Drawing in the dark: faith and knowledge in Jacques Derrida’s Memoirs of the Blind

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay focuses on Jacques Derrida’s Memoirs of the Blind, the catalog accompanying the exhibit of the same name that Derrida organized and curated at the Louvre Museum in Paris in 1990. The essay begins by considering Derrida’s seemingly surprising choice of themes, that is, darkness, blindness and invisibility, for an exhibit of drawings and paintings that belong to the so-called ‘visual arts’. The essay goes on to explain what Derrida calls in Memoirs of the Blind two intersecting logics in the visual arts, the ‘transcendental’ and the ‘sacrificial’, both of which are related in some way to blindness or invisibility. It then considers how these two logics come to intersect in Derrida’s own exhibit and in the autobiographical narrative – the memoir – of his exhibition, a narrative that, as we see, also proceeds from a certain blindness or lack of knowledge. The essay concludes by asking what Derrida’s analyses might teach us about the blindness at the very origin of the visual arts and, especially, about a certain ‘elementary faith’ – a notion taken from his 1996 essay ‘Faith and Knowledge’ – that is required in order to practice them.