historical, mythical, and logicalorigins of perspective, is resumed in the double hypothesis of Memoirs of theBlind. By exhibiting the deconstruction of drawing, Derrida gestures at theenactment of philosophical thought in art. He also shows that the logics at workin drawing touch on the origin of art itself, and are predicated on, as we willsee, faith. The discourse of the origin of art, and its inaccessibility, parallels the

12. Michael Fried, The Moment of Caravaggio(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010),p. 148. Pericolo notes that Caravaggio pushedtransgression much farther, and calls thecomposition a bipolar field of interaction, but fordifferent reasons than Fried, Caravaggio and PictorialNarrative, pp. 2602.

13. Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida,Jacques Derrida (Chicago: University of ChicagoPress, 1993), p. 169.

14. John D. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of JacquesDerrida: Religion without Religion (Bloomington:Indiana University Press, 1997), p. 294.

15. For a review of the debate about perspectiveand its philosophical implications, see MargaretIversen, The Discourse of Perspective in theTwentieth Century: Panofsky, Damisch, Lacan,Oxford Art Journal, vol. 28, no. 2, 2005, pp. 191202.

16. James Elkins, The Poetics of Perspective (Ithaca:Cornell University Press, 1994), p. 263.

17. Damisch, The Origin of Perspective, p. 47.


Matthew Ancell

invisible deity that supplements and organises the logic of belief, of revelation inblindness. That is, both perspective and faith must make recourse to the infinite(the vanishing point and Deity, respectively); in other words, the wayperspective thinks (especially in its extreme form of anamorphosis) mirrorsthe discourse of faith. Belief is not necessarily irrational, but rather mustsomehow account for the fragmented limbs in its field of vision and assemblethem from different and conflicting points of view. Faced with the absence of agrounding origin, the monocularism of Enlightenment reason, the disembodiedCogito, or rational self-formed from the Cartesian mindbody dualism,converts to the believing, abocular or binocular subject. Derrida invokes a newvocabulary 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 offaith as the picturing of the world.

Vous croyez . . . ?

If art thinks, then it also believes, arguesDerrida.Memoirs begins, after an epigraphfrom Diderot, in the middle of a dialogue between a philosopher and interviewer,implicitly male and female, respectively.18 At the ostensible conclusion of theprinted text, which ends in an ellipsis, we find that the conversation continueswith the quotation by Diderot. In the French version, the text resumes with thequotation followed by another ellipsis, giving the conversation a circular, ormore precisely, elliptical structure, which is meant to foil the dialectical,rational, and linear structure of the philosophical dialogue.

I write without seeing. I came. I wanted to kiss your hand . . . This is the rst time I haveever written in the dark . . . not knowing whether I am indeed forming letters. Whereverthere will be nothing, read that I love you. Diderot, Letter to Sophie Volland, June 10,1759 (. . .)19

If we connect the dots by joining the ellipses, Diderots epigraph could, on the onehand, appear to fall outside the circuitous structure, as its complement. On theother hand, as Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (the translators of Memoirsof the Blind) ask, Doesnt the rest of the book draw this epigraph into it, so tospeak, so that the book is a sort of circle or ring or, as one says in French, analliance?20 Alliance evokes the religious, specifically covenantal aspects offaith, 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, anddrawing upon its pre-Cartesian and pre-Socratic positions:

- Do you believe this [vous croyez]? Youll observe from the very beginning of thisinterview Ive had problems following you. I remain sceptical . . .

- But scepticism is precisely what Ive been talking to you about: the differencebetween believing and seeing, between believing one sees [coire voir] andseeing between, catching a glimpse [entrevoir] or not. Before doubt everbecomes a system, skepsis has to do with the eyes. The word refers to a visualperception. . . . The judgment depends on the hypothesis. So as not to forgetthem along the way, so that everything be made clear, let me summarize:there would be two hypotheses.

- You seem to fear themonocular vision of things.Why not a single point of view?Why two hypotheses?

- The twowill cross paths, but without ever confirming each other, without theleast bit of certainty, in a conjecture that is at once singular and general, thehypothesis of sight, and nothing less.21

18. The video connected to the exhibition featuresan off-screen, skeptical female voicewho questionsDerrida. See Jean-Paul Fargier (dir.), JacquesDerrida memoires daveugle (Bibliothe`que publiquedinformation Centre Pompidou ed., 2009);Newman, Derrida and the Scene of Drawing,pp. 21920.

19. Derrida, Memoirs, p. 1. Memoires, p. 9.

20. Michael Naas, Taking on the Tradition: JacquesDerrida and the Legacies of Deconstruction (Stanford:Stanford University Press, 2003), p. 120. Apictorial analogy here is the manner in whichCaravaggios frames extend to envelop elementsthat fall outside.

21. Derrida, Memoirs, pp. 12.



The statement The judgment depends on the hypothesis could also be rendered thejudgment suspends or defers the hypothesis.22 We must talk around the suspendedor deferred object, even aswe depend on it. To think of this dependence of judgmentas suspension and deferral makes explicit the relationship between scepticalepistemology (the suspension of absolute judgments) and Derridas deconstructionin the context of faith and its object.

The translators note that a reading ofMemoirs of the Blind depends on the elideddirect object (i.e. this) of its first and penultimate lines Do you believe [vouscroyez]? Much like Paul thrown on his back, whether or not you see this poses adouble hypothesis, a double vision in a sceptical mode. While the texts orobjects in which Derrida locates his discussion are the drawings and paintingsincluded in the Parti Pris exhibition, two of the subtexts or absent objects of hisdiscussion that is, the this of the text in the catalogue are drawn from earlymodern discourses: one thesis, then, views fideistic scepticism as opposed toCartesian rationalism, and the other, their pictorial analogues anamorphosisas the logical undoing of Albertian perspective (as later appropriated as a modelof Cartesian thought). These two discourses enact the tensions at work inMemoirs of the Blind. Linear perspective, often taken as a figure for disembodiedrationalism, reveals its own representational failures when taken to its logicalextreme, that is, anamorphosis, which in turn is predicated on that verytechnique and which posits a suspension of judgment. Similarly, Derridadismantles the claims of reason even as he reincorporates reason into the verystructure of faithful self-reflection.

John Caputo has argued for reading Derrida as religious deconstructivelyunconventional, sans religion as it were, but religious nonetheless. Claiming tohave been read less and less well over almost twenty years, like my religionabout which nobody understands anything, Derrida reports that the constancyof God in my life is called by other names, so that I quite rightly pass for anatheist.23 This initially baffling confession of religion prompts Caputo toreconstruct a Derridean religion from his texts, starting with the increasinglyreligiously oriented works of the late 1980s. Oft-analysed affinities betweendeconstruction and negative theology are ultimately superficial, Caputodemonstrates. Instead, Derridas desire for the impossible is messianic andprophetic, theology being too systematic to withstand the interruptive force ofGod or the (W)hol(l)y Other (tout autre). Deconstruction, Caputo states,repeats the movements of faith, of expecting what we cannot know but onlybelieve . . . of the blindness of faith . . . in the impossible, but without thedogmas of the positive religious faiths.24 Caputos compelling argumentoverlooks, however, the ways in which Derridas religion, while perhaps suigeneris, repeats the non-dogmatic early modern sceptical discourses and theircontemporary pictorial analogues discourses that Memoirs of the Blind reliesupon elliptically as it articulates these movements of faith in pictorial terms.I view fideism and linear perspective as Derridas subtexts, then, not becausethey are hard to identify or that one would be surprised to find them there, butbecause while these discourses are only elliptically present, recognising what avery patient reader like Derrida is reading is crucial in our own reading of histexts. Contrary to expectations, or maybe entirely consonant with them,fideism is never explicitly mentioned in Memoirs of the Blind, and linearperspective, as such, only briefly (and only if we count the term aperspectiveand a discussion of the prefix per- which implies perspective without namingit).25 Another way to posit my thesis is that in Memoirs of the Blind Derridaaddresses the question of faith and the absence of the direct object of faith byeliding two discourses: early modern scepticism and its visual counterparts in

22. Newman, Derrida and the Scene ofDrawing, p. 220.

23. Bennington and Derrida, Jacques Derrida,pp. 15455n.

24. See Caputo, Prayers and Tears, pp. xviixxi.

25. Derrida, Memoirs, p. 39, 53. Derrida doesexplicitly announce that the point of view will bemy theme, Memoirs, p. 2.


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perspectival practice. This elliptical movementmirrors the problem that gives riseto it, namely the relationship between faith and the object of faith, the relationshipbetween belief and the absence or disappearance of a direct object.26 Such arelationship 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

Themost employed term inMemoirs 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 Ithas 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 thetrace, differance, pharmakon, and other deconstructive terms. The argument inMemoirs 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 ofMemoirs of the Blind shares the same self-eclipsing logic of retrait which itattributes to drawing. Like the graphic trait which never presents itself as such but which,by its power of reference, haunts drawing as its condition of possibility, Derridas text isallusive and elliptical throughout ... the logic that dictates the recurrence of [Memoirs]themes is infuriatingly elusive.29

The logic is allusive, I would agree, but that is part of the point, infuriating or not.Let me attempt to trace out the elusive logic of Memoirs of the Blind.30

Derridas hypothesis of sight includes the crossing of two further hypothesesthat 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 thata drawing of the blind is a drawing of the blind, that is, representations of thetheme of blindness reflect the blindness of the draughtsman.31 Some of this iscounter-intuitive. Derrida calls the first type of blindness transcendental theinvisible condition of the possibility of drawing, drawing itself, the drawing ofdrawing.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, theartist must turn from the object to the paper and work from memory. The objectthen 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 upthe horizon, traits through which, between which, you can observe without beingseen.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 invisiblecomplement 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 ishim or herself?35

The discussion of the transcendental logic of the invisible leads to thesecond logic, the narrative or spectacle of representation of the blind, whatDerrida terms the sacrificial logic of the invisible, the representation of theunrepresentable. Sacrificial refers to the economic operation in whichblindness is exchanged for a different form of sight and this sacrifice alwaysimplies some sort of violence (the violence of ruse or deception, the violenceof punishment, the violence of conversion and of martyrdom, the blindnessthat comes from wounded eyes or from bedazzlement).36 These theses will

26. Naas, Taking on the Tradition, p. 118.

27. Heb. 11.1 NRSV.


29. Maria Scott, Textual Trompe-loeil in JacquesDerridas Memoirs of the Blind, in Martin Heusseuand others (eds), On Verbal/Visual Representation:Word & Image Interactions 4 (Amsterdam: Rodopi,2005), p. 246.

30. For an insightful summary and analysis ofMemoirs of the Blind, see Caputo, The Prayers andTears, pp. 30829.



33. Derrida, Memoirs, p. 55. Scott glosses thatNot only does the trait permit vision, it also exertsa fascination which threatens distinct, coherentvision, as implied by the comparisons of the acts ofviewing and drawing to an act of voyeurism, Scott,Textual Trompe-loeil, p. 241.


35. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears, p. 320.




later converge in the catalogue on scenes ofwounds, blindness, and conversion thatexemplify the second logic, just as Caravaggios Paul receiving revelation alsoexemplifies this sacrificial blindness.

The Vanishing Point

In order to illustrate the first or transcendental logic of blindness, that drawing isblind, Id like to discuss a famous image that Memoirs of the Blind could haveincluded, as a second breaking of the law: Durers Draughtsman Drawing aRecumbent Woman (Fig. 2). This representation of the act of representationdramatises the gendered epistemology of the dialogue/dialectical philosophicalmode upon which Memoirs plays and demonstrates the logics of blindnessput forth in Derridas double hypothesis. Read straightforwardly, this woodcutillustrates one of the several perspectival techniques from Durers PaintersManual.37 The artist peers through a frame crossed by a grid that correspondsto a paper grid on which he can draw the figure in front of him, which is,instead of the lute depicted in several other representations of technicalproficiency in perspective, a reclining woman.38 His point of view is fixed bythe obelisk-like tool, guaranteeing the accuracy of the coordinates he transfersfrom the frame, a sort of window on the world. His attitude is dispassionateand his position objective, despite the fact that the woman is nearly nude andextended seductively before him. But the operations of perspective deconstructthe rationalist aims that are often imputed to it. Evidently, perspectiva artificialisdiffers from perspectiva naturalis (or optics): it assumes a fixed, single viewpointinstead of our binocular and constantly moving eyes, and the image projectsonto a flat surface as opposed to a concave retina.39 Read closely, this woodcutenacts the representational failure of perspective, as well as, proleptically, theepistemological failure of Enlightenment reason.40 First, the draughtsman isblind in the way we have seen that all artists are blind, in that his gaze mustleave the object to trace the figure on the paper. There is still a gap between thepicture plane and the surface of the paper, requiring memory to recall theimage. In trying to render nature or truth, of which this almost naked womanis a symbol, the artist is frustrated. The disembodied mind or eye of Cartesianrationalism, as the vantage point is often taken to be, confronts embodied

Fig. 2. Durer. Draughtsman Drawing a Recumbent Woman, c. 1600, woodcut, 7.7 21.4 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. (# The MetropolitanMuseum of Art, Image Source: Art Resource, NY.)

37. See Albrecht Durer, The Painters Manual: AManual of Measurement of Lines, Areas, and Solids byMeans of Compass and Ruler Assembled by Albrecht Durerfor the Use of All Lovers of Art with AppropriateIllustrations Arranged to be Printed in the Year MDXXV,trans. by Walter L. Strauss (New York: Abaris,1977).

38. The erotic connotations of musicalinstruments are an early modern commonplace.

39. Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form,trans. by Christopher S. Wood (New York: ZoneBooks, 1991), pp. 2931.

40. See Svetlana Alpers, Art History and itsExclusions: The Example of Dutch Art, in NormaBroude andMaryD.Garrard (eds), Feminism and ArtHistory: Questioning the Litany (New York: Harper &Row, 1982), pp. 1857; See also Ulrike Stutz,Beteiligte BlickeAsthetische Annaherungen inqualitativen empirischen Untersuchungen, inWinfried Marotzki and Horst Niesyto(eds), Bildinterpretation und Bildverstehen:Methodische Ansatze aus sozialwissenschaftlicher, kunst und medienpadagogischer Perspektive (Berlin:Springer, 2006), p. 144; Margaret Iversen andStephen Melville, Writing Art History: DisciplinaryDepartures (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,2010), pp. 10910.


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reality Embodied truth becomes phenomenal and the female figure crowds theframe, exceeding its boundaries and leaving the viewer with traces of the ideal.

Moreover, if we reconstruct the visual pyramid extending from thephallogocentric fixed point to the body of the woman, the centric ray wouldappear to transverse her body near her genitalia, about where her left handtouches her thigh. It is difficult to know this with certainty, since the centricray from our point of view, perpendicular to the plane of the woodcut, is rightof centre of the gridded window, and therefore not perpendicular to the table.This only furthers the point, however, since the embodied state of the viewer,just eye-balling the woodcut, so to speak, obviously prevents entry into thepurely geometrical realm of the perspectival scheme in order to establish thevanishing point corresponding to the draftsmans point of view.

While thepresence and immediacyof thebody in the image ostensibly present theunobscured truth of the matter to the viewer, the woodcut discloses the fact ofstructural blindness. That is, knowledge of the other, the originary secret,remains cut off from view, foregrounding an alternative method of knowing, theabocular sense of touch, which falls outside the limits of empirical rationalism.We see that the vanishing point, the origin of perspectival representation, isperhaps veiled by cloth if not completely obscured by the models leg hardlythe intended object of the draughtsmans monocular gaze. The vanishing point the infinite, the transcendental, truth as such retreats from his view, andthe draftsmans failure to appropriate, to know, is testified by the absence ofany marks (traits) on his page.41 Knowledge of the woman, the woodcutindicates, requires not just mental and optical engagement, but a corporealcommitment, a fidelity to a relationship to the other that will always exceedcoldly analytical attempts to comprehend its totality.

Venetian Blindness

Memoirs of the Blind constantly questions the privileged status of the viewer, equatedwith the thinking subject who, within the perspectival system, stands outside thecontingencies of space. Svetlana Alpers offers Durers Draughtsman as an exampleof a commanding, Albertian mode of representation, wherein the artist orviewer is prior to the world, as opposed to the northern mode in which theworld prior to us [is] made visible.42 She gives a further illustration of the first,or Albertian, mode in Titians Venus of Urbino,43 the naked female body in thefield of vision in both of these examples ostensibly offered to the viewer/artistas subordinate nature to male control.44 This commanding mode draws uponthe problematic Albertian window metaphor, with the isomorphism of theAlbertian window and the Cartesian plane facilitating the association of linearperspective with Enlightenment rationalism. Artificial perspective seems torationalise space, with all figures in the plane coherently relating to each otherin reference to the vanishing point. Thus, the analogy of the vanishing point as aprecursor to Descartess cogito as a philosophical ground has been widelyassumed and unchallenged until relatively recently, notably by Lyle Massey.45

Panofsky has been quite influential in making this association, assuming a sharedconception of space between pre-Cartesians and post-Cartesians.46 As Masseyhas demonstrated, however, both of these assumptions are problematic becauseof the embodied position of the viewer, something from which even Descartessdiscourse never truly thought its way out. Moreover, taking perspective to itslogical extreme, the process of anamorphosis demonstrates the distortingeffects inherent in perspective. With two irreconcilable viewpoints, or foci, orat least one extremely oblique point of view, anamorphosis exposes the vantage

41. Or as Gian Casper Bott notes, no ink flowsfrom his quill. Der Klang Im Bild: Evaristo Baschenisund die Erfindung des Musikstillebens (Berlin: D.Reimer, 1997), p. 101.

42. Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Artin the Seventeenth Century (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1983), p. 70.

43. Svetlana Alpers, Interpretation withoutRepresentation, or, the Viewing of Las Meninas,Representations, vol. 1, February 1983, pp. 367.

44. Of course, the picture is not a passive object.See Maria H. Loh, Titian Remade: Repetition and theTransformation of Early Modern Italian Art (LosAngeles: Getty Research Institute, 2007), p. 33.Also, Mary D. Garrard, Brunelleschis Egg: Nature,Art, and Gender in Renaissance Italy (Berkeley:University of California Press, 2010), pp. 215ff.

45. See Lyle Massey, Anamorphosis throughDescartes or Perspective Gone Awry, RenaissanceQuarterly, vol. 50, no. 4, 1997, and Picturing Space,Displacing Bodies: Anamorphosis in Early ModernTheories of Perspective (University Park, PA:Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007).

46. Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form, p. 66; seeNorman Bryson, Vision and Painting: The Logic of theGaze (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983),p. 107, for an opposing view.



point as contingent on the body: In effect, anamorphosis shows that there is aconflict between being and appearing, between phenomenal space andgeometric space.47 This is precisely the argument assayed by Derrida inMemoirs of the Blind, which demonstrates how blindness, or abocularity, is alsothe distorted, or contingent vision proper to human experience.

Indisputably, the association of linear perspective with the cogito is anachronisticfor the Renaissance Descartes being sui generis but what Durers Draughtsmanshows is that the pretence of rationalisation formed an integral part of thedevelopment of perspectival techniques. That is, whatever its conception of space,Renaissance linear perspective did aspire to render objects truthfully in referenceto the artist/viewer in an epistemologically commanding position, with thevanishing point (or corresponding vantage point) functioning as a stable point ofreference. The further ramification is, precisely, that such pretences and systems proto-Cartesian, non-Cartesian, genuinely Cartesian founder on their ownlogic and make recourse, or at least appeal, to a point outside the system. Eventhough Derridas discussion of perspective in Memoirs of the Blind repeats themetaphysical assumptions about linear perspective, it does so in order to make asimilar argument as Masseys rethinking of the identification of perspective andCartesian rationalism. In other words, the viewing subject cannot escape the logicof 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 inDerridas discussion of the trait:

For the same reason, the trait is not sensible, as a patch of color would be. Neitherintelligible nor sensible . . . For if we left the Platonic cave a while back, it was not in ordernally to see the eidos of the thing itself after a conversion, anabasis, or anamnesis. Weleft the cave behind because the Platonic speleology misses, is unable to take intoaccount if not to see, the inappearance of a trait that is neither sensible nor intelligible. Itmisses the trait precisely because it believes that it sees it or lets it be seen. The lucidity ofthis speleology carries within it another blind man, not the cave dweller, the blind mandeep down, but the one who closes his eyes to this blindnessright here.48

Derrida responds to the rationalist tradition by illustrating its inability to see its ownblindness, to notewhat is truly invisible. As Derridas text indicates, he is speakinghere of graphic and not color blindness, of drawing and not painting.49 One isreminded of the seventeenth-century definition of linea as lunghezza senzalarghezza [length without width].50 Rather than the Form of the intelligiblerealm, accessible through dialectic reason, the trait is the generative ellipse, thedifference that cannot be perceived between the forms of objects in the sensibleworld. The Platonic opposition between the sensible and the intelligible, asconnected here to linear perspective, recalls the early modern debate over disegnoand colore. Serving to render objects in the picture plane in a coherent relationshipto each other and the viewer, the system of orthogonal lines, transversals,horizon, and vanishing point of Albertian perspective are theoretically invisiblesince they form the substratum, part of the disegno, the sketch or overall design ofa 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, seeingthrough). In the introduction to A Derrida Reader, Peggy Kamuf connects thepartially obstructed view of the jalousie (that is, the slats of a venetian blind) tothe various and partial selections of Derridas corpus that constitute thecollection. The introduction is not exactly a dialogue that explores the richness

47. Massey, Picturing Space, p. 66.


49. Derrida, Memoirs, p. 55

50. Vocabolario degli Accademici della Crusca,(1612), s.v. linea.

51. On the structural invisibility of perspective,see Grootenboer, The Rhetoric of Perspective.



Matthew Ancell

of the image of the jalousie (and notion of the jealousy of the monotheistic God) as adifferential term.53 God enters the picture at this point in that, when speaking of thetrait, Derrida asks if it is

by chance that in order to speak of the trait we are falling back upon the language ofnegative theology or of those discourses concerned with naming the withdrawal [retrait] ofthe invisible or hidden god? . . . It is theological through and through, to the point,sometimes included, sometimes excluded, where the self-eclipsing trait cannot even bespoken about, cannot even say itself in the present, since it is not gathered, since it doesnot gather itself, into any present, I am who I am (a formula whose original grammaticalform, 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 fromwhich meaning emanates but is always in retreat from comprehension. Thus, ourinteractions with Deity are with the phenomena, expressions, representations,signs that decline from it in the divine grammar. As Brian Rotman observes, thevanishing point has a dual semiotic character, since within the scene in thepicture plane it signifies a specific location, but one that, as it is infinitely distant,is unoccupiable. In its external position, the vanishing point organises othersigns in a meta-linguistic relation. Meaning, then, is inseparable from theprocess of depiction itself.55 The trait and vanishing point are generative, but notpresent.

As is typical of his style, Derrida is speaking from inside the discourse, pointingtoward an exterior of the structure that cannot be named but inhabits a positionBefore [avant] all the blind spots that, literally or figuratively, organize thescopic 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, toennoble an infirmity or an impotence.57

Would you not claim in your jealous, even envious passion, in our wounded impotence, tobe more faithful to the trait, to the trait in its most rened end or nality? As for the greatdraftsmanto follow your suggestiondoes he not also try in vain, up to the point ofexhausting a ductus or stylus, to capture this withdrawal [retrait] of the trait, to remark it,to sign it nallyin an endless scarication.58

Sight and blindness are bound together. Recognising the impotence of reason, itsinability to penetrate beyond the lines of logical representation, beyond artifice,Derrida confesses the valorisation of blindness as a structural feature of drawingand therefore of all representation. To be sure, Derrida is not an irrationalist, oreven anti-Enlightenment, yet his project questions the certainties and axiomsof Enlightenment in order to think them better.59 As Nietzsche pronounced,the Enlightenments greatest casualty is faith, or at least the object of faith. Theobject of faith is, here, the missing object, the unseen subject, the subjectile orsubjectum of Memoirs of the Blind, which illustrates the blind impotence of reasonsevered from the blindness of faith.60

Louvre ou` ne pas voir

As opposed to Durers careful draughtsman and his logical perspectival system,Caravaggio looks and paints. This is not to say that Caravaggio does not evertake advantage of drawings or marks in his work, but that his process allowsfor, if not encourages, the errors inherent in sensory perception to creep in.61

The glaring discrepancies between representation and what we should expect to

53. See Peggy Kamuf, Reading Between theBlinds, in Peggy Kamuf (ed.), A Derrida Reader:Between the Blinds (New York: Columbia UniversityPress, 1991), pp. xiiixlii.


55. BrianRotman, SignifyingNothing: The Semioticsof Zero (New York: St Martins Press, 1987), p. 19.




59. This ismentioned in: JacquesDerrida, Points ...: Interviews, 19741994. Elisabeth Weber (ed.),trans. Peggy Kamuf and others (Stanford: StanfordUniversity Press, 1995), p. 428.

60. One might wonder if Derrida is not callingNietzsches bluff regarding faith. See the conclusionof Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. byDavidWills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,1995).

61. On Caravaggios underdrawings, see RobertoBellucci and others, Finding CaravaggiosPreparatory Drawings, in Claudio Strinati (ed.),Caravaggio (Milan: Skira, 2010), pp. 2345.



see in both artificial and natural perspective dramatise distortions that occur inDerridas self-portrait or revelation of the self. Two of the distortions I have inmind for this claim (in addition to those we have seen in the Conversion, but thatare not in the exhibition) are the following. In the Calling of St. Matthew (15991600), Christs legs are awkwardly turned in the opposite direction of his torso.Consider also the impossible angle of Christs (apparently detached) hand in thePotsdam Incredulity of Saint Thomas (c. 1602), which allows for a natural graspas he guides the disciples touch and, significantly, a clear view of the stigma.62

This bodily fragmentation leads Fried to conclude that Caravaggio was neversimplyperhaps not even primarilyan optical realist . . . in Paul Valerysphrase, as cited by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, he always took his body withhim.63 Knowing the only object that we can know, the self (inasmuch as it isknowable), takes place in an act of self-representation that cannot depend onstrictly rational procedure, as figured by the perspectival sketch. As Itay Sapirhas observed, Caravaggios tenebrism substitutes precisely for the now-inexistent perspectival structure.64 This substitution buries the vanishing point,the infinite, into the space of darkness and incertitude. Consequently, allknowing is provisional, embodied, and phenomenal.

With this in mind, and breaking with the law of the exhibition again, let usexamine the Incredulity of Saint Thomas (Fig. 3) in more detail, as it serves along

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

62. On Caravaggios distortions, see Alfred Moir,Le sviste di Caravaggio, inMaurizio Calvesi (ed.),LUltimo Caravaggio e la cultura artistica a Napoli inSicilia e a Malta (Siracusa: Ediprint, 1987), p. 13945.

63. Fried, The Moment of Caravaggio, p. 134. For aninsightful discussion of the fragmented body andviolation of pictorial norms inCaravaggio, see ToddP. Olson, Pitiful Relics: Caravaggios Martyrdom ofSt. Matthew, Representations, vol. 77, no. 1, 2002,pp. 10742.

64. Itay Sapir, The Visible, the Invisible, and theKnowable: Modernity as an Obscure Tale, in SilkeHorstkotte and Karin Leonhard (eds), SeeingPerception (New Castle: Cambridge ScholarsPublishing, 2007), p. 203. Sapir productivelyplaces Caravaggio alongside Montaigne asdeconstructors of Renaissance humanistconceptions of knowledge, representation, andperception, p. 210. See also Sapirs Tene`bres sanslecons: esthetique et epistemologie de la peinturetenebriste romaine, 15951610 (Bern: Peter LangAG, 2012).


Matthew Ancell

with the Conversion as an emblem of the entire argument ofMemoirs of the Blind. Thepainting sets upwhat is at stake in the logics of blindness. That is, empirical vision andknowledge are set in relief to blindness, revelation, and conversion. In perspectivaland epistemological terms, the disembodied rational viewpoint must concede itsinsufficiency and enter into an embodied and relational position to know theother. In the painting, in this moment of conversion, incarnate divinity is thrustinto the foreground, almost into our space, the embodied realm, in visceraldetail. Several critics give the paintings portrayal of sight an empirical reading,emphasising that Thomas stares into the wound.65 John Spike concludes thatThomas peering unblinkingly into the slashed flesh is the image of an empiricalscientist who will not be satisfied with second-hand information. The theoryunder examination was the physical resurrection of the Lord.66 But, to describeThomas as an empirical scientist misses the point, just as Thomass gaze missesthe wound entirely. Lorenzo Pericolos recent analysis of the Postdam paintingsupports an abocular, non-linear, and anamorphic reading. He observes thatChrist and Thomas occupy different planes and, therefore, the apostles stare isnot toward the wound67 Thomass demand for ocular proof is thwarted. Not evengazing at the surface of the wound at this point, Thomas is blind. Here it isimportant to remember the distinction between Renaissance scepticism and whatwould become the colloquial sense of scepticism later on, as I noted Derrida usesthe term (knowingly) at the beginning of Memoirs of the Blind. Thomassscepticism, while perhaps initially of the sort of disbelief, converts into a scepticalfideism, an epistemological position that acknowledges the impossibility ofabsolute knowledge but that depends on the assurance of an experientialrelationship with the object to be known. The scientific detail that fascinatesmany critics, has occluded Thomas condition of blindness, or abocularity.Pericolo argues that perceptually the beholder reroutes Thomas gaze towardJesus side to compensate for Caravaggios intentional misalignment of the twofigures.68 The rational impulses of the viewer reconstruct a perspectival pyramidthat connects Thomass eye to the wound.

Moreover, if the vanishing point fromThomass viewpoint is supposed to be thewound which perspectiva naturaliswould dictate if he were staring into it thenCaravaggio presents uswith another disruption of the perspectival system.69 In theabsence of perspective, the viewer is inevitably drawn to thewound, which elicitsvisceral reactions. ContraHowardHibbards classicizing composition of the fourheads in a concentrated diamond that reassures him against the unbearablerealistic detail by counterbalancing the shocking wound, Mieke Bal argues thatthe centripetal pointer of the wound is emphasised and sucks us in.70 Theincoherent nexus of hands intensifies these transgressions of perspectival law,and foregrounds the philosophical implication that our pictures of the world aresubject to perceptual and rational error. We stare at the mark, the organisingprinciple of the composition, the substitute vanishing point, blind to whatmight lie beyond. For Nicola Suthor, the viewers gaze both penetrates but isalso disturbed [or hurt, shocked].71 There is a doubling of viewpoints, oursand Thomass, and both go astray or are blind.

But that is not to say that this is not a scene of sight andknowledge, for asThomasgropes, he is guided by Jesus touch. Pericolo notes that, in a sense, Thomas seesthrough his finger.72 Once again, drawing upon Diderot, Derrida observes thepossibility 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 ifYahwehs design were mapped out on the surface of their skin, as if it had, to use anexpression of Diderots, traced the portrait on the hand. Diderots Letter on the Blind for

65. Fried, The Moment of Caravaggio, 84; CatherineR. Puglisi, Caravaggio (London: Phaidon Press,1998), p. 216; Marianne Koos, Kunst undBeruhrung. Materialitat versus Imagination inCaravaggios Gemalde des "UnglaubigenThomas", in Johann Anselm Steiger and others(eds), Passion, Affekt und Leidenschaft in der FruhenNeuzeit, vol. 2 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag,2005), p. 1141.

66. John T. Spike, Caravaggio (New York:Abbeville Press, 2001), p. 213. Spike also discussesthe philosophical dimension of the experience bynoting the influence of Sextus Empiricus (theprimary source of Pyrrhonian scepticism forMontaigne and others) in Rome through theadvocacy of Francisco Patrizi.

67. Pericolo, Caravaggio and Pictorial Narrative,p. 459.

68. Pericolo, Caravaggio, p. 459.

69. Malvasia quotes Lodovio Carracci expressinghis disappointment in this painting because it wastoo obedient to nature, lacked decorum, was oflittle grace and intelligence, andwas clearly ruinousto good design, Walter Friedlaender, CaravaggioStudies (Princeton: Princeton University Press,1974), p. 161.

70. Howard Hibbard, Caravaggio (New York:Harper & Row, 1983), pp. 1678; Bal, QuotingCaravaggio, p. 32.

71. Nicola Suthor, Bad touch? ZumKorpereinsatz in Michelangelo/Pontormos Nolime tangere und Caravaggios UnglaubigemThomas, in ValeskavonRosen,KlausKruger, andRudolf Preimesberger (eds.), Der Stumme Diskursder Bilder (Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2003),p. 271.

72. Pericolo, Caravaggio and Pictorial Narrative,p. 460.



the Use of Those Who See describes in two places this vision by the skin. Not only canone see by the skin, but the epidermis of the hands would be like a canvas stretchedtaut for drawing or painting: . . . [quoting the letter] Thus the blind have likewise a painting,in which their own skin serves as canvas.73

Thomas misses the mark visually, even as the canvas of Christs body is revealed tohim. Christs body is scened as a painting, his shroud a curtain that reveals thepicture.74 The scene is doubled, though, as the traits of the stigmata areinscribed, in a sense, on Thomas in his conversion, his epistrophe or turning toChrist. He recognises Deitys design which is transferred to him, the small tearin his robe establishing a compositional and bodily correspondence betweenChrist and himself. Paul, after his own conversion, would declare I carry themarks of Jesus branded on my body.75 Humanity draws upon Christs bodilycanvas and he in turn inscribes a new law on the inner parts of believers,obviating but not erasing the mark of circumcision. Paul and Thomas findthemselves both inside and outside the Law (figured in Memoirs as linearperspective, disegno, and the law of the exhibition).

Thomass tactile knowledge follows Ann Hartles characterisation of Michel deMontaigne in which he transcends both simple credulity and learnedpresumption, and that, in philosophical terms, would be called learnedignorance.76 As Richard Popkin has observed, it is the sceptic, and not thedogmatist, who is in a position to receive revelation.77 In the moment of desiredrational confirmation, figured by sight, Thomas is blind, simultaneously touchinghis own hip as if to verify the experience. As Fried observes, only the viewer seesthe naked haunch of the newly resurrected Christ.78 Again, nudity is occludedfrom the view of the depicted observer, as in Durers Draughtsman, but nowChrist opens up his shroud and wound to be experienced (if not seen) by thedisciple, who now knows God and exclaims his recognition, according to theJohannine 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 sensewe most rely upon for knowledge fails. The intimacy is not figured as eroticismstrictly speaking, but it is a moment of love that gives knowledge to thebeliever-doubter of an order that eludes the dispassionate draughtsman. Thomasoccupies the unoccupiable vanishing point but in an asymmetrical relationship inthat the viewpoint does not correspond to it. And it is a relationship, the impliedcovenant of belief, that makes it possible. The order of knowledge acquired,though, is precisely not an acquisition, but a renewal of a relationship and apromise of return, of what Derrida calls the avenir or the to come. This is not amoment, 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 himselfof his salvation, corporeal and spiritual, through a new covenant or alliance. AsDerrida explains:

the thanksgiving grace [grace] of the trait suggests that at the origin of the graphein thereis a debt or gift rather than representational delity. More precisely, the delity of faithmatters more than the representation, whose movement this delity commands and thusprecedes. And faith, in the moment proper to it, is blind. It sacrices sight, even if it doesso with an eye to seeing at last.80

What one really believes always remains hidden from others, if not to theindividual as well. But, in Memoirs of the Blind, Derrida seems to go beyondmere ventriloquism of religious discourse, as could be claimed, and emulatesMontaignes integration of scepticism into the faith which transcends it.81

73. Derrida, Memoirs, pp. 1001.

74. Koos, Kunst und Beruhrung, p. 1146.

75. Gal. 6.17 NRSV.

76. Ann Hartle, Montaigne and Skepticism, inUllrich Langer (ed.), The Cambridge Companion toMontaigne (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 2005), p. 204.

77. Richard H. Popkin, The History of Scepticism:From Savonarola to Bayle (Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 2003), p. 51.

78. Fried, The Moment of Caravaggio, p. 85.

79. John 20.28 NRSV.


81. Hartle, Montaigne and Skepticism, p. 204.


Matthew Ancell

Faith becomes the supplement to reason, pointing towards an invisiblecomplement that lies in a position outside the system, as opposed to being partof the chain of reason; it makes possible the movement of reason, which mustproceed from that act or moment of belief, just as the self-portrait is onlyguaranteed, as such, by belief in the supplementary inscription of its title.

I have only been able to trace out the problem here, the interrelationshipbetween reason and faith, but I end with the question of what to make ofDerridas religion? What does it mean for him to believe? Memoirs of the Blind,this abocular rejoinder to the monocular Circumfession, this self-portrait of aJewish post-modern Paul-Augustine-Montaigne-Thomas, is a response to thepolyvalent question, Vous croyez? (Do you believe? Can you believe it? Doyou believe this? Do you think?). The response to do you think? convertscogito into credo. But the this, the object of belief, is absent, necessitatingfaith. Derridas alliance with the religion of his mother is broken, but what doesit mean for him to cry tears of belief, that which is proper to the eyes, thatwhich blinds them?82 Memoirs of the Blind follows the structure of faith.83 Thisstructure of the double hypothesis, as I have explored it pictorially, is intent onopening up the possibilities that lie beyond the horizon of reason and the limitsof scepticism, in its modern sense of religious doubt as opposed to the fideisticscepticism of the early modern period. The sexual difference in the dialogue ofMemoirs of the Blind culminates in the relationship between the masculine sightof reason and the feminine tears of faith, repeating the movement betweenlinear perspective and anamorphosis. The poem Eyes and Tears by AndrewMarvell, on the last page of Derridas 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 dont 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 parallelsDerridas autobiographical self-portrait in Memoirs.87 If it were possible, theportrait he paints of the self would be wholly naked, the truth, so to speak, ofthe self. In the spirit and even style of Montaignes Essays, Memoirs of the Blind is acompanion piece to the autobiographical Circumfession, a religious confession thatreveals a conversion of sorts and displays Derridas circumcision in dialoguewith Geoffrey Benningtons biography Jacques Derrida.88 Both texts adopt aposition similar to the Essays as Derrida fills in the lines of his self-portrait andmounts a critique of Enlightenment thought as monocular or perspectival.Benningtons side of the conversation, entitled Derridabase, consists of a logicallysystematic exposition of Derridas philosophy without any direct quotation. Cutoff from Benningtons remarkably lucid synthesis by a horizontal dotted line,Derridas text, Circumfession, seeks to undercut the coherence of Derridabase withan account that is highly biographical, contextually specific, and explicitly frank inits bodily detail. Rather than an integral ego, the self-portrait Derrida presents isa fragmentary being, or a monster, of sorts, but not what he calls a double-focuswith-without monocular vision.89 This enigmatic formulation provides aninterpretative key for Memoirs of the Blind, and also marks an important momentin Derridas career in that, apart from The Truth in Painting, originally published in


83. Caputo, Prayers and Tears, p. xxi.

84. See Gary Kuchar, Andrew MarvellsAnamorphic Tears, Studies in Philology, vol. 103,no. 3, Summer 2006, pp. 34581.



87. Montaigne, Essays, p. 2.

88. Bennington and Derrida, Jacques Derrida.

89. Bennington and Derrida, Jacques Derrida,p. 169.



1978, it is hismost sustained treatment of visual art. Itwould be followed byThe Giftof Death, signalling a turn to religion in hiswriting thatwould confoundmany critics.This turn deserves renewed scholarly attention because it inaugurated the final phaseof Derridas philosophical project. The monocular portrait of the subject ofCircumfession, then, becomes a self-portrait of the blind man of faith in Memoirs, afigure reminiscent of Montaigne, who argues that our vision of the world isdistorted and refracted by our fallible reason and bodily emotions.

In Of Giving the Lie, Montaigne describes the effect of self-portraiture:Painting myself for others, I have painted my inward self with colours clearerthan my original ones. I have no more made my book than my book has mademea book consubstantial with its author.90 The composition of the self (arepository of phenomena derived from the senses, memories, fantasies, andreason) is a continual process of revision, wherein the self is shaped by its ownfiguration. Here the inward self is painted (not drawn) in all its passions andimperfections with colours clearer than the original, as if Montaigne wereretreating from disegno, distorting for effect, his fidelity given to what he sees infront of him, not to an internal ideal image of the self.

Montaigne confesses, in Of Friendship: Andwhat are these things ofmine, intruth, but grotesques and monstrous bodies, pieced together of divers members,without definite shape, having no order, sequence, or proportion other thanaccidental?91 Montaignes Essays portray self-knowledge as natural knowledge,for inasmuch as the mind is inextricable from the body, our being expresses theexperience of the unstable world. Assaying experience, for Montaigne, is toparticipate in it and to represent it in a manner that enacts the epistemologicaland ontological problems that Descartes attempted to resolve. Ultimately, theself-portrait for both Derrida and Montaigne is a kind of anamorphosis inwhich the representation of the self is both commensurate and incommensuratewith 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. Derridaconflates these modes, but then exposes that their deconstruction (i.e. fideisticscepticism and anamorphosis) lies avant la lettre within the operations of theirown systems. Memoirs becomes a Derridean withdrawal into reflection andmemory, a self-portrait, an essay on the self, and a dialogue with a friend andfellow sceptic of dogmatic rationalism in Montaigne.

If we recall Caravaggios Conversion, with its fragmentary composition, invisiblecomplement, and corporeal emphasis, we can now see it as a self-portrait in theautobiographicalMemoirs of the Blind that remarks on the movement from drawingto painting, linear perspective to anamorphosis, blindness to revelation, law tolove, and thought to belief.

Too many friends and colleagues are to thank for help in writing this article to mentionhere, but I am especially grateful toMaria Loh, Hanneke Grootenboer, LauraHatch, and theanonymous reviewers for their feedback.




Matthew Ancell

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