Sites of Sight: Derrida's Writings on the Spatial Arts

Abstract

Sites of Sight:Derrida's Writings on the Spatial Arts Brian O'Keeffe (bio) Review of Jacques Derrida, Thinking Out of Sight: Writings on the Arts of the Visible, edited by Ginette Michaud, Joana Masó, and Javier Bassas, with new translations by Laurent Milesi, Chicago U of Chicago P, 2021. xiv + 321 pp. On first looking into Thinking Out of Sight, a volume that assembles the English translations of a number of Derrida's texts and interviews focusing on the visual and performing arts, the reader is dazzled into a renewed admiration of the intellectual range of the deep-brow'd Derrida. For he discusses painting, drawing, photography, film, and video art with keen insight and considerable verve. Still, it's dazzlement and admiration tinged with the disobliging thought that Derrida probably found it all too easy to visit deconstruction upon those artworks, and, sure enough, we find Derrida evoking, in "The Ghost Dance" and "Cinema and Its Ghosts," the hauntological motifs we find in Specters of Marx. In "The 'Undersides' of Painting, Writing, and Drawing," we revisit the question of the subjectile he first addressed in his text on Artaud ("Maddening the Subjectile"), and the essay "To Save the Phenomena," a discussion partly devoted to Salvatore Puglia's work Ashbox, recalls portions of his book Cinders. But there's (almost) no sense in which Derrida is cruising here, or offering us "boilerplate" deconstruction, since, in each text, he is intensely respectful of the artwork's singularity—if deconstructive motifs emerge in Derrida's discussions, it's because each artwork seems to elicit those same motifs. There is therefore (almost) nothing routine about Derrida's thoughts in regard to these works. There is, on the contrary, a sense that Derrida had been provoked, compelled and summoned to react in a way that is singularly his (and, as he observes moreover, it's not just the artworks that compelled him, it's the interviewers and publishers who asked Derrida to respond in these ways). Nonetheless, consider the first text, an interview titled "The Spatial Arts," conducted by Peter Brunette and David Wills. They ask Derrida about his competence in the fields of the visual and performing arts. Last time we looked, Derrida was a philosopher, not an art theorist. So when [End Page 347] Derrida wrote (or was bidden to write) on drawing or painting, was he just indulging in a bit of intellectual dilettantism, taking a break from the hard graft of proper philosophy? Except that what I dared call "proper philosophy" has always held the high ground. Atop its lofty summit it regards other disciplines (literary studies, architecture studies, studies of the visual arts, etc.) as subordinate to philosophy, or else it dignifies these various intellectual endeavors only if they cleave their discourses, theoretical or critical, to the discourse of philosophy. Derrida intervenes precisely here, and clearly regards writing about the visual and performing arts as a way of checking the privilege of philosophy to hold that presumptive high ground. And while such interventions may be occasional or punctual—solicited by a given exhibition, required by an interviewer, or compelled by whatever artwork Derrida was actually looking at—the import of those interventions is general. What is general is Derrida's desire to counter that philosophical privilege, to resist philosophy's putative hegemony. And that would perhaps be the central aim of "deconstruction." So when Brunette and Wills ask Derrida about his competence, Derrida's reply is this: "So, each time I approach a literary work, or a pictorial or architectural work, what interests me is the same deconstructive force with regard to philosophical hegemony" (5). Thus, "As a result, one can always find the same gesture on my part, even though each time I try to respect the singularity of the work. That gesture consists of finding, or in any case looking for, whatever in the work represents its force of resistance to philosophical authority" (5). But what is the nature of that philosophical authority, that philosophical hegemony? Let's recall Of Grammatology and the characterization of philosophy as logocentric philosophy. Derrida, in the essay "Thinking Out of Sight," usefully clarifies what that means: logocentrism is often deemed...