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- Title
Credo Ergo Sum: Faith, Blindness, and Pictorial Logic in Derrida's Memoirs of the Blind.
- Authors
Ancell, Matthew
- Abstract
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. The catalogue is an autobiographical self-portrait that explores the theme of blindness through, mostly, drawings from the Louvre’s collection. The unnamed subtexts of his discussion in the catalogue are sceptical philosophy (Montaigne’s Pyrrhonism as opposed to Cartesian rationalism), and anamorphosis (as the logical undoing of Albertian perspective). This essay examines Derrida’s ‘double hypothesis’ and how these philosophical and artistic discourses operate within Derrida’s analysis of what Derrida calls ‘the thought of drawing, a certain pensive pose’. Memoirs demonstrates that drawing thinks through perspective, but this thought makes a movement to revelation and painting as an act of faith. The elliptical structure of the catalogue, a dialogue, suggests the broken law of Derrida’s Judaism and a movement to a personal position of faith figured as a kind of anamorphic fideism and supplement to monocular Enlightenment thought. What emerges is an autobiographical vision blinded by tears, a sacrifice of one type of sight for another. Derrida draws a complex outline of the structure of faith itself and what it means for figures who grapple with the epistemological ramifications of failures of representation and perception.
- Subjects
DERRIDA, Jacques, 1930-2004; BLIND people in art; ART theory; ART exhibitions; PERSPECTIVE (Art); ANAMORPHOSIS (Visual perception)
- Publication
Oxford Art Journal, 2014, Vol 37, Issue 2, p193
- ISSN
0142-6540
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1093/oxartj/kcu007