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Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-portrait and Other Ruins
 
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Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-portrait and Other Ruins [Paperback]

Derrida

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Product details

  • Paperback: 152 pages
  • Publisher: University of Chicago Press; 2nd edition (1 July 1993)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0226143082
  • ISBN-13: 978-0226143088
  • Product Dimensions: 29.9 x 20.7 x 1.6 cm
  • Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 493,553 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Jacques Derrida
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Product Description

Product Description

In this brilliant essay, Jacques Derrida explores issues of vision, blindness, self-representation, and their relation to drawing, while offering detailed readings of an extraordinary collection of images. Selected by Derrida from the prints and drawings department of the Louvre, the works depict blindness--fictional, historical, and biblical. From Old and New Testament scenes to the myth of Perseus and the Gorgon and the blinding of Polyphemus, Derrida uncovers in these images rich, provocative layers of interpretation.

For Derrida drawing is itself blind; as an act rooted in memory and anticipation, drawing necessarily replaces one kind of seeing (direct) with another (mediated). Ultimately, he explains, the very lines which compose any drawing are themselves never fully visible to the viewer since they exist only in a tenuous state of multiple identities: as marks on a page, as indicators of a contour. Lacking a "pure" identity, the lines of a drawing summon the supplement of the word, of verbal discourse, and, in doing so, obscure the visual experience. Consequently, Derrida demonstrates, the very act of depicting a blind person undertakes multiple enactments and statements of blindness and sight.

"Memoirs of the Blind" is both a sophisticated philosophical argument and a series of detailed readings. Derrida provides compelling insights into famous and lesser known works, interweaving analyses of texts--including Diderot's "Lettres sur les aveugles," the notion of mnemonic art in Baudelaire's "The Painter of Modern Life," and Merleau-Ponty's "The Visible and the Invisible." Along with engaging meditations on the history and philosophy of art, Derrida reveals the waysviewers approach philosophical ideas through art, and the ways art enriches philosophical reflection.

An exploration of sight, representation, and art, "Memoirs of the Blind" extends and deepens the meditation on vision and painting presented in "Truth and Painting." Readers of Derrida, both new and familiar, will profit from this powerful contribution to the study of the visual arts.


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Amazon.com:  2 reviews
11 of 15 people found the following review helpful
Drawing Conclusions at the the Louvre 10 Oct 2000
By Karl Haendel - Published on Amazon.com
Format:Paperback
This book is both an exhibtion catalogue to a show Derrida curated at the Louvre of drawings on the theme of blindness (complete with many reproductions of works) as well as a brillant investigation into the art of drawing by dealing with blindness as evidence of 'blindness' itself in every act of looking (and of course reproduction). As stated by Derrida, "every drawing of 'the blind' is a drawing 'of' the blind." More than just an example of applied deconstruction, Derrida's reading of these drawings questions the very foudnation of western ideologies of 'looking' and 'seeing' taken for granted as self-evident by artists for centuries. By the end, one wonders who is the author, the artist, the curator?, as Derrida does more with these drawings 'for drawing' than they ever did for drawing themselves. This book is a necessity for any visual artist producing critical work in the 21st century.
2 of 5 people found the following review helpful
Vision of Blindness 26 April 2009
By William Cole - Published on Amazon.com
Format:Paperback
Here Derrida offers a vision of blindness, that is to say a "vision" of "blindness", or even a "vis"ion of "blind"ness. By deconstructing the very "act" of see"ing", he defers to différance, grammatology, and "éperons", that is to say, the "spurs" by which we harry, that is to say hurry, the horse(s) of structuralized condescension. Perception, that is, or "interception", or even "interperception" of vision--or more precisely, visuality, and all that implies. Reading, and re-reading, this book, we can easily understand why Derrida and his thought were so instrumental in the fall of apartheid.

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