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notícias | a saúde dos olhos | textos didácticos | cegueira e literatura | cinema e cegueira | arte e cegueira | legislação | contactos |
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notícias | a saúde dos olhos | textos didácticos | cegueira e literatura | cinema e cegueira | arte e cegueira | legislação | contactos |
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Memoirs of the
Blind:
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| 1. Antoine
Coypel, Study of the Blind Louvre Museum |
2. Antoine
Coypel, Study of the Blind Louvre Museum |
Imploring and deploring are also experiences of the eye. Are you
going to speak to me of tears?
Yes, later on, because they say something about the eye that no longer concerns or regards sight, unless they still reveal it while veiling it. But look again at Coypel's
blind men.
Like all blind men, they must advance, advance or commit themselves,
that is, expose themselves, run through space as if running a risk. They are
apprehensive about space, they apprehend it with their groping, wandering hands;
they draw in this space in a way that is at once cautious and bold; they
calculate, they count on the invisible. It would seem that most of these blind
men do not lose themselves in absolute wandering. These blind men, notice, since
the illustrious blind of our culture are almost always men, the "great blind men," as if women perhaps saw to it never to risk their sight. Indeed, the absence of "great blind women" will not be without consequence for our hypotheses. These blind men explore and seek to foresee there where they do
not see, no longer see, or do not yet see. The
space
of the blind always conjugates these three tenses and times of memory. But simultaneously.
For example, in the drawings done in preparation for Christ's Healing of the Blind of
Jericho, Coypel's men do not seek anything in particular; they implore the other, the other hand, the helping or charitable hand, the hand of the other who promises them sight.
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3. Antoine Trouvain after Antoine
Coypel,
Christ's Healing of the Blind of Jericho, Bibiothèque Nationale |
As with touching, the laying on of hands orients the drawing. One must always recall the other hand or the hand of the other.
La Fage
arranges the
hands in such a way that at the moment when Christ's right index finger shows, by touching it, the blind man's left eye, the blind man touches Christ's arm with his right hand, as if to accompany its movement, and, first of all, to reassure himself of it in a gesture of prayer, imploration, or gratitude. Both of the left hands remain drawn back [en retrait]. Compare them to the left hands in Ribot's
drawing: Christ's is open and turned back
towards him, while the blind man's is opened upwards (begging, praying, supplicating, imploring, praising).
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| 4. Raymond La
Fage, Christ Healing a Blind Man Louvre Museum |
5. Theodule Ribot, Christ Healing a Blind Man Louvre Museum, Orsay Collection |
In his right hand, between his legs, he still holds firmly onto his cane, the cane that and he is not yet ready to forget it was his saving eye, his emergency eye, one might even say his optical prosthesis, more precious than his own pupils, than the apples of
his eyes [la prunelle de ses
yeux].
As for
Federico Zuccaro, he peoples the
space of healing with a whole crowd, between an enormous column (around which a man with fleshy buttocks wraps himself) and the long staff of the kneeling blind man. The man's hands are joined this time, his instrument extending far above his head.
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| 6. Federico Zuccaro, Christ Healing a Blind Man Louvre Museum |
Lucas Van Leyde's blind man is less passive. He himself, with his own
hand, will have pointed out his eyes; he will have shown his own blindness to Christ. Doing the presenting himself, as if a blind man were doing his own portrait the self-portrait of a blind man telling his own story in the first person he will have indicated, localized, and circumscribed his blindness with his right hand turned back towards his face, his index finger pointing towards his right eye.
Turned towards the eye, the finger's gesture shows but does not touch the body proper. It draws or forms, at a suitable or respectful distance, a sort of obscure self-showing, nocturnal yet
assured. A strange flexion of the arm or reflection of the fold. A silent auto-affection, a return to oneself, a sort of soul-searching or self-relation without sight or contact. It is as if the blind man were referring to himself with his arm folded back, there where a blind Narcissus, inventing
a mirror without image, lets it be seen that he does not see. He shows himself, he shows up, but to the other. He shows himself with his finger as blind. And so there he is, guiding the hand of the Savior as if the other did not yet see the eye to be healed. The stricken man thus shows by waiting, imploring, and praying. He draws, draws in the space of a promise already received. In showing, he does [fait] something. No more than any drawing, the movement of the right hand is not content with simply pointing out, describing,
or stating the truth of what is. It neither represents nor simply
presents; it acts. As for the left hand, it holds firmly onto a long
stick pressed against the right leg. This hardwood assistant stands
curiously between him and the child, his son perhaps, in any case his guide-yet another assistant, but this time a living one, because one sees him from behind holding onto the blind man by a fold in his garment.
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7. After Lucas Van Leyde, Christ Healing a Blind Man Louvre Museum |
The play of fingers can be easily figured out. While the woman behind the stricken man points her left index finger in the same direction as the blind man's right index finger, as if to show the blindness of the other whose self-showing she nonetheless takes part in, the young boy orients the index finger of his right hand, the same hand as the blind man, in the opposite direction, not in order to show, this time, but to touch, to hold onto and hold up. Jesus' right hand is held out, but still at a distance; it sketches out or initiates a gesture to accompany
like the woman facing him the right hand of the blind man: a mirror effect, around what we have called the mirror without image. The Savior's left hand, meanwhile, is busy on his stomach; like the child's hand, it is busy about the folds of a garment, this time his own, busy holding onto them, holding them up or holding them back, at what would seem to be the child's eye-level.
Sin, fault, or error the fall also means that blindness violates what can here be called Nature. It is an accident that interrupts the regular course of things or transgresses natural laws. It sometimes leads one to think that the affliction affects both Nature and a nature of the will, the will to know [savoir] as the will to see [voir]. A bad will an unwillingness would have driven man to close his eyes. The blind do not want to know, or rather, would like not to know: that is to say, not to see.
Idein, eidos, idea: the whole history, the whole semantics of the European idea, in its Greek genealogy, as we know as we see relates seeing to knowing. Look at
the allegory of Error, Coypel's blindfolded man. Naturally his eyes would be able to see.
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8. Antoine Coypel,
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But they are blindfolded [bandés (bandés means both blindfolded and sexually erect or hard. Trans.)] (by a handkerchief, scarf, cloth, or veil, a textile, in any case, that one fits over the eyes and ties behind the head). Erect and blindfolded [bandés] not naturally but by the hand of the other, or by his own hand, obeying a law that is not natural or physical since the knot behind the head remains within a hand's reach of the subject who could undo it: it is as if the subject
of the error had consented to having got it up, over his eyes, as if he got off [jouissait] on his suffering and his wandering, as if he chose it, at the risk of a fall, as if he were playing at seeking the other during a sublime and deadly game of blind man's buff. His will is at stake, and he goes willingly; he is the one who has been "touched," who stands erect and blindfolded. What does Descartes, this thinker of the eye who one day analyzed his own inclination "to like" "dubious characters" or "squinters," say about error? For the author of the Optics, who also dreamed of making eyeglasses and of restoring sight to the blind, error is first of all a belief, or rather, an opinion: consisting in acquiescing, in saying yes, in opining too early, this fault of judgment and not of perception betrays the excess of infinite will over finite understanding. I am in error, I deceive myself, because, being able to exercise my will infinitely and in an instant, I can will to move myself beyond perception, can will [vouloir] beyond sight [voir].
Am I in turn deceiving myself? Am I the victim of a hallucination when I believe that I see, through this Error of Coypel, the figure of a draftsman at work? I will explain myself later.
In any case, this Error of a man standing alone, curious, anxious to see and to touch, his hands restless, given over from head to toe to sketching out as much as to skipping out, bears no resemblance, as far as I can see, even though this too has to do with an adventure of knowledge, to those prisoners chained to opinion in the cave of the Republic. The Platonic speleology itself develops, let us not forget it, an "image" of all possible blindnesses, an "icon," as Plato often says, a word that is also translated as allegory. Still blind to the idea of the things themselves, whose shadows they contemplate as they are projected by the fire onto the wall in front of them, these prisoners have been chained since childhood, "their legs and necks in bonds so that they are fixed, seeing only in front of them, unable because of the bond to turn their heads all the way around."
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9. Louis Desplaces,
after Antoine Coypel Truth Unveiled by Time Bibliothèque Nationale. |
A conversion
will free them from the phenomenal prison of the visible world. But before this dazzling ascent, an anabasis that is also an
anamnesis, before this passion of memory that, at the risk of another blindness, will turn the soul's gaze towards the "intelligible place," these prisoners suffer from sight, to be sure, and they will suffer again, because "there are two kinds of disturbances of the eyes, stemming from two sources-when they have been transferred from light to darkness and when they have been transferred from darkness to light." But Plato represents them as motionless. Never do they stretch out their hands towards the shadow (skia) or the light (phôs) towards the silhouettes or images that are drawn on the wall. Unlike Coypel's solitary man, they do not venture out with outstretched hands in the direction of this
skiaor
photo-graphy, their sights set on this shadowor light-writing. They converse, they speak of memory. Plato imagines them seated, chained, able to address one another, to "dialectize," to lose themselves in the echoing of voices.
Before arbitrarily interrupting this infinitely echoing discourse, let us note for the sake of memory that, just before or above this, at the moment of descending, of guiding us into the cave, Plato had sketched out several analogies. Among them, a genealogy relates the sensible sun, the cause of sight and the image of the eye for the sun resembles the eye, the most "helioform" of all sense organs to the intelligible sun, that is, to the Good, just as the son is related to the father who has begotten him in his own likeness. The anamnesis of blindings, so many dazzlements en abyme
can itself be followed, like this story, from the father to the son. And the absolute Good, the intelligible father who begets being as well as the visibility of being (the eidos figures an outline of intelligible visibility), remains as invisible as the condition of sight as visibility itself can be. Regarding the Good, its descent is peopled with sons born blind, with little suns, so many pupils from which one sees only on the condition of not seeing whence one sees. We are here in the logic of the little sun placed en abyme, about which Ponge asks at the heart of his long poem, The Sun Placed en Abyme: "Why has the French language, in order to designate the star of the day, chosen the verbal form derived from the diminutive soliculus?"
Let us recall that, in the case of the blind man, hearing goes farther than the hand, which goes farther than the eye. The hand has an ear for preventing the fall, that is, the casus, the accident; it thus commemorates the possibility of the accident, keeps it in memory. A hand is, here, the very memory of the accident. But for the one who sees, visual anticipation takes over for the hand in order to go even farther indeed much farther. What does "farther" mean, and farther than the far-away itself? Taking it in, into its sights, the eye takes in more and better than the hand. To take here a figure is to be taken figuratively. The ear would carry still farther if the tropes of this rhetorical supplementarity did not always lead us farther and always too far {trop loin}. Indeed, it is about these tropes, about this trappo, this too-much of sight at the heart of blindness itself, that I would like to speak.
And so on the night of July 16th of last year, without turning on the light, barely
awake, still passive but careful not to chase away an interrupted dream, I felt around with a groping hand beside my bed for a pencil, then a notebook. Upon awakening, I deciphered this, among other things: "... duel of these blind men at each other's throats, one of the old men turning away in order to come after me, to take me to task me, poor passerby that I am. He harasses me, blackmails me, then I fall
with him to the ground, and he grabs me again with such agility that I
end up suspecting him of seeing with at least one eye half open and staring, like a cyclops (one-eyed or squinting, I no longer know); he restrains me with one hold after another and ends up using the weapon against which I am defenseless, a threat against my sons [fils]..."
I will offer no immediate interpretation of a dream so overdetermined by elders [vieux} and eyes
[yeux}, by all these duels. For many reasons. The idiomatic threads [fils} of my dream are, for me, neither clear nor countable far from it and since I have neither the desire nor the space
to expose here those that I might follow in a labyrinth, I will be content with naming a few of the paradigms, that is, a few of these commonplaces of our culture that often make us plunge headlong, by an excess of anticipation, into a misguided or seduced reading. This dream remains mine; it regards nobody else. What I will say of it here by way of figure, a parable on a parable, will thus come from what I earlier called precipitation. And while insinuating throughout an oblique or distracted reading of Bataille's narrative, my story of the eye also indicates in its recess or hollow the necessity of an anthropology or cultural ophthalmo-pathology (a few statistics: why so many blind people in Greece, in biblical times, and in the past few centuries? How did one become blind? How was blindness treated, compensated for, or supplemented? What was the place of the blind in the family and in society? Were there really more blind men than women? etc.).
Oedipus has become tiresome, a bit worn-out; we have grown old with him. Even more so with Tiresias, the blind soothsayer or seer who leaps over generations and across sexual differences. Tiresias goes blind for having seen what must not be seen, the coupling of two snakes, or perhaps the nakedness of Athena, or perhaps even the Gorgon in the eyes of the goddess with the penetrating gaze (oxyderkes).
He then predicts to Narcissus that he will go on living as long as he does not see himself, and to Pentheus that he will lose his life for having seen the sacred rites of Dionysus, or for having let himself be seen as a boar by the Bacchants. No,
the memory of Tiresias is still too close to Oedipus. Mythology or not, when it comes to asking about the host of our great blind men, the West has other resources; it draws upon the reserves of a Greek memory that is an-Oedipean, preor extra-Oedipean, and it draws, above all, from the crypts or the apocrypha of a Biblical memory.
There are as many blind men in the Old Testament as in the New. And the relationship between the two testaments often represents a sharing
of
vision and a difference in viewpoint [partage de la vue] as well as a
partitioning of light. It is always the other who did not yet see. It is always the other who saw with an eye that was too natural, too carnal, too external, which is to say, too literal. Blindness of the letter and by the letter. Here is a symbol: the blindfolded synagogue.
The Pharisees, these men of letters, are, when you come right down to it, blind. They see nothing because they look outside, only at the outside. They must be converted to interiority, their eyes turned toward the inside; and a fascination must first be denounced, the body and exteriority of the letter reproached:
Earlier, Christ had recalled the prophecy of Isaiah: "... you will indeed look, but never perceive... they have shut their eyes; so that they might not look with their eyes..." The Jews would not have seen the truth: for example, that Christ, by applying to the eyes a mixture of mud and his own saliva, had been able to heal a man blind from birth. This man surely
had not sinned, nor had his parents, but it was necessary that he bear witness to God's works through his restored sight. By a singular vocation, the blind man becomes a witness; he must attest to the truth or the divine light. He is an archivist of visibility like the draftsman, in short, whose responsibility he shares. This is one of the reasons why a draftsman is always interested
by the blind: they are his very interest, for he is an interested party, which is to say, he is engaged and works among them. He belongs to their society, taking up in turn the figures of the seeing blind man, the visionary blind man, the healer or the sacrificer -by which I mean someone who takes away sight in order finally to show or allow seeing and to bear witness to the light.
Another witness, John, recalls that the truth and the light (phos)
come through Christ. The Jews dispelled this light because they "did not
believe" that the healed blind man had been blind." The Gospels can be read as an anamnesis of blindness: the word that is sent, the word of Judgment or salvation, the good news, always happens or
comes to blindness. The advent or coming takes place according to the story of the eye; it draws this internal division of sight and viewpoint:
The blind men in my dream were ancestors, or rather, fathers, perhaps even grandfathers in any case, old men. And there were several of them, at least two. I had jotted down "duel" during the night. So let us forget Oedipus for the moment, the two Oedipuses. Let us forget the Oedipus of "the great Homer," of the "harmonious blind man," an Oedipus who does not, it must be underscored, gouge out his eyes.
But let us also forget Sophocles' Oedipus, the Oedipus of the "myth" and
of the "complex," the enlightened blind man who draws in space with his staff, who mixes or jumps generations on two, three, or four feet.
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10. Jacques-Louis David Homer singing his poems Louvre Museum |
There are at least three generations in my dream of the duel, of the dual [duel] and of dolor, of mourning [deuil], of elders and eyes: the white figure of the ancestors, then my own generation, in place of the son, but a son who is already a father since his own sons are in turn threatened. And these generations jump; they jump over each other, and jump one another in order to take each other to task. But I am headed rather toward the testament. Specifically, toward the stories of legacy or delegation on the inside, as en abyme, of what is called the neoor the paleo-testamentary. A testamentary scene always presupposes along with the supplement of a generation at least a third party who sees, the mediation of a lucid witness. By means of a story or a signature, this witness attests that he has clearly seen, thereby authenticating the act of memory and the last wish. In what way would blindness concern or if one may say this regard this family scene? And why is the third, this witness who authenticates the testament, himself also able to intervene in the scene, to trick or to play with blindness? Eli, Isaac, Tobit all these old blind men of the Old Testament are always in want of sons. They suffer through their sons, always waiting for them, sometimes to be tragically disappointed or deceived, but sometimes also to receive from them the sign of salvation or healing. At the time of my dream, I did not know the story of Eli, the mourning of him who, having already lost his eyes, loses or laments his two sons at once. And who dies as a result, thus losing his life after his sight and after his sons. God had already announced to him that Hophni and Phinehas would die on the same day for having never respected the sacrifices to Yahweh. Like the old prophet Ahijah, to whom Jeroboam's wife tried to pass herself off as another woman, the high priest Eli, ninety-eight years old, already no longer sees when the messenger announces to him and this is a single event the conjunction of the worst, the carrying off of both his sons and the ark. This is the moment of the fall: for the blind are beings of the fall, the manifestation always of that which threatens erection or the upright position (Samson, Saint Paul, Polyphemus, etc.). For at these terrible words, Eli falls over backward:
If I have only recently discovered this double dolor or mourning of Eli (to be distinguished, if only by a bit, from Elijah, or Eliah, which turns out to be one of my first names), I must have read and then forgotten, at the time of my dream of elders and eyes, the plights of Isaac and Tobit.
These two fathers, these two old blind men, seem to be opposed in every way, trait for trait. One loses his sight with age, as if through normal wear and tear:
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11.
Francesco Primaticcio, Isaac Blessing Jacob Louvre Museum |
Moreover, the story of the ruse is related in the third person the ruse by which Isaac's wife Rebecca takes advantage of her husband's blindness in order to substitute one son for another, that is, Jacob, the favorite younger son, for Esau, at the moment of the testamentary blessing. A nagging and interminable question: how does one sacrifice a son? A son who is always unique, always an only son [un fils unique]? Isaac knew a thing or two about this. His father had "looked up" twice at the decisive moment when he had to sacrifice him and then spare him by substituting a ram.
How does one choose between two sons? This is, twice multiplied, the
same question, the unique question of the unique. How does one choose between two brothers? Between two twins, in sum, since Jacob was Esau's twin, even though he was born after him and his brother had sold him his birthright (he "despised his birthright"). Is this not more difficult than choosing between the pupils of one's own two eyes, between the two apples of one's eyes, which can at least supplement each other? To sacrifice a son is at least as cruel as giving up one's own sight. The son here represents the light of vision; that is what Tobit, in short, says to his son.
By contrast, then, in the book that bears his name and in the course of a narration that passes from one mouth to another, Tobit himself narrates at first, narrates in the first person, narrates himself by telling the story of his own blindness. Depicting himself, relating to himself, he relates a blindness whose advent was, in his case, not natural. He interprets it, in truth, as an obscure punishment. Another point of contrast is that he recovers from his blindness eight years later at the hands of his son Tobias. One will recall that the orphan Tobit had married Anna. He liked to bury the dead of his community (my father too liked to do this, and did so for decades in Algiers), sometimes secretly, fearing King Sennacherib (who was himself, in fact, killed by his own two sons). Tobit
is stricken by blindness after having wept...
I'll have you
observe that you have already promised to speak of tears or veiled eyes,
remember...
I haven't forgotten. Tobit shed tears? then buried one of his own people who had been strangled and abandoned in the market place. He narrates, and it is once again a story of mourning:
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Jacopo Ligozzi Tobias and the Angel Louvre Museum |
13. Pietro Bianchi Tobias healing his Father's Blindness Louvre Museum |
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After Rubens Tobias Healing his Father's Blindness Louvre Museum |
Tobit's son Tobias restores his sight, as we know, by spreading fish gall on his father's eyes, following the advice of the angel Raphael: "'I know that
his eyes will be opened. Smear the gall of the fish on his eyes; the medicine will make the white films shrink and peel off from his eyes, and your father will regain his sight and see the light.'" The angel stands at the center of Pietro Bianchi's drawing, a long staff in his right hand, his torso open like the enormous eyelid of a fiery eye. But in a drawing after Rubens, the angel remains withdrawn [en retrait], as if hidden, behind Tobias. He too holds a staff in his left hand, the blind Tobit gripping his staff with both hands, while his wife Anna prays with her hands together: the mise en scène of the blind is always inscribed in a theater or theory of the hands.
Raphael seems to remain on the edge, almost in the margin, of Rembrandt's drawing (though he is at the center of a Tobit Recovering His Sight after Rembrandt).
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15. Rembrandt
[attributed to] Tobias Healing his Father's Blindness Louvre Museum |
Yet that is not this drawing's only peculiarity. The drawing remains rather sketchy. Tobias and his mother are busy doing something strange behind the old blind man, behind his back. This scene of hands, of maneuvering and manipulation, calls to mind a properly surgical operation, which I dare not, or not yet, call graphic. Tobias seems to be holding a stylus-like instrument, some sort of engraver or scalpel. In fact, when the drawing was sent from Versailles to the Louvre in 1803 it bore the inscription: "Surgeon bandaging a wounded man, washed in bister on white paper? Rembrandt." A later specification in the inventory style reads: "Tobias restoring sight to his father, idem. drawing coming from Versailles, where it was referred to by the title Surgeon Bandaging a Wounded Man also attributed to Livens."
In none of the representations of this healing does the fish gall appear. It is always a matter of manipulations, of operations of touching or making contact with a hand that is either bare or armed.
Veiled light, tears and veils, the burying of bodies and eyes:
before asking what tears are or what they do, it would be necessary to follow the entangled composition of these motifs in a Book that was first considered
apocryphal. The son is the light, the supplementary or excessive eye of
the father, the blind man's guide, his staff even, but also the staff of
the weeping mother, who constantly recalls this fact. First, after Tobias' departure:
Raguel, Edna, and Sarah shed many tears upon discovering that Tobias is the son of Tobit and that this latter has lost his sight. Later, when Tobias has not yet returned, Anna weeps once more: "My child has perished, and is no longer among the living. ... Woe to me, my child, the light of my eyes, that I let you make the journey." At his healing, Tobit too breaks down in tears, and what he sees first is his son. He gives thanks not simply for seeing, for seeing for the sake of seeing, but for seeing his son. He weeps in gratitude, in recognition, not so much because he finally sees but because his son restores his sight [rend la vue] by making himself [se rendre] visible: he restores his father's sight in making himself visible and in order to make himself visible, he, his son, that is to say, the light that is given as the light that is received, lent, given back, exchanged. Son means: the eyes, the two eyes:
Son: the eyes, the two eyes [deux yeux], the name of God [Dieu]. From now on, what Tobit finally sees, it seems, is neither this or that thing, this or that person, but his very sight, that very thing, that very one, his son, who restores his sight. Could one not say that he sees in his son the very origin of his own faculty of sight? Yes and no. What restores his sight is not, in truth, his son, visible at last. Behind the son there is the angel, the one coming to announce the other. The hand of the son is guided by the
angel Raphael. Now, this latter ends up presenting himself as a being without carnal desire, perhaps even without a body: he is a simulacrum of
sensible visibility. He merely "rendered himself visible," being, in truth, only a "vision." Raphael himself speaks and tells the truth of his own visibility: "'Bless God forevermore. As for me, when I was with you, I was not acting on my own will, but by the will of God.
... Although you were watching me, I really did not eat or drink
anything-but what you saw was a vision.'''
It is from this "vision" of the "invisible" that he gives, immediately thereafter, the order to write: in order to give thanks [rendre grâce], the memory of the event must be inscribed. The debt must be repaid with words on parchment, which is to say, with visible signs of the invisible:
As archive of the narrative, the written story gives thanks, as will every drawing that draws upon the narrative. In the graphic lineage or descent from the book to the drawing, it is less a matter of telling it like it is, of describing or noting what one sees (perception or vision), than of observing the law beyond sight, of ordering truth alongside the debt, of ordering truth from the debt, of giving thanks at once to the gift and the lack, to what is due, to the faultline [la faille] of the "il faut" ["one must"], be this to the "il faut" of the "il faut voir" ["one must see," "one will have to see"] or of an "il reste a voir" ["it remains to be seen"], which connotes at once the overabundance and the failure [defaillance]
of the visible, the too-much and the much-too-little, the excess and the
default [faillite]. What guides the graphic point, the quill, pencil, or scalpel is the respectful observance of a commandment, the acknowledgement before knowledge, the gratitude
of the receiving before seeing, the blessing before the knowing. That is why I insisted on the central appearance or displacement of the angel Raphael in the healings of Tobit. Depending upon the angel's absence or presence, depending upon the place he occupies, we might classify these as "drawings with vision," "drawings without vision," etc. What happens, in Rembrandt for example, when the drawing sidelines the angel? What happens to the apparition of the invisible being who restores sight but also dictates the book? Has Raphael stepped aside because the scene is starting to become a simple, natural surgery?'" Or is it because, as the Book of
Tobit literally says, the human actors "stood up, and could see [the angel] no more" once he had given the order to give thanks?
Whether it be in writing or in drawing, in the Book of Tobit or in the representations related to it, the thanksgiving grace [grâce] of the trait suggests that at the origin of the graphein there is debt or gift rather than representational fidelity. More precisely, the fidelity of faith matters more than the representation, whose movement this fidelity commands and thus precedes. And faith, in the moment proper to it, is blind. It sacrifices sight, even if it does so with an eye to seeing at last. The performative that comes on the scene here is a "restoring of sight" rather than the visible object, rather than a constatative description of what is or what one notices in front of oneself. Truth belongs to this movement of repayment that tries in vain to render itself adequate to its cause or to the thing. Yet this latter emerges only in the hiatus of disproportion. The just measure of "restoring" or "rendering" is impossible or infinite. Restoring or rendering is the cause of the dead, the cause of deaths, the cause of a death given or requested. Tobit
is not only the man of burials, the man of "the last respects," the one who makes it his obligation to give the last shroud. This father also never stops asking his son to give him too in turn a decent burial when the time comes for him, the son, to close his father's eyes. He asks him this before and after his healing, before Tobias' departure and after his return. All this, amidst scenes of running into debt, of leaving money in trust, of repayment and giving alms:
The prayer, the request, which was also an order, is repeated after the healing:
One might find this obscure or all too evident. But this burial rite or duty is linked to the debt and to the gift of "restoring sight." The death shroud is woven like a veil of vision. One might find this insignificant or overdetermined with meaning, but the angel Raphael, the invisible one who restores sight and who himself appears only in a "vision," is also the one who, without being seen, accompanies Tobit during burials. He recalls this during his final apparition, speaking now to the healed blind manhealed, no doubt, in recompense for his respect for the dead:
Observe that on the day when this dream of the blind and of sons, of elders and eyes, came to me, the theme of this exhibition had not yet been chosen, though I was already thinking about it. Must I recall these dates? Is it my duty to inscribe them? To whom is this due? What interest is there in describing these obscure connections?
This really is looking like an exhibition of yourself. You are inscribing in your memoirs, in short, the chronicle of an exhibition.
No, I would be tempted rather by the self-portrait of a blind man. The
caption: "This is a drawing of me, a drawing of mine." But let me pick
up my story. With the exhibition already envisaged, I have to cancel a
first meeting at the Department of Drawings with Françoise Viatte, Régis Michel, and Yseult Séverac. It is July 5th, and I have been suffering for thirteen days from facial paralysis caused by a virus, from what is called a frigore (disfiguration, the facial nerve inflamed, the left side of the face stiffened, the left eye transfixed and horrible to behold in a mirror a real sight for sore eyes the eyelid no longer closing normally: a loss of the "wink" or "blink," therefore, this moment of blindness that ensures sight its breath). On July 5th this trivial ailment has just begun to heal. It is finally getting better after two weeks of terror the unforgettable itself two weeks of vigilant medical attention (superequipped surveillance, if you hear what I mean, with instruments anoptic or blind that sound out, that allow one to know [savoir] there where one no longer sees [voir]: not the luminous rays of radioscopy or radiography but the play of waves and echoes, the electromyogram,
by means of "galvanic stimulation of the orbicular muscles of the
eyelids and lips," the measurement of the "blinking reflexes" by the "orbicular recording of the eyelids," the "Ultrasonic Cervical Assessment" with a transcranial doppler, echotomography searching for the "intraluminal echo," the scanner's computer blindly transcribing the coded signals of the photoelectric cells.
Things certainly do happen to you, day and night.
You better believe it [il faut croire]; I will have seen my share of late, it's true. And all this is documented, I am not the only one who could witness to it. And so on July 11th I am healed (a feeling of conversion or resurrection, the eyelid blinking once again, my face still haunted by a ghost of disfiguration). We have our first meeting at the Louvre. That same evening while driving home, the theme of the exhibition hits me. All of a sudden, in an instant. I scribble at the wheel a provisional title for my own
use, to organize my notes: L'ouvre où ne pas voir [The Open Where Not To
See], which becomes, upon my return, an icon, indeed a window to "open" on my computer screen.
As I told you, this must not be read as the journal of an exhibition. From all this I retain only the chance or the place for a thoughtful question: what would a journal of the blind be like? A newspaper or daily of
the blind? Or else the more personal kind of journal, a diary or day-book? And what about the day, then, the rhythm of the days and nights without day or light, the dates and calendars that scan memories and memoirs?
How would the memoirs of the blind be written?
I say memoirs, and not yet songs, or narratives, or poems of the blind in the great filiation of the night that buries Homer and Joyce, Milton and Borges. Let's let them wait in the background. I am satisfied for the moment with coupling them off two by two these great, dead-eyed elders of our literary memory as in the double rivalry of a duel. The author of Ulysses, after having written his own odyssey (itself haunted by a "blindman"), ends his life almost blind, one cornea operation after another. Hence the themes of the iris and glaucoma pervade Finnegans Wake:
"... the shuddersome spectacle of this semidemented zany amid the inspissated grime of his glaucous den making believe to read his usylessly unreadable Blue Book of Eccles, édition de ténèbres....
The whole Joycean oeuvre cultivates seeing eye canes.
As for Borges, among the blind ancestors whom he identifies or claims in the gallery of Western literature, it is clearly Milton who is his rival; it is with Milton that he would like to identify himself, and it is from Milton that he awaits, with or without modesty, the noble lineage of his own blindness. For this wound is also a sign of being chosen, a sign that one must know how to recognize in oneself, the privilege of a destination, an assigned mission: in the night, by the night itself. To call upon the great tradition of blind writers, Borges thus turns round an invisible mirror. He sketches at once a celebration of memory and a self-portrait. But he describes himself by pointing to the other blind man, to Milton, especially to the Milton who authored that other self-portrait,
Samson Agonistes. The confession is entitled Blindness:
A singular genealogy, a singular illustration, an illustration of oneself among all these illustrious blind men who keep each other in memory, who greet and recognize one another in the night. Borges begins with Homer; he then ends with Joyce and, still just as modestly, with the self-portrait of the author as a blind man, as a man of memory, and this, just after an allusion to castration.
I had you observe that Borges "begins with Homer." In truth, he begins with Wilde, who was himself speaking of Homer. Now, Wilde happens to be the author of The Picture of Dorian Gray, a tale of murder or suicide, of ruin and confession. It is also the story of a representation that carries death: a deadly portrait first reflects the progressive ruin on the face of its model who is also its spectator, the subject being thus looked at, then condemned, by his image:
The literature of murderous works. On the wall of the same exhibition one would have to hang Poe's The Oval Portrait: a portrait at once seen and read, the story of an artist who kills his drawn out, exhausted model his wife, in fact after having given her body over to ruin. The experience of a painter coupled with his model is that of a husband who
This is not, then, the journal of an exhibition. I was more than just honored by the invitation that was extended to me; I was intimidated, deeply worried even, by it. And I still am, no doubt well beyond what is reasonable. The anxiety was, of course, mixed with an obscure jubilation. For I have always experienced drawing as an infirmity, even worse, as a culpable infirmity, dare I say, an obscure punishment. A double infirmity: to this day I still think that I will never know either how to draw or how to look at a drawing. In truth, I feel myself incapable of following with my hand the prescription of a model: it is as if, just as I was about to draw, I no longer saw
the thing. For it immediately flees, drops out of sight, and almost
nothing of it remains; it disappears before my eyes, which, in truth, no
longer perceive anything but the mocking arrogance of this disappearing apparition. As long as it remains in front of me, the thing defies me, producing, as if by emanation, an invisibility that it reserves for me, a night of which I would be, in some way, the chosen one. It blinds me while making me attend the pitiful spectacle. By exposing me, by showing me up, it takes me to task but also makes me bear witness. Whence a sort of passion of drawing, a negative and impotent passion, the jealousy of a drawing in abeyance. And which I see without seeing. The child within me wonders: how can one claim to look at both a model and the lines [traits] that one jealously dedicates with one's own hand to the thing itself? Doesn't one have to be blind to one or the other? Doesn't one always have
to be content with the memory of the other? The experience of this shameful infirmity comes right out of a family romance, from which I will retain only a trait, a weapon and a symptom, no doubt, as well as a cause: wounded jealousy before an older brother whom I admired, as did every-one around him, for his talent as a draftsman and for his eye, in short, which has no doubt never ceased to bring out and accuse in me, deep down in me, apart from me, a fratricidal desire. His works, I must say in all fraternity, were merely copies: often portraits done in black pencil or India ink that reproduced family photographs (I remember the portrait of my grandfather after his death, wearing a cap, with a little goatee and wirerimmed glasses) or pictures already reproduced in books (I still remember this old rabbi praying; but because my own grandfather Moses, though not a rabbi, incarnated for us the religious consciousness, a venerable righteousness placed him above the priest).
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16. Bartolomeo Passarotti Cain and the Eye of Abel Louvre Museum |
I suffered seeing my brother's drawings on permanent display, religiously framed on the walls of every room. I tried my hand at imitating his copies: a pitiable awkwardness confirmed for me the double certainty of having been punished, deprived, cheated, but also, and because of this even, secretly chosen. I had sent to myself, who did not yet exist, the undecipherable message of a convocation. As if, in place of drawing, which the blind man in me had renounced for life, I was called by another trait, this graphics of invisible words, this accord of time and voice that is called (the) word or writing, scripture. A substitution, then, a clandestine exchange: one trait for the other, a trait for a trait.
I am speaking of a calculation as much as a vocation, and the stratagem was almost deliberate, by design. Stratagem, strategy this meant war. And the fratricidal watchword:
economizing on drawing. Economizing on visible drawing, on drawing as
such, as if I had said to myself: as for me, I will write, I will devote
myself to the words that are calling me. And even here, you can see very
well that I still prefer them; I draw nets of language about drawing, or rather, I weave, using traits, lines, staffs, and letters, a tunic of writing wherein to capture the body of drawing, at its very birth, engaged
as I am in understanding it without artifice. For all this happens to us, in truth, in a movement of eyes [yeux] and elders [vieux], by the divine [dieux] and the dual [deux], the dolor [dueil] and the duel [duel]. (Perhaps some "she" [du "elle"] awaits us, and some "he"
[du "il"], and what is "due him" the "due isle" ["dû/île"] and what "due her" ["dû/ elle"], along with the whole family of "pers" (greenish-blue) eyes: Athena Glaukopis "piercing": Athena Oxyderkes or Gorgopis or "pierced." All these "per's" that we implore in secret, across the homonymic filiation of blind fathers or pères, of "pairs" of eyes, of sight's "perdition" as one is given over to the hazard of signifiers or to the blind man's
buff of proper names (Perseus), so generously provided, it seems, by blindfolded Fortune. Between the two series I have just mentioned, the father and the eye, the figure of the ancestor (avus) is drawn out: Old blind men pass by in a crowd, and this is the very experience of fathers, the space of our memories. If experience is authority, as Bataille said, is it not also blindness? It is neither a question of giving in to playful jubilation nor of victoriously manipulating words or vocables. On the contrary, you can hear them resonating all on their own, deep down in the drawing, sometimes right on its skin; because the murmuring of these syllables has already come to well up in it, bits of words parasiting
it and producing interference; and in order to perceive this haunting
one need only abandon oneself to the ghosts of discourse by closing
one's eyes.
Doing without drawing, then. Yet drawing always returns. Does one ever give it up? Does one ever get over drawing, is one ever done mourning it? My working hypothesis also suggested the work of mourning. The unconscious renounces or gives up nothing. I have never in my life drawn again, not even tried. Except once last winter and I still keep the archive of this disaster when the desire, and the temptation, came over me to sketch my mother's profile as I watched over her in her hospital bed. Bedridden for a year, surviving between life and death, almost walled up within the silence of this lethargy, she no longer recognizes me, her eyes veiled by cataracts. We can only hypothesize about the degree to which she sees, about what shadows pass before her, whether she sees herself dying or not. (Did I just spontaneously say that my mother was "walled up"? This is one of the typical figures of what could be called the rhetoric of blindness. Rilke's blind person [die Blinde is, this time, a woman
note that the grammar of l'aveugle in French does not allow one to distinguish between un aveugle [a blindman] and une aveugle [a blindwoman]] speaks of her "eyes walled up" [vermauerten Augen). These leaden walls enclose one into the night of the tomb [the blind Pharisees are "whitewashed tombs" (Matthew 23 :27), while Milton's Samson presents himself as one of the living-dead, exiled from light, buried inside himself within a moving grave: "Myself my sepulchre,
a moving grave, buried..."].
These walls also close one up inside a prison. Samson says that he is doubly confined, "prison within prison," no longer knowing which to "bewail" more, the literal prison of stone, or the other, even more interior prison, as if "en abyme" behind the walls of the eye. ["Which shall I first bewail, / Thy bondage or lost sight, / Prison within prison / Inseparably dark? Thou art become (O worst imprisonment) / The dungeon of thyself."] The confinement of the blind man can thus isolate him behind some pretty hard walls, against which he must use his hands and nails. But the abyss of isolation can also remain liquid, like the substance of the eye, like the waters of a Narcissus who would no longer see anything but himself, nothing around him. The specular isolation thus calls for the insularity
of the image, or even, to reflect the "abandonment" of the blind man and his mourning solitude, the image of the island: "I am an island," she says. Die Blinde: "Ich bin von altem verlassen/ Ich bin eine Insel. [I am abandoned by all/ I am an island.]" And to the stranger come from the sea: "Ich bin eine Insel und altein.
[I am an island and alone.]" Yet solitude is "rich," insularity does not isolate or "deprive" one of anything, since "all the colors are translated [übersetzt] into sounds and smells [in Geräusch und Geruch].")
And so we are in July, after the recovery. Now that the theme is chosen (it is necessary to go quickly now and sketch with broad strokes), I hesitate between two paradoxes, two great "logics" of the invisible at the origin of drawing. Two thoughts of or about drawing thus take shape, and, by correlation, two "blindnesses."
Give them names, for memory's sake.
I shall name them the transcendental and the sacrificial. The first would be the invisible condition of the possibility of drawing, drawing itself, the drawing of drawing. It would never be thematic. It could not be posited or taken as the representable object of a drawing. The second, then, the sacrificial event, that which comes to or meets the eyes, the narrative, spectacle, or representation of the blind, would, in becoming the theme of the first, reflect, so to speak, this impossibility. It would represent this unrepresentable. Between the two, in their fold, the one repeating the other without being reduced to it, the event can give rise to the speech of narrative, to myth, prophecy, or messianism, to the family romance or to the scene of everyday life, thus providing drawing with its thematic objects or spectacles, its figures and heroes, its pictures or depictions of the blind [tableaux d'aveugle]. Drawing counts on [table] the representations procured by the event, by what may have come or happened to the eyes or to sight, which is not necessarily the same thing. It will always remain to be seen whether one of the two blindnesses does not hasten or precipitate the other. And whether, for example, what I expose right away under the name of transcendental blindness is not motivated by the violence of a sacrificial economy: eyes gouged out or burned, castration with all its abocular metonymies, resentment or revenge against brothers who have
the power to draw, sublimation or interiorization (the arts of the invisible, the intelligible light, the interior or supernatural revelation).
How does one demonstrate that the draftsman is blind, or, rather, that
in or by drawing he does not see? Do we know of any blind draftsmen?
There are deaf musicians, some great ones. There are also great blind
singers and poets, about whom we will have more to say later; and blind sculptors:
Observe the drawing from the school of Guercino, Della Scoltura Si, Della Pittura No.
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17. School of Guercino,
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This beggar has all the characteristics of the blind men in the Scriptures. His gesture is that of a sculptor; for while he holds a staff in his left hand, he recognizes with his right hand the bust of a woman who might well be blind herself, her face offering itself to a caress, her eyes turned upwards, disoriented like the man's but in a movement that wavers between imploring and ecstasy ("I ask myself what are they seeking in the heavens, all those blind men?" the ultimate question for Baudelaire's "faintly ridiculous" Blind Men) "terrifying and strange as sleep-walkers").
But if the blind man's mute fingers indicate "yes" to sculpture and "no" to painting, speech is enough to invert things and to convert them. Speech, which is to say, rhetoric.
Leaning against the base of the statue, lower than it, as if
abandoned on the ground, (the) drawing is indeed put down: put down,
subordinated in the hierarchy of the arts, submitted to the judgment of
the blind man who touches but also listens to what he is told about the
relief. But what, in fact, is the blind man touching? Recognizing the
lines of the face at the level of the eyes, looking them in the face
with his hand, but as if from memory, he puts his fingers on the
forehead of the other: a loving gesture or a blessing, a protective
gesture too (he seems to be hiding or closing her eyes: you don't see,
don't look, I'm closing your eyes, you see: what is one doing when one
closes the other's eyes?). Unless one imagines him, like Pygmalion
animating a statue, in the process of restoring sight by touching: a blind man restoring sight to a blind woman (you don't see, now see!, you, you see, you have seen, you will have seen, you already saw you are already living (tu vis déjà)). And it just so happens that the eyes of sculpture are always closed, "walled up" in any case, as we were saying, or turned inward, more dead than alive, scared stiff, more dead than the eyes of masks.
But what is a mask? We have yet to speak of the blind man's memory as the experience
of the mask.
Let me stop you for a moment before you go too far. If we can recall no blind draftsman, none that is literally deprived of sight and eyes (ab oculis), is it not going against common sense, giving in to an easy provocation, to claim exactly the opposite, i.e., that every draftsman is blind? No one will dispute that the draftsman is prey to a devouring proliferation of the invisible, but is that enough to make him into a blind man? Is it enough to justify this counter-truth? Monet himself only almost, at the end, lost his sight.
We are talking here about drawing, not painting. From this point of view, there are, it seems to me, at least three types of powerlessness for the eye, or let us say, three aspects, to underscore once again with a trait that which gives the experience of the gaze (aspicere) over to blindness. Aspectus is at once gaze, sight, and that which meets the eyes: on one side, the spectator, and on the other, the aspect, in other words, the spectacle. In English, spectacles are glasses. This powerlessness is not an impotence or failure; on the contrary, it gives to the experience of drawing its quasi-transcendental resource.
I would see the first aspect as we will call it in the aperspective of the
graphic act. In its originary, pathbreaking [frayage] moment, in the tracing potency of the trait, at the instant when the point at the point of the hand (of the body proper in general) moves forward upon making contact with the surface, the inscription of the inscribable is not seen. Whether it be improvised or not, the invention of the trait does not follow, it does not conform to what is presently visible, to what would be set in front of me as a theme. Even if drawing is, as they say, mimetic, that is, reproductive, figurative, representative, even if the model is presently facing the artist, the trait must proceed in the night. It escapes the field of vision. Not only because it is not yet visible, but because it does not belong to the realm of the spectacle, of spectacular objectivity and so that which it makes happen or come [advenir] cannot in itself be mimetic. The heterogeneity between the thing drawn and the drawing trait remains abyssal, whether it be between a thing represented and its representation or between the model and the image. The night of this abyss can be interpreted in two ways, either as the eve or the memory of the day, that is, as a reserve of visibility (the draftsman does not presently see but he has seen and will see again: the aperspective as the anticipating perspective or the an amnesic retrospective), or else as radically and definitively foreign to the phenomenality of the day. This heterogeneity of the invisible to the visible can haunt the visible as its very possibility. Whether one underscores this with the words of Plato or Merleau-Ponty, the visibility of the visible cannot, by definition, be seen, no more than what Aristotle speaks of as the diaphanousness of light can be. My hypothesis remember that we are still within the logic of the hypothesis is that the draftsman always sees himself to be prey to that which is each time universal and singular and would thus have to be called the unbeseen, as one speaks of the unbeknownst. He recalls it, is called, fascinated, or recalled by it. Memory or not, and forgetting as memory, in memory and without memory.
On the one hand, then, anamnesis: anamnesis of memory itself Baudelaire
relates the invisibility of the model to the memory that will have borne
that model. He "restores" invisibility to memory. And what the poet of
The Blind
says is all the more convincing in that he speaks of the graphic image,
of representative drawing.
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18.
Charles Baudelaire, Self-Portrait. Louvre Museum, Orsay Museum Collection |
This goes a fortiori for the other kind of drawing. One would have to cite here all of Mnemonic Art. For example:
Baudelaire, it is true, interprets memory as a natural reserve, without history, tragedy, or event, as, in his words, the naturally sacrificial matrix of a visible order that is selected, chosen, filtered. It breaks with the present of visual perception only in order to keep a better eye on drawing. Creative memory, schematization, the time and schema of Kant's transcendental imagination, with its "synthesis" and its "ghosts." "Duel" is also one of Baudelaire's words, a duel, as in my dream, between two blind men and for the appropriation of excess: the (no)-more-sight [le plus-de-vue], the visionary vision of the seer who sees beyond the visible present, the overseeing, sur-view, or survival of sight. And the draftsman who trusts in sight, in present sight, who fears the suspension of visual perception, who does not want to be done with mourning it, who does not want to let it go, this draftsman begins to go blind simply through the fear of losing his sight. This cripple is already on the road to blindness; he is "near-sighted or far-sighted." The Baudelairian rhetoric also makes use of political tropes or figures:
And so, for Baudelaire, it is the order of memory that precipitates, beyond present perception, the absolute speed of the instant (the time of the clin d'oeuil that buries the gaze in the batting of an eyelid, the instant called the Augenblick, the wink or blink, and what drops out of sight in the twinkling of an eye), but also the "synthesis," the "phantom," the "fear," the fear of seeing and of not seeing what one must not see, hence the very thing that one must see, the fear of seeing without seeing the eclipse between the two, the "unconscious execution," and especially the figures that substitute one art for another, the analogical or economic (i.e., the familial) rhetoric of which we were just speaking-the trait-for-a-trait.
By attributing the origin of drawing to memory rather than to perception, Baudelaire is, in turn, making a show of memory. He is writing himself into an iconographic tradition that goes back to at least Charles Le Brun. In this tradition, the origin of drawing and the origin of painting give rise to multiple representations that substitute memory for perception. First, because they are representations, next, because they are drawn most often from an exemplary narrative (that of Butades, the young Corinthian lover who bears the name of her father, a potter from Sicyon), and finally, because the narrative relates the origin of graphic representation to the absence or invisibility of the model. Butades does not see her lover, either because she turns her back to him more abiding than Orpheus or because he turns his back to her, or again, because their gazes simply cannot meet (see, for example, J. B. Suvée's Butades or the Origin of Drawing): it is as if seeing were forbidden in order to draw, as if one drew only on the condition of not seeing, as if the drawing were a declaration of love destined for or suited to the invisibility of the other unless it were in fact born from seeing the other withdrawn from sight.
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19. Joseph-Benoît Suvée |
This painting is sometimes referred to in English as The Daughter of Butades Drawing the Shadow of Her Lover. Trans.
Whether Butades follows the traits of a shadow or a silhouette her hand sometimes guided
by Cupid (a Love who sees and, here, is not blindfolded) or whether she draws on the surface of a wall or on a veil, a skiagraphia
or shadow writing in each case inaugurates an art of blindness. From the
outset, perception belongs to recollection. Butades writes, and thus already loves in nostalgia. Detached from the present of perception, fallen from the thing itself which is thus divided a shadow is a simultaneous memory, and Butades' stick is a staff of the blind. Let's follow its course in Regnault's picture (Butades Tracing the Portrait of Her
Shepherd or the Origin of Painting), as we have done for all the drawings of the blind: it goes back and forth between love and drawing.
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Jean-Baptiste Regnault, Butades Tracing the Portrait of Her Shepherd or The Origin of Drawing. Palace of Versailles |
Rousseau wanted to grant it speech, to give it the floor. In the Essay on the Origin of Languages, he writes:
On the other hand, and in anamnesis itself, there is amnesia, the orphan of memory, for the invisible can also lose its memory, as one loses one's parents. On a different trail, which perhaps comes down to the same one, the draftsman would be given over to this other invisibility, given over to it in the same way that a hunter, himself in relentless pursuit, becomes a fascinating lure for the tracked animal that watches him. In order to be absolutely foreign to the visible and even to the potentially visible, to the possibility of the visible, this invisibility would still inhabit the visible, or rather, it would come to haunt it to the point of being confused with it, in order to assure, from the specter of this very impossibility, its most proper resource. The visible as such would be invisible, not as visibility, the phenomenality or essence of the visible, but as the singular body of the visible itself, right on the visible so that, by emanation, and as if it were secreting its own medium, the visible would produce blindness. Whence a program for an entire rereading of the later Merleau-Ponty. Let us be satisfied, for lack of space, with a few indications from The Visible and the Invisible. Rather than recall the "teleperception" or the four "layers" of the invisible, which, as Merleau-Ponty explains, cannot be "logically" brought together (1) "what is not actually visible, but could be," (2) the framework of the nonvisible existentials of the visible, (3) the tactile or kinesthetic, (4) the sayable, the "lekta" or the "Cogito" I would rather have followed the traces of absolute invisibility. To be the other of the visible, absolute invisibility must neither take place elsewhere nor constitute another visible, that is, something that does not yet appear or has already disappeared something whose spectacle of monumental ruins would call for reconstitution, regathering from memory, rememberment. This nonvisible does not describe a phenomenon that is present elsewhere, that is latent, imaginary, unconscious; hidden, or past; it is a "phenomenon" whose inappearance is of another kind; and what we have here seen fit to call transcendentality is not 'unrelated to what MerleauPonty speaks of as "pure transcendence, without an ontic mask":
And again:
The aperspective thus obliges us to consider the objective definition, the anatomico-physiology or ophthalmology of the "punctum caecum" as itself a mere image, an analogical index of vision itself, of vision in general, of that which, seeing itself see, is nevertheless not reflected, cannot be "thought" in the specular or speculative mode-and thus is blinded because of this, blinded at this point of "narcissism," at that very point where it sees itself looking.
I'll agree that, at its originary point, the trait is invisible and the draftsman is blind to it, but what about afterwards, once the line has been traced?
Let's look now at the second aspect. It is not an aftereffect, a second or secondary aspect. It appears, or rather disappears, without delay. I will name it the withdrawal [retrait] or the eclipse, the differential inappearance of the trait. We have been interested thus far in the act of tracing, in the tracing of the trait. What is to be thought now of the trait once traced? That is, not of its pathbreaking course, not of the inaugural path of the trace, but of that which remains of it? A tracing, an outline, cannot be seen. One should in fact not see it (let's not say however: "One must not see it") insofar as all the colored thickness that it retains tends to wear itself out so as to mark the single edge of a contour: between the inside and the outside of a figure. Once this limit is reached, there is nothing
more to see, not even black and white, not even figure/form, and this is the trait, this is the line itself: which is thus no longer what it is, because from then on it never relates to itself without dividing itself just as soon, the divisibility of the trait here interrupting all pure identification and forming-one will have no doubt understood it by now our general hypothec for all thinking about drawing inaccessible in the end, at the limit, and de jure. This limit is never presently reached, but drawing always signals toward this inaccessibility, toward the threshold where only the surroundings of the trait appear that which the trait spaces by delimiting and which thus does not belong to the trait. Nothing belongs to the trait, and thus, to drawing and to the thought of drawing, not even its own "trace." Nothing even participates in it. The trait joins and adjoins only in separating.
Is it by chance that in order to speak of the trait we are falling back upon the language of negative theology or of those discourses concerned with naming the withdrawal [retrait] of the invisible or hidden god? The withdrawal of the One whom one must not look in the face, or represent, or adore, that is, idolize under the traits or guise of the icon? The One whom it is even dangerous to name by one or the other of his proper names? The end of iconography. The memory of the drawings-of-the-blind [déssins-d'aveugles] it has been only too clear for quite some time now opens up like a God-memory [memoire-Dieu]. It is theological through and through, to the point, sometimes included, sometimes excluded, where the self-eclipsing trait cannot even be spoken about, cannot even say itself in the present, since it is not gathered, since it does not gather itself, into any present, "I am who I am" (a formula whose original grammatical form, as we know, implies the future). The outline or tracing separates and separates itself; it retraces only borderlines, intervals, a spacing grid with no possible appropriation. The experience or experimenting of drawing (and experimenting, as its name indicates, always consists in journeying beyond limits) at once crosses and institutes these borders, it invents the Shibboleth of these passages (the chorus of Samson Agonistes recalls that which links the Shibboleth, this circumcision of the tongue, of language, to the
death sentence: "... when so many died / Without reprieve adjudged to
death, / For want of well pronouncing Shibboleth").
The linear limit I am talking about is in no way ideal or intelligible. It divides itself in its ellipsis; by leaving itself, and starting from itself, it takes leave of itself, and establishes itself in no ideal identity. In this twinkling of an eye, the ellipsis is not an object but a blinking of the difference that begets it, or, if you prefer, a jalousie (a blind) of traits cutting up the horizon, traits through which, between which, you can observe without being seen, you can see between the lines, if you see what I mean: the law of the interview. For the same reason, the trait is not sensible, as a patch of color would be. Neither intelligible nor sensible. We are speaking here of graphic and not color blindness, of drawing and not painting, even if a certain painting can wear itself out by painting drawing, indeed by representing in order to make it into a picture the allegory of an "origin of drawing." For if we left the Platonic cave a while back, it was not in order finally to see the eidos of the thing itself after a conversion, anabasis, or anamnesis. We left the cave behind because the Platonic speleology misses, is unable to take into account if not to see, the inappearance of a trait that is neither sensible nor intelligible. It misses the trait precisely because it believes that it sees it or lets it be seen. The lucidity of this speleology
carries within it another blind man, not the cave dweller, the blind man
deep down, but the one who closes his eyes to this blindness right here. (Let us leave for another occasion the treatment Plato reserves for those great blind men Homer and Oedipus.)
"Before" ["avant"] all the "blind spots" that, literally or figuratively, organize the scopic field and the scene of drawing, "before" all that can happen to sight, "before" all the interpretations, ophthalmologies, and theo-psycho-analyses of sacrifice or castration, there would thus be the ecliptic rhythm of the trait, the blind [jalousie], the abocular
contraction that lets one see "from-since" ["depuis"] the unbeseen. "Before" and "from-since": these draw in time or space an order that does not belong to them-is this not all too clear?
If this was indeed the initial idea for the exhibition, one will always be able to say, without fear of self-deception, that you are in fact seeking to transcendentalize, that is, to ennoble an infirmity or an impotence: does not your blindness to drawing respond to a universal necessity? Is it
not the response par excellence to an essence of the trait, to an invisibility inscribed right on the trait? Would you not claim in your jealous, even envious passion, in your wounded impotence, to be more faithful to the trait, to the trait in its most refined end or finality? As for the "great draftsman" to follow your suggestion does he not also try in vain, up to the point of exhausting a ductus or stylus, to capture this withdrawal [retrait] of the trait, to remark it, to sign it finally-in an endless scarification?
But say I admitted this, would it be enough to disqualify my hypothesis? This rhetoric of avowal or confession in which you would like to confine me leads us to the third aspect: the rhetoric
of the trait. For is it not the withdrawal [retrait] of the line that which draws the line back, draws it again [retire], at the very moment when the trait is drawn, when it draws away [se tire] that which grants speech? And at the same time forbids separating drawing from the discursive murmur whose trembling transfixes it? This question does not aim at restoring an authority of speech over sight, of word over drawing, or of legend over inscription. It is, rather, a matter of understanding how this hegemony could have imposed itself. Wherever drawing is consonant with and articulated by a sonorous and temporal wave, its rhythm composes with the invisible: even before a Gorgon's mask resounds
(for a terrible cry sometimes accompanied its gaze), even before it turns you stone blind. It is still by way of figure that we speak of rhetoric, in order to point out with a supplementary trope this huge domain: the drawing of men. For we here reserve the question of what is obscurely called the animal which is not incapable of traces. The limit that we leave here in the dark appears all the more unstable since it is there that we necessarily come across the "monstrosities" of the eye, zoo-theo-anthropomorphic figures, shifting or proliferating transplants or grafts, unclassifiable hybrids of which the Gorgons and Cyclopes are only the best known examples. It is said that the sight of certain animals is more powerful, sharper more cruel, too than man's, and yet that it lacks a gaze.
The drawing of men, in any case, never goes without being articulated with articulation, without the order being given with words (recall the angel Raphael), without some order, without the order of narrative, and
thus of memory, without the order to bury, the order of prayer, the order of names to be given or blessed. Drawing comes in the place of the name, which comes in the place of drawing: in order, like Butades, to hear oneself call the other or be called (by) the other. As soon as a name comes to haunt drawing, even the without-name of God that first opens up the space of naming, the blind are tied in with those who see. An internal duel breaks out at the very heart of drawing.
The transcendental retrait or withdrawal at once calls for and forbids the self-portrait. Not that of the author and presumed signatory, but that of the "source-point" of drawing, the eye and the finger, if you will. This point is represented and eclipsed at the same time. It lends itself to the autograph of this wink or
clin d' oeil
that plunges it into the night, or rather, into the time of this waning
or declining day wherein the face is submerged: it gets carried away, it
decomposes itself or lets itself be devoured by a mouth of darkness. Certain self-portraits of
Fantin-Latour show this. Or rather, they would be the figures or
the demonstration of this.
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& 22. Henri Fantin-Latour, Self-Portrait. Louvre Museum, Orsay Museum Collection. |
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Henri Fantin-Latour, Self-Portrait, The Denver Art Museum |
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Henri Fantin-Latour, Self-Portrait, Louvre Museum, Orsay Museum Collection. |
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25. 26. & 27. Henri Fantin-Latour, Self-Portrait, Louvre Museum, Orsay Museum Collection. |
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Sometimes invisibility is shared out [s'y partage], if one can say this, right between the two eyes. There is on the one hand [d'une part] the monocular stare of a narcissistic cyclops: a single eye open, the right one, fixed firmly on its own image. It will not let it go, but that's because the prey necessarily eludes it, making off with the lure. The traits of a self-portrait are also those of a fascinated hunter. The staring eye always resembles an eye of the blind, sometimes the eye of the dead, at that precise moment when mourning begins: it is still open, a pious hand should soon come to close it; it would recall a portrait of the dying. Looking at itself seeing, it also sees itself disappear right at the moment when the drawing tries desperately to recapture it. For this cyclops eye sees nothing, nothing but an eye that it thus prevents from seeing anything at all. Seeing the seeing and not the visible, it sees nothing. This seeing eye sees itself blind. On the other hand [d'autre part, and this would be, as it were, the eye's nocturnal truth, the other eye is already plunged into the night, sometimes just barely hidden, veiled, withdrawn [en retrait],
sometimes totally indiscernible and dissolved into a blotch, and
sometimes absorbed by the shadow cast upon it by a top hat shaped like
an eyeshade. From one blindness, the other. At the moment of the
autograph, and with the most intense lucidity, the seeing blind man
observes himself and has others observe...
You are always saying observe, to have others observe, ete. You like this
word...
Yes, it associates scopic attention with respect, with deference, with the attention of a gaze or look that also knows how to look after, with the contemplative gathering of a memory that conserves or keeps in reserve, Here, the signatory, who is also the model, the object or the subject of the self-portrait, thus has us observe that he is looking at himself seeing the model that he himself is in a mirror whose image he is letting us see: a drawing of the blind that, in two different takes, in white and in black, shows itself drawing, He shows this movement, this touching or examination, with the assured gesture of a surgeon. But a surgeon who does not look at his hands any more than a blind man does. He turns his eyes neither towards what he holds between his hands, the vertical or oblique point of a scalpel, staff, or pencil, nor towards what lies beneath his hands, the body, the scarified skin, the ground or surface of inscription.
We are getting to what at the outset I called the hypothesis of sight or the intuitive hypothesis, the hypothesis of intuition. One generally dissociates conjecture from perception. One even opposes hypothesis to intuition, to the immediacy of the "I see" (video, intueor), "I look at" (aspicio), I "have an eye on" [je mire], I am astonished to see, I admire (miror, admiror). And so right here, and this is a paradigm, we can only suppose intuition. In fact, in these last two cases (a self-portrait of the draftsman drawing and seen full face), it is only by hypothesis that we imagined him in the process of drawing himself facing a mirror, and thus doing the selfportrait of the draftsman doing the self-portrait of the draftsman. But this is only conjecture; Fantin-Latour
might also be showing himself in the process of drawing something else (Self-Portrait of the Artist Drawing). He might be drawing himself full face, facing something else or facing us, but not necessarily facing himself, just as others draw themselves in profile; thus we have The Painter Drawing (in the manner of Bruegel the Elder) or
Van Rysselberghe's seated draftsman, whom one might identify with the painter, at least by metonymy, but about whom one might also learn, through necessarily external indications, that he is another artist (in this case, Charpentier).
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28. Théo Van Rysselberghe, The Sculptor Alexandre Charpentier in front of his Easel Louvre Museum, Orsay Museum Collection. |
29. In the manner of Pieter Bruegel Pieter Bruegel in his Studio Louvre Museum. |
What does this conjecture bring to light? In order to form the hypothesis of the self-portrait of the draftsman as self-portraitist, and seen full face, we, as spectators or interpreters, must imagine that the draftsman is staring at one point, at one point only, the focal point of a mirror that is facing him; he is staring, therefore, from the place that we occupy, in a face to face with him: this can be the self-portrait of a self-portrait only for the
other, for a spectator who occupies the place of a single focal point, but in the center of what should be a mirror. The spectator replaces and then obscures the mirror, he makes one blind to the mirror by producing, by putting to work, the sought after specularity. The spectator's performance, as it is essentially prescribed by the work, consists in striking the signatory blind, and thus in gouging out at the same stroke the eyes of the model, or else in making him, the subject (at once model, signatory, and object of the work), gouge out his own eyes in order both to see and to represent himself at work. If there were such a thing, the self-portrait would first consist in assigning, thus in describing, a place to the spectator, to the visitor, to the one whose seeing blinds; it would assign or describe this place following the gaze of a draftsman who, on the one hand, no longer sees himself, the mirror being necessarily replaced by the destinatory who faces him, that is, by us, but us who, on the other hand, at the very moment when we are instituted as spectators in (the) place of the mirror, no longer see the author as such, can no longer in any case identify the object, the subject, and the signatory of the self-portrait of the artist as a self-portraitist. In this self-portrait of a self-portrait, the figure or face of Fantin-Latour should be looking at us looking at him according to the law of an impossible and blinding reflexivity. In order to see himself or show himself, he should see only his two eyes, his own eyes two eyes that he must, however, get over mourning just as soon, and precisely In order to see himself, eyes that he must just as soon replace, to this end, with this representation in sight, and in (the) place of the mirror, by other eyes, by eyes that see him, by our eyes. We are the condition of his sight, certainly, and of his own image, but it is also the case, as in
Hoffmann's "The Sandman," that we rub out his eyes in order instantly to replace them: we are
his eyes or the double of his eyes. A bottomless debt, a terrifying prosthesis, and one can always detect this fear in the draftsman's gaze, though the hypothesis is just as petrifying [medusante] for us as for him.
[Hoffmann's tale "The Sandman," is a
frightening story of torn out eyes and optical prostheses. The
children's nurse describes a wicked man who throws handfuls of sand into the eyes of children who refuse to sleep, making their bleeding eyes pop out of their heads. During a delirious illness, the student Nathanael associates the terrible face of the lawyer Coppelius (whom he would have heard shouting, "Give me eyes, Give me eyes!") with that of the itinerant optician, Coppola, who, while yelling in the streets, "I gotta da eyes too. I gotta da nice eyes," in fact sells only harmless eyeglasses. Nathanael buys a pocket spyglass to spy on the beautiful Olympia, Professor Spalanzini's daughter, who turns out to be an automaton. Then comes the scene where Coppola and Spalanzini fight over the eyeless doll. Spalanzini flings Olympia's bloody eyes at the student's head, screaming that Coppola has stolen them, etc. The end of the illness and delirium is not the end of the narrative the end of a narrative that the Freudian literature has, perhaps unfortunately, saturated with automatic interpretations. It is in "The 'Uncanny'" (1919) that Freud, in any case, illustrates with a reference to "The Sandman" his most eye-striking
formulation of the equivalence between anxiety over one's eyes and the castration complex; it is there that we find his discourse on the genesis of doubles, the effects of primary narcissicism, etc. Crime, punishment, blindness. At the center of it all is the figure of Oedipus: "The self-blinding of the mythical criminal, Oedipus, was simply a mitigated form of the punishment of castration-the only punishment that was adequate for him by the lex talionis.
... Moreover, I would not recommend any opponent of the psychoanalytic
view to select this particular story of the Sandman with which to
support his argument that anxiety about the eyes has nothing to do with
the castration complex. For why does Hoffmann bring the anxiety about
the eyes into such intimate connection with the father's death? And why
does the Sandman always appear as a disturber of love?"]
This is not only the hypothesis of the specular or of the imaginary duel. For a mirror is also necessarily inscribed in the structure of self-portraits of draftsmen drawing something else. But in this case, one must suppose, in addition to the mirror, another object, one that does not look, an eyeless, abocular object, or at least (since it may be a third being supplied with eyes or an optical apparatus) an object that, from its standpoint, its place, takes nothing into consideration, has no views. Only the topic of an abocular object, only this topical remedy, rescues Narcissus from blindness. And this to infinity, since there is no object, as such, without a supposed spectator: the hypothesis of sight.
Again once again one must observe the differences: this time between the portraits of another draftsman drawing something else (though these allograms are in every case figures of self-portraits) and the self-portrait of the author as a draftsman drawing something else.
Facing the easel, close up to it, is this Van Rysselberghe or his model, Charpentier,
himself like another draftsman, seated, glasses on his nose, his eyelids
lowered, holding a cigarette in the fingers of his left hand, which rests on his
bent back leg, while with his right hand he is quite visibly drawing) right now) this thing over which he is leaning but which is also hidden from our sight? Facing the easel, but with the marked distance of a step back, is it really the author himself (of whom should we say himself in this case?) of this
"Painter Drawing"
(in the manner of Bruegel
the Elder)? He is standing this time without glasses, his eyelids raised, holding a palette between the fingers of his left hand, his arm folded across his chest, while with the long stick poised in his right hand he is visibly not drawing but looking, with a painter's eyes and from a suitable distance, at the drawing's linea ducta, which, this time, we see and read beneath his feet, or more precisely, beneath his signature. And this signature is also the signature of another, a signature whose lines mime the rhythm of the whole scene, which is itself reflected and displaced, reassembled in a corner: the student of the master, humble, that is, close to the ground, seated cross-legged, visibly drawing, in the manner of the master, this thing over which he is leaning but which is also hidden from our sight.
One should once again differentiate the sketch of this typology. Yet in all the cases of the self-portrait, only a nonvisible referent in the picture, only an extrinsic clue, will allow an identification. For the identification will always remain indirect.
One will always be able to dissociate the "signatory" from the "subject" of the self-portrait. Whether it be a question of the identity of the object drawn by the draftsman or of the draftsman who is himself drawn, be he the author of the drawing or not, the identification remains probable) that is, uncertain, withdrawn from any internal reading, an object of inference and not of perception. An object of culture and not of immediate or natural intuition. (One might here locate, in all rigor, the condition for a sociology of the graphic art and for a pedagogy of the gaze.) This is why the status of the self-portrait of the self-portraitist will always retain a hypothetical character. It always depends on the juridical effect of the title, on this verbal event that does not belong to the inside of the work but only to its parergonal border. The juridical effect calls the third to witness, calls on him to give his word, calls upon his memory more than upon his perception. Like Memoirs, the Self-Portrait always appears in the reverberation of several voices. And the voice of the other orders or commands, makes the portrait resound, calls it without symmetry or consonance.
If what is called a self-portrait depends on the fact that it is called "self-portrait," an act of naming should allow or entitle me to call just about anything a self-portrait, not only any drawing ("portrait" or not) but anything that happens to me, anything by which I can be affected or let myself be affected. Like Nobody, like nobody else,'" as Odysseus will say as he is about to blind Polyphemus. Before even attempting a systematic history of the portrait, before even diagnosing its decline or ruin ("the portrait is in a state of collapse," Valery said), one must always say of the self-portrait: "if there were such a thing...," "if there remained anything of it." It is like a ruin that does not come after the work but remains produced, already from the origin, by the advent and structure of the work. (In the beginning, at the origin, there was ruin. At the origin comes ruin; ruin comes to the origin, it is what first comes and happens to the origin, in the beginning. With no promise of restoration:. This dimension of the ruinous simulacrum has never threatened quite "to the contrary the emergence of a work. It's just that one must know [savoirJ, and so one just has to see (it) [voir
ça i.e., that the performative fiction that engages the spectator
in the signature of the work is given to be seen only through the blindness that it produces as its truth. As if glimpsed through a blind. Even if one were sure that Fantin-Latour were drawing himself drawing, one would never know, observing the work alone, whether he were showing himself drawing himself or something else or even himself as something else, as other. And he can always, in addition, draw this situation: the stealing away of what regards you, of what looks at you, of what fixedly observes you not seeing that with which or with whom you are dealing. Does the signatory himself see that which he makes you observe? Will he have seen it in some present?
Fantin ventured to say of himself: "He is a model who is always ready; he offers every advantage: he is punctual, submissive, and one knows him before painting him."
Is this a stupefying or a stupefied tranquility? The superb irony of the portraitist as a model? The one, the other, knows at
least one thing: that he would never know how to be accessible as such,
and especially not to knowledge, neither beforehand nor after. All symmetry is interrupted between him and himself, between him, the spectacle, and the spectator who he also is. There are now only specters. In order to get out of this, it is necessary, at the very least, to share out the roles in the heteroportrait, indeed in sexual difference. Thus Picasso to Gertrude Stein: "When I see you, I do not see you." And she: "And as for me, I finally see myself."
As soon as the draftsman considers himself, fascinated, fixed on the image, yet disappearing before his own eyes into the abyss, the movement by which he tries desperately to recapture himself is already, in its very present, an act of memory. Baudelaire suggested in
Mnemonic Art that the setting to work of memory is not in the service of drawing. But neither does it lead drawing as its master or its death. It is the very operation of drawing, and precisely its setting to work. The failure to recapture the presence of the gaze outside of the abyss into which it is sinking is not an accident or weakness; it illustrates or rather figures the very chance of the work, the specter of the invisible that the work lets be seen without ever presenting. Just as memory does not here restore a past (once) present, so the ruin of the face and of the face looked in the face in drawing does not indicate aging, wearing away, anticipated decomposition, or this being eaten away by time something about which the portrait often betrays an apprehension. The ruin does not supervene like an accident upon a monument that was intact only yesterday. In the beginning there is ruin. Ruin is that which happens to the image from the moment of the first gaze. Ruin is the self-portrait, this face looked at in the face as the memory of itself, what remains or returns as a specter from the moment one first looks at oneself and a figuration is eclipsed. The figure, the face, then sees its visibility being eaten away; it loses its integrity without disintegrating. For the incompleteness of the visible monument comes from the eclipsing structure of the trait, from a structure that is only remarked, pointed out, impotent or incapable of being reflected in the shadow of the self-portrait. So many reversible propositions. For one can just as well read the pictures
of ruins as the figures of a portrait, indeed, of a self-portrait.
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30. François Stella Ruins of the Coliseum in Rome Louvre Museum |
31. Cigoli Narcissus Louvre Museum |
32. Cigoli Study of Narcissus Louvre Museum |
Whence the love of ruins. And the fact that the scopic pulsion, voyeurism itself, is always on the lookout for the originary ruin. A narcissistic melancholy, a memory in mourning of love itself. How to love anything other than the possibility of ruin? Than an impossible totality? Love is as old as this ageless ruin at once originary, an infant even, and already
old. Love doles out his traits; he sights, he comes on site, and sees without seeing this blindfolded love,
"this old child, blind archer, and naked," as Du Bellay says of Cupid. The ruin is not in front of us; it is neither a spectacle nor a love object. It
is experience itself: neither the abandoned yet still monumental fragment of a totality, nor, as Benjamin thought, simply a theme of baroque culture. It is precisely not a theme, for it ruins the theme, the position, the presentation or representation of anything and everything. Ruin is, rather, this memory open like an eye, or like the hole in a bone socket that lets you see without showing you anything at all, anything of the all. This, for showing you nothing at all, nothing of the all. "For" means here both because the ruin shows nothing at all and with a view to showing nothing of the all. There is nothing of the totality that is not immediately opened, pierced, or bored through: the mask of this impossible
self-portrait whose signatory sees himself disappearing before his own
eyes the more he tries desperately to recapture himself in it. Thoughtful memory and ruin of what is in advance past, mourning and melancholy, the specter of the instant (stigme) and of the stylus, whose very point would like to touch the blind point of a gaze that looks itself in the eyes and is not far from sinking into those eyes, right up to the point of losing its sight through an excess of lucidity. An Augenblick without duration, "during" which, however, the draftsman feigns to stare at the center of the blind spot. Even if nothing happens, if no event takes place, the signatory blinds himself to the rest of the world. But unable to see himself properly and directly a blind spot or transcendental trait
he also blindly contemplates himself, attacks his sight right up to the
exhaustion of narcissism. The truth of his own eyes as seer, in the
double sense of this word, is the last thing that can be taken by
surprise naked, without attribute, without glasses, without a hat, without a blindfold on the head, in a mirror. The naked face cannot look itself in the face,
it cannot look at itself in a looking glass.
This last locution says something about the shame or modesty that is part of the picture. It engages the picture in the irrepressible movement of a confession. Even if there is as yet no crime (whether a reality or a phantasm), even if there is no Gorgon, no mirror-shield, no aggressive or apotropaic gesture. Shame or modesty, to be sure, which is barely overcome in order to be observed, looked after and looked at, respected and kept at a respectful distance, its status that of a shade. Yet there is also fear given over to spectacle, the seeing-oneself-seen-without-being-seen, histrionics and curiosity, exhibitionism and voyeurism: the subject of the self-portrait becomes fear, it makes itself into fear, makes itself afraid.
But because the other, over there, remains irreducible, because he resists all interiorization, subjectification, idealization in a work of mourning, the ruse of narcissism never comes to an end. What one cannot see one can still attempt to reappropriate, to calculate the interest, the benefit, the usury. One can describe it, write it, stage it.
On the one hand, one will draw the artifact: technical objects designed, like prostheses, to supplement sight and, first of all, to compensate for this transcendental ruin of the eye that threatens and seduces it from the origin; for example, mirrors, telescopes, glasses, binoculars, monocles. But because the loss of direct intuition, as we have seen, is the very condition or hypothesis of the gaze, the technical prosthesis takes place, takes its place, before all instrumentalization, as close as possible to the eye, like a lens made of animal matter. It immediately stands out, is immediately detachable from the body proper. The eye is detachable, and it catches the eye: one can desire it, desire to tear it out, to tear each other to pieces over it. And this from the very beginning: the modern history of optics only represents or points out in new ways a weakness of what is called natural sight; beginning with what are called spectacles in English, as we noted only a moment ago, the draftsman's eyeglasses.
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33. Gavarni Two Pierrots Looking into a Box Louvre Museum |
34. Jean-Baptiste Chardin' Self-Portrait with Eyeshade Louvre Museum |
Whence the self-portraits with eyeglasses. Chardin's self-portrait, known as Self-Portrait with Eyeshade, bespeaks well the eyeshade, since it plunges the painter's eyes into the shade, or protects them within it. (Like that other detachable fetish, the hat, whose brim almost hides
Fantin-Latour's eyes in a self-portrait.)
And in addition, every bit as jealously, every bit as blindly [jalousement], it at once shelters and shows the same eyes behind a pair of eyeglasses whose
stems are visible. The painter seems to be posing face-front, he is facing you, inactive and immobile. In the Self Portrait with Spectacles (glasses without stems, a pince-nez for working perhaps),
Chardin
lets himself be seen or observed in profile; he appears more active,
momentarily interrupted perhaps, turning his eyes away from the picture.
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35. Jean-Baptiste Chardin Self Portrait with Spectacles Louvre Museum |
36. Jean-Baptiste Chardin Self Portrait with Spectacles Louvre Museum |
But in another self-portrait he represents himself in the process of
painting or drawing, the hand and the instrument visible at the edge of
the canvas. In this respect, one can always consider this self-portrait as one example among others in the series of Chardin's Draftsmen. Is he busy about the selfportrait or about something else, another model? One would not know how to decide. In all three cases, the glasses are on and a bandanna is wrapped around the head; the eyes are not blindfolded [bandés] this time but the head is bandaged up [bandée], a word that can always suggest, among other things, a wound: right on the face to which they do not belong, detachable from the body proper like fetishes, the bandanna and the spectacles remain the illustrious and most exhibited supplements of these self-portraits. They distract as much as they concentrate. The face does not show itself naked, especially not that; and this, of course, unmasks
nakedness itself. This is what is called showing oneself naked, showing nakedness a nakedness that is nothing without modesty, the art of the veil, the window pane, or the piece of clothing.
One can also, on the other hand, surprise that which does not let itself
be surprised; one can draw the eyes closed: in an ecstatic vision, in
prayer or sleep, in the mask of the dead or wounded man. (Look at the eyes of
Courbet's Self Portrait known as The Wounded Man [1854].)
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| 37. Félicien Rops Woman with Pince-nez Louvre Museum, Orsay Museum Collection |
38. Pisanello Study of Three Heads Louvre Museum |
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39. Odilon Redon |
40. Bernard de Ryckere |
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| 41. German School Portrait of Margarete Prellwitz Louvre Museum |
42. Francesco Vanni The Blessed Pasítea Crogi Louvre Museum |
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43. Gustave Courbet |
- Would you say then that the autograph of the drawing always shows a mask?
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Yes, provided that we recall all the values of the mask. First, dissimulation:
the mask dissimulates everything save (whence the blind and jealous fascination it exercises) the naked eyes, the only part of the face at
once seeable, therefore, and seeing, the only sign of living nakedness that one believes to be shielded or exempt from [soustrait] old age and ruin. Next, death: every mask announces the mortuary mask, always taking part in both sculpture and drawing. Finally (as a result, and this quasi-transcendental
deduction has no need of myth, event, or proper name), the "Medusa" effect: the mask shows the eyes in a carved face that one cannot look in the face without coming face to face with a petrified objectivity, with death or blindness.
Each time one wears a mask, each time one shows or draws a mask, one repeats Perseus's heroic deed. At one's own risk or peril. Perseus could become the patron of all portraitists. He signs every mask. "Each time," we said, each time a mask is worn on the face or held by hand, each time it is shown, exhibited, objectified, or designated, it is Perseus who is put to the test of drawing. Consequently, the story of this heroic son does not only give rise to the narrative of an event. The myth also illustrates or rather figures an index, the finger of a draftsman or the trait of a structure.
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44. Giacinto Calandrucci Head of Medusa Louvre Museum |
Without directly facing the fatal gaze of Medusa's facing only its reflection in the bronze shield polished like a mirror, Perseus sees without being seen. He looks to the side when he decapitates the monster and when he exhibits her head to his enemies in order to make them flee with the threat of being petrified. Here again, there is no direct intuition, only angles and the obliqueness of the gaze.
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45. 17th c.
Neapolitan School, Perseus Changing Phineus Louvre Museum |
46. Carel Van
Mander Perseus Changing Phineus into Stone Louvre Museum |
47. Luca Giordano Perseus Beheading Medusa Louvre Museum |
Let us not forget that all these, once again, are scenes of prediction and filiation,
scenes of the seer. The oracle had announced to Danae that if she had a son he would kill his grandfather. This latter, Acrisius, king of Argos, had his daughter locked up, but Zeus turned himself into golden rain in order to visit her. The resulting birth is thus heroic, half-divine, half-human like Dionysus. Dionysus, whom Perseus hates, and whose father their common father had shown himself as such, for once, at the moment of coupling. To sever the Medusa's head following Polydectes' challenge, the hero has to multiply the steps or tasks, and each time it is a story of the eye. He must receive from the Nymphs the helmet of Hades, the kune that renders one invisible. But in his search for the Nymphs, he first pays a visit to [se rend chez] the female elders, the Graiae, sisters of the Gorgons. Between the three of them they have but one eye and a single tooth. One of them stays on the lookout, keeping the eye always open, the tooth ready to devour. Perseus steals this eye and tooth during the changing of the guards, as it were, at the moment when they are passed from one hand to another and thus belong to no one. He thus steals a sort of subjectless vigilance. (Once again, the lone, unique eye stands out) is detachable; it circulates between subjects like an instrumental organ, a fetishized
prosthesis, an object of delegation or representation. Moreover, by making it into a partial object, all the representations of an eye dissociated or worked over by a graft are inscribed in this scene. This is as much the case in all anatomical and "objective" representations of the eye as it is, for example, in Odilon Redon's The Eye with Poppy.)
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48.
Odilon Redon |
After having severed the head of Medusa, after having hidden in his bag this potential for death that fascinates and redoubles the gaze of the other, leading to its perdition, Perseus escapes from the other Gorgons, thanks to the helmet of invisibility.
Each time, then, there is the ruse of an oblique or indirect gaze. A ruse that consists in sidestepping rather than meeting head-on the death that comes through the eyes. Death threatens sometimes by the specular
crossing of gazes (Perseus thus plays one mirror off another, looking at Medusa in a mirror so as not to cross her gaze), sometimes by the unicity of a staring eye, by a sleepless vigilance, but also by the missing eye or the eye-too-many, the expropriable eye that can be stolen, borrowed with usury, the eye that must not be seen, or the eye open like a wound, indeed gaping like an open mouth whose eyelid-lips might also open up, in order to expose it, onto a woman's sex. It would be difficult not to associate the Graiae with the Cyclops. The story of Polyphemus is both that of a Cyclops, thus of a monster, half-beast, half-god, the son of Poseidon who is in love with Galatea, and that of a giant made drunk and then put to sleep by the ruse of Odysseus, who then drives a fire-hardened stake into his eye: a single, unique eye, a closed eye, an eye gouged out. By ruse rather than by force (dolo oude biephin)) and by someone who calls himself "Nobody."
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49. Annibale Carracci The Story of Polyphemus Louvre Museum |
The metis of Outis: the deception that blinds is the ruse of nobody (outis, me tis, metis). Homer plays more than once on these words when Polyphemus echoes the question of the chorus: (e me tis... e me tis...): "Ruse, my friends! Ruse and not force! ... and who is killing me? Nobody!" And Odysseus, in turn, echoes back the same words by signing his ruse with his name of nobody and with his "metis." By presenting himself as Nobody, he at once names and effaces himself: like nobody, like nobody else the logic of the self-portrait. And yet the cruel ruse of Nobody does not fail to make a spectacle of its triumph. It is, in our poetic memory, one of the most terrifying descriptions of an eye gouged out. Has it ever been drawn? Has anyone ever represented the movement of this lever, of this mochlos, or fiery-pointed stake, as it draws a piercing spiral into Polyphemus' bleeding eye?
Cyclopia is the name of a region near Naples whose first inhabitants were called by the first Greek colonists the Opikoi (the Eye-landers) and whose other name was oinotria, which the Greeks interpreted as "wine country" (oinos = vinum). Talkative and much talked about, as his name might indicate, Polyphemus seems to spit out lava and rock. His drunken clamor embodies volcanic power the land pockmarked with craters, like so many erupting eyes. (Besides, the cyclopes, these wandering giants who are nonetheless at home at the forge, often belong, as we see here, to the guilds of vulcanites
and metallurgist-magicians.) Cyclopia, "Eye-land," unceasingly spews forth tears of fury.
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50. Francesco Primaticcio Vulcan's Workshop Louvre Museum |
The eye of a cyclops gives rise to heterogeneous representations. The description is rarely coldly detached or neutral. An eye, the one-and-only-eye, the monocle, is never an object.
Sometimes it appears open like a wound whose fleshy lips are still
bleeding: the obscenity of a scar, the impossible suture of a slit,
frontal genitality. Sometimes the anomaly appears invisible or banalized: a forbidden representation, as was sometimes the case, or a spectacle to avoid, the exhibition of an infirmity, the exposition of a shady or sinister squint.
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51. After Giulio Romano Fall of the Giants. Louvre Museum |
52. Louis de Boulogne Cyclops. Louvre Museum |
53. Jean-Marie Faverjon Self-Portrait in Trompe-l'oeil. Louvre Museum, Orsay Museum Collection |
One must add another possibility to this typology: drawing one's own mask in
trompe-l'oeil. Faverjon's Self-Portrait in Trompe-l'oeil
would be exemplary in this regard. The face presumed to be that of the author emerges from a frame, but within the
frame. It overflows the portrait in order to see you looking at what it
pretends to show you with an index finger pointing down toward the center, toward this third, open eye whose lid is raised like a theater curtain onto a scene that in turn overflows the eye. This, in the indefinite discharge of the entoptic phantasm or of the fascinated hallucination that can always be interpreted [interpreter] - or attributed
[preter] to the author.
Let us use this as a pretext to situate a translation or a transfer. It is also a question of a trembling hesitation - just as the hand of the draftsman or the blind man derives its decisive firmness from a groping that is overcome - the hesitation between a transcendental and a sacrificial thought of the drawing of the blind, a thought of the condition of possibility and a thought of the event. What is important is the hesitation between the two, even if it appears to be overcome in the incisive decision, in what makes each of the two thoughts the supplement or the vicar, the stand-in, of the other. For there is neither pure transcendentality nor pure sacrifice. The sacrificial thought seems to appeal more to an event than to a structure. It appears more historical because of this, and the sacrifice always implies some sort of violence (the violence of ruse or deception, the violence of punishment, the violence of conversion and of martyrdom, the blindness that comes from wounded eyes or from bedazzlement), even if what then happens or comes to sight oscillates between phantasm and the "real." This inflicted violence is always at the origin of the mythic narrative or of the revelation that opens one's eyes and makes one go from the sensible light or the lumen naturale to the intelligible or supernatural light. But the event, that which, in this case, happens or comes to sight, also seems to
annul itself in the structure, which is to say, in the circle of exchange. And that is why this historical logic resembles, and can always substitute for, a transcendental logic that is recalled each time to memory by the figure or species of the event. Such exchange, as we will see, can take on the typical - and always economic - forms of the conversion between blindness and the supplement of clairvoyance, indeed, of providence. The blind man can always become a seer or visionary. We could, provisionally, distinguish at least between the three types of violence we just named: mistaking (ruse or deception, punishment, and conversion. Yet the structural logic is powerful or involuted enough to allow these three types to be converted into each other. They exchange themselves, in truth, or take themselves for each other.
The blind man is, first of all, subject to being mistaken, the subject of mistake.
Coypel's The Error, for example, puts on the scene a man who is blindfolded rather than blind. He is deceived, either because he is deceiving himself, almost voluntarily, or because he is being deceived, letting himself be deceived by weakness of will, or else because he is grappling to deceive his own blindness. But as soon as he does not see - and it is through this that he is first and foremost exposed, naked, offered up to the gaze and to the hand, indeed to the manipulations of the other - he is also a subject deceived.
The fall or the mistake lies in wait for him. The other can take advantage of him: in order to make him fall, or in order to substitute one thing for another, making him thus take something for something else.
Greuze's Blind Man Deceived
serves as a paradigm: an old blind man taken advantage of by a young
woman.
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54. Jean-Baptiste Greuze Blind Man Deceived Moscow, Pushkin Museum |
For example (but is this an example among others? my dream of
mourning, of elders and eyes, no doubt asked me), can't the same
deception put forward one son in the place of another, make one brother
pass for the other, at the fateful moment of election or of the
testamentary blessing? Isn't the ultimate and irreversible deception,
the most monstrous and most tragic - the one that engages a historical
destination - the substitution of one child for another at the moment of
inheritance? Rebecca makes the old, blind Isaac believe that he is
stretching his hand in blessing over Esau, his elder son, though she has in fact substituted Jacob for Esau. Does not the intrigue of the blind man's buff, with all its lightheartedness and childlike playfulness, gesture in this direction - a direction sought after with outstretched arms, as in Fragonard's Blind Man's Buff or Bramer's Scene of the Blind Man's Buff? Isn't the point to designate a relay by touching - as well as naming - a successor in the
dark?
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55. Jean-Honoré Fragonard Blind Man's Buff Washington, National Gallery Art |
56. Jean-Honoré Fragonard Blind Man's Buff detail of the preceding |
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57. Léonard Bramer Scene of the Blind Man's Buff Louvre Museum |
58. Francesco Primaticcio Isaac Blessing Jacob Louvre Museum |
Isn't it always a question of a play of hands, as in the
Blind Man Deceived, where Greuze shows the old husband's hand holding his young wife's, as if this contact reaffirmed his confidence and certainty at the very moment when we see the two young lovers pulling the wool over his eyes, betraying him but also perhaps about to betray themselves by the fall of the jug?
I wouldn't swear to it, but that doesn't matter: didn't the paradigm of Jacob being blessed by Isaac also secretly lay the foundation for the scenario of your dream of mourning, of elders and eyes (the old blind men, the threat against sons or brothers), or for the duel with your brother over the power of drawing, the ruse of the younger brother converting his infirmity into a sign of secret election? The hazard or arbitrariness of signifiers, blindfolded Fortune who assigns proper names: your dream distinguishes between two generations; you are younger than the old blind men but you are also the father of the threatened sons - a father whose most visible first name, as you are often reminded, is consonant with Jacob's name as well as Isaac's, beginning with one and ending with the other.
This blessing of the blind is well known, but the narrative is often butchered. Two reversals, which are also repetitions, convert blindness into providential clairvoyance. In the first place, it is not a perfidious ruse, as is often believed, that pushes Rebecca to deceive the old, blind Isaac by substituting Jacob for Esau. Her ruse anticipates, responds in advance, to the designs of Yahweh, who had announced to her: "Two nations are in
your womb, and two peoples born of you shall be divided; the one shall
be stronger than the other, the elder shall serve the younger."
Rebecca sees far ahead, with God's eyes, into the destiny of Israel. And
at the moment when the blind old man blesses Jacob, whose hands are
covered with the skins of young goats to simulate the hirsute body of
Esau, one even wonders whether Isaac himself does not obscurely
portend - as if already consenting to it - the unfathomable decision of
an invisible God, this God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob who is
never seen face to face and whose ways are secret. Everything takes
place between speech and hands. Now why does Isaac consent to bless a
son whose hirsute body he believes he recognizes by touch but whose
voice he says he does not recognize? ("So Jacob went up to his father
Isaac, who felt him and said, 'The voice is Jacob's voice, but the hands
are the hands of Esau.") Once the deception is discovered, why does
Isaac confirm without reservation the blessing that was given? Why does
he give Esau the order to serve his brother? In the second place, after
the dream of the ladder, and after the vision of God, who says to him in
a dream -
- Why does Jacob himself, in turn, become blind, and why does he, in turn, bless Ephraim, the younger son of his son Joseph, and not Manasseh, the elder? Why does the old blind man Jacob, having himself become Israel, thereby repeat the substitution through which he was chosen, crossing his hands at the moment of the blessing? How can one choose, which is also to say, sacrifice, a son or a grandson, and why twice? How is blindness capitalized upon the heads of fathers and ancestors? What is the point? What is the interest? Why this usury of the eyes? Why is blindness not only the effect of a particular sacrifice (where one loses one's eyes or sight, has them sacrificed in the course of or through this particular sacrifice - though there are others)? Why is blindness first and foremost the very experience of sacrifice in general, this time, from the side of the sacrificer? From the side of the sacrificer's hand? In the exergue to his essay on Goethe's Elective Affinities, Benjamin quotes Klopstock: "The smoke of sacrifice attacks the eyes of the one who chooses blindly."
Why does sacrifice, in its own moment, make one go blind, regardless of what is at stake? And this, whether it be a matter of the act of choosing or of the beings who are chosen-chosen quite often in order to be sacrificed: the only son, the unique son, one son for the other - or the daughter, more invisible than ever. Unless it is the opposite: one no longer sees because one sees too far and too well - but this comes down to the same thing, to the same hypothesis of sight. Why a second time? Why does this blind man, Jacob, after having himself been chosen or blessed by a blind father, Isaac, why does he in turn invert the natural order of the generations with an eye to obeying divine providence and observing its secret order?
In representing Jacob's dream, as Rembrandt, for example, does, one might bring together into the same scene a vision (God appearing to Jacob), the closed eyes
of sleep, and the clairvoyance of two blind men - Isaac, then Jacob - this obscure lucidity with which they fulfill divine providence. This providence passes through their hands of the blind.
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59. Rembrandt Jacob's Dream Louvre Museum |
It is inscribed on the inside of these hands, which are guided by the hand of God, as if Yahweh's design were mapped out on the surface of their skin, as if it had, to use an expression of Diderot's, "traced the portrait on the hand." Diderot's Letter on the Blind for the Use of Those Who See describes in two places this vision "by the skin." Not only can one see "by the skin," but the epidermis of the hands would be like a "canvas" stretched taut for drawing or painting:
And in the Addition to the Preceding Letter:
The author of a Letter on the Blind and of the Salons was not only a thinker of mimesis who was haunted by blindness; he also knew how to write, "in the dark," a blindfolded love letter, a letter drafted for "the first time" "without seeing." He knew how to write:
Subject to being mistaken, the blind man is also the subject of punishment. As soon as it is assigned a meaning, the blow that makes one lose one's sight inscribes sacrifice into the economic representation of a kind of justice. This fatality is all the more intractable in that it follows a law of retribution or compensation, of exchange and equivalence. The logic of punishment overlaps and recovers the logic of acquittal or repayment. The punishment may annul the evil or even produce a benefit (the interest, the usury of lost eyes). Orion sees himself punished twice for the violence of his desire. He loses his sight, then his life. Yet the solar fire had restored his sight when, after having had his eyes gouged out by Oenopion, Merope's father, he was guided by Cedalion, whom he carried on his shoulders, toward the bedazzling star - this other eye, this eye of the other who saw him coming. And yet [en revanche] - it's
true - it was the solar venom of a scorpion that eventually put him to
death on Artemis' order. For revenge [une revanche] also reestablishes equivalence or equity.
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60. Fontainebleau School |
61. Fontainebleau School |
Turning into martyrdom, and thus into witnessing, blindness is often the price to pay for anyone who must finally open some eyes, his own or
another's, in order to recover a natural sight or gain access to a
spiritual light. The paradox stems from the fact that the blind man thus becomes the best witness, a chosen witness. In fact, a witness, as such, is always blind. Witnessing substitutes narrative for perception. The witness cannot see, show, and speak at the same time, and the interest of the attestation, like that of the testament, stems from this dissociation. No authentification can show in the present what the most reliable of witnesses sees, or rather, has seen and now keeps in memory - provided that he has not been borne away by fire. (And as for the witnesses of Auschwitz, like those of all extermination
camps, there is here an abominable resource for all "revisionist" denials.)
It is thus always a matter of returning from wandering, of restituting a destination, of
restoring what one should have seen to it not to lose. The punishment of Elymas, to whom sight will in fact be restored, itself restores to the proconsul the faith from which the magician had tried to turn him away.
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62. Giulio Clovio |
Saul, who is also Paul, "look[s] intently at him." He is seen pointing his finger in the same direction, on the left of Giulio Clovio's drawing, and the hands of all the characters are outstretched: toward each other, but also toward the center of an invisible presence that orients all the bodies. Foreseeing what is about to happen, Paul announces to Elymas that the hand of the Lord is going to cast him into darkness, but only provisionally and providentially.
Is blindness going to be translated by castration? Is anyone still interested in this? To illustrate the overwhelming "truth" of this Freudian axiom (though it is the question of truth that we are here placing under observation - or into memory, and into the memory of the blind), one has all the material for a simple and striking demonstration in the story of Samson. Samson loses every phallic attribute or substitute, his hair and then his eyes, after Delilah's ruse had deceived his vigilance, thereby giving
him over to a sort of sacrifice, a physical sacrifice. He is not only a figure of castration, a castration-figure, but, a bit like all the blind, like all one-eyed men or cyclopes, a sort of phalloid image, an unveiled sex from head to toe, vaguely obscene and disturbing ("What are they seeking in the heavens, all these blind men?"). He is stretched towards the invisible and threatening place of his desire in an energetic, determined, but uncontrollable
movement, being sheer potential, potentially violent, at once groping
and sure, between erection and fall, all the more carnal, even animal,
in that sight does not protect him, most notably, from shameless
gestures. More naked than others, a blind man virtually becomes his own
sex, he becomes indistinguishable from it because he does not see it,
and not seeing himself exposed to the other's gaze, it is as if he had lost even his sense of modesty. The blind man has no shame, Luther said in short. Following this analogy between the eye and the sex, can it not be said that the eye of the blind man, the blind man himself, derives its strange familiarity, its disquieting strangeness, from being more naked? From being exposed naked without knowing it? Indifferent to its nakedness, and thus at once less naked and more naked than others as a result? More naked because one then sees the eye itself, all of a sudden exhibited in its opaque body, an organ of inert flesh, stripped of the signification of the gaze that once came to both animate and veil it. Inversely, the very body of the eye, insofar as it sees, disappears in the gaze of the other. When I look at someone who sees, the living signification of their gaze dissimulates for me, in some way and up to a certain point, this body of the eye, which, on the contrary, I can easily stare at in a blind man, and right up to the point of indecency. It follows from this that as a general rule - a most singular rule, appropriate for dissociating the eye from vision - we are all the more blind to the eye of the other the more the other shows themselves capable of sight, the more we can exchange a look or gaze with them. This is the law of the chiasm in the crossing or noncrossing of looks or gazes: fascination by the sight of the other is irreducible to fascination by the eye of the other; indeed, it is incompatible with it. This chiasm does not exclude but, on the contrary, calls for the haunting of one fascination by the other.
Is not such phallic obscenity perceptible in this seventeenth-century
Dutch drawing, where one sees all these hands raised up against or
coming down upon Samson? The body is powerful, too powerful. Stretched
to the limit, oblique, exposed, almost naked, it is offered up to all
these violent holds - themselves seized, it seems, by desire.
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63. Dutch School - attributed to
Hoet (end of 17th century) Samson Blinded by the Philistines Louvre Museum |
Offered up
to the eager, envious, and impatient gestures of all these soldiers
seeking contact with Samson's skin under the pretext of overcoming the
superhuman force of this stiff and unyielding phallus. It makes one
think of a scene of gang rape. While hands immobilize the smooth skull,
a dagger is seen gouging out the right eye. The flowing locks have
already been cut, some are scattered on the floor, but most of them are gathered in a thick mane in the right hand of a Philistine who holds in his left hand the victorious and threatening shears.
Samson, the victim of punishment, is also one of the chosen of divine providence. During Israel's captivity in the land of the Philistines (the people having already been punished and made to expiate their sins), the angel of Yahweh announces to Samson's barren mother that she is to have a son. He will begin to save Israel, but "no razor is to come on his head." After having taken a wife from among the uncircumcised Philistines, after all the sudden turns of fortune that lead him into captivity and then into blindness, after God has "left him," Samson invokes Yahweh, who restores his strength. Samson will save his people by sacrificing himself, along with the Philistines, after being able once again to get it up [bander] - his
energy, that is. Column against column, a column between columns, which all come tumbling down: the one makes the others fall, on all the others and on itself. This sacrifice also implies exchange, capital vengeance, vengeance capitalized upon (not only an eye for an eye but "one act of revenge... for my two eyes"), that is, a usury of memory:
"One act of revenge... for my two eyes," the dead were "more than those": in this logic of the
sacrificial supplement, there is always recompense for ruin, benefits or profits from usury, in short, a hypothec of the eyes and a premium upon blindness.
It is this calculation, at once blind and providential, this wager on
blindness, that Milton translates in that self-portrait called Samson Agonistes. Like Samson, the blind poet is chosen by God; a terrible punishment becomes the price to pay for a national mission and a political responsibility. And the blind man regains, he guards and regards, retains and recoups, and compensates for what his eyes of flesh have to renounce with a spiritual or inner light - as well as a historical lucidity. For blindness seems to illuminate the "inward eyes":
But he, though blind of sight,
Despised and thought extinguished guite,
With inward eyes illuminated,
His fiery virtue roused
From under ashes into sudden flame, ...
But for Samson, the question remains alive, open, open like a wound but closed upon a secret: if the interiority of light is the life of the soul, then why was it entrusted to the exteriority of the body, imprisoned, "confined" in a ball as vulnerable as the eye?
Since light so necessary is to life,
And almost life itself, if it be true
That light is in the soul,
She all in every part, why was the sight
To such a tender ball as th' eye confined?
It is widely conjectured that the attacks upon Milton aggravated the condition of his glaucoma. His enemies did not fail to see in the blindness that struck him around 1652 a punishment, a punishment interpreted by Milton himself as a sacrifice to a "noble cause" (revolution, regicide, the defense of divorce). A sacrifice, certainly, but a sacrifice that is compensated for, or simply motivated by, the gift of visionary prophecy. This is what his friend Marvell, the author of "Eyes and Tears," said to him, comparing him to Tiresias:
Where couldst thou words of such compass find?
Whence furnish such a vast expense of mind?
Just Heav'n thee like Tiresias to requite
Rewards with Prophecy thy loss of sight.
It was, in fact, during a war with the uncircumcised Philistines that the hero of Gaza lost his sight. His trials thus also belong to an archive of politico-military justice and punishment. One might call before an imaginary tribunal, or hang on the wall of the same gallery, all those generals who were condemned to lose their sight or who had to face being blindfolded - all the "Belisariuses" of antiquity, David's, for example, or his rival Peyron's, and all the "Drouots" of modern day court-martials.
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| 64. Pierre Peyron Belisarius Louvre Museum. |
65. Jean-Baptiste Isabey General Drouot Louvre Museum |
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If, to believe you, the blind man is indeed the subject of mistake or punishment, can this really give rise to the conversion that you announced? How can blindness overturn the subject or bowl him over, turn him upside down or turn him around? By turning him toward what? A version or turning toward whom?
- Each time a divine punishment is cast down upon sight in order to signify the mystery of election, the blind become witnesses to the faith. An inner conversion at first seems to transfigure
light itself. Conversion of the inside, conversion on the inside: in order to enlighten the spiritual sky on the inside, the divine light creates darkness in the earthly sky on the outside.
This veil between two lights is the experience of bedazzlement. The very
bedazzlement that, for example, knocks Paul to the ground on the road to
Damascus.
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| 66. Lelio Orsi The Conversion of Saint Paul Louvre Museum |
67. Laurent de La Hyre The Conversion of Saint Paul Louvre Museum |
A conversion of the light literally bowls him over. Oftentimes his horse is also thrown violently to the ground, bowled over or knocked to the ground in the same fall, its eyes sometimes turned like its master's toward the blinding source of the light or the divine word.
In Caravaggio's painting (Rome, Santa Maria del Popolo), only the
horse remains standing. Lying outstretched on the ground, eyes closed,
arms open and reaching up toward the sky, Paul is turned toward the
light that bowled him over. The brightness seems to fall upon him as if
it were reflected by the animal itself.
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68. Caravaggio |
In addition to being mentioned in the Letter to the Galatians, the conversion is described three times in the Acts of the Apostles. The first account does not come from Paul's (or Saul's) mouth and is a more visual narration of the event:
It is during a vision that God appears to the disciple Ananias to confer upon him the mission of laying hands on Saul during prayer (and also during one of Saul's visions: the narrative of a vision within a vision). And this, "so that he might regain his sight":
The other two versions of the narrative are memoirs, the confessions or the self-portrait of a convert. Saul speaks in the first person. He puts more emphasis on the figure of the blind man as a witness. The blind man's privilege is that he will have heard as well as seen.
In the second autobiographical narrative, the destination of this testimony of conversion is seen to be even more clearly assigned. It is a question, this time, of converting others and turning their eyes - open at last - toward the light, a question of turning them away from darkness and from Satan (the angel of light but also of blindness) in order to recall them to God, in order for God to call them back to Him.
Sunflower blindness, a conversion that twists the light and turns it upon itself to the point of dizziness, the blacking out of the one bedazzled, who sees himself go from brightness and clarity to even more clarity, perhaps to too much sun. This clarivoyance of the all-too-evident is Paul's madness. And one blames it on books, in other words, on the visibility of the invisible
word: Festus cries, "You are out of your mind, Paul! Too much learning [grammata] is driving you mad!" One can bet that Paul's confession, the self-portrait of this mad light, will have come to represent the model of the self-portrait, the one that concerns us here in its very ruin...
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You mean yours?
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Anyone's - anyone among us, in our culture, who says "mine." This is what I also call the hypothesis of sight, that is, the suspension of the gaze, its "epoch" (epoche means interruption, cessation, suspension, and sometimes the suspension of judgment, as in the skepsis that we spoke of in the beginning). In Christian culture there is no self-portrait without confession. The author of the self-portrait does not show himself; he does not teach anything to God, who knows everything in advance (as Augustine never ceases to recall). The self-portraitist thus does not lead one to knowledge, he admits a fault and asks for forgiveness. He "makes" truth, to use Augustine's word, he makes [fait] the light of this narrative, throws light on it, in order to make the love of God grow within him, "for love of your love." At the heart of the Confessions, at the moment when the selfportraitist fends off the temptations of sight and calls for this conversion from the light to the light, from the outward realm to the realm within, it is a theory of the blind that unfolds, a procession [théorie] of the blind that files past. All the Tobits of the Scriptures are called together in his
memory, along with Isaac and Jacob. But not Paul, because of or in spite
of the fact that he is here the closest model, the blind spot at this
point of the Confessions) which themselves turn round a
conversion. And the evil comes as much from forms as from colors:
At the same time as he denounces the secular light of the age, of the siècle - and the siècle is itself defined by the corporeal light"' - Saint Augustine denounces the sleep that closes our eyes to the true light within. But he also indicts works of art, and most notably, paintings, "all these... additional temptations to the eye that men follow outwardly, inwardly forsaking the one by whom they were made, ruining what he made of them." The Confessions are presented as a sort of testimony for Christian brothers, but this attestation is a discourse - in the form of a self-portrait about this ruin and this sacrifice. The confession "raises up invisible eyes" against the "concupiscentia oculorum";
Would Saint Augustine thus condemn the temptations of all Christian painting? Not at all, just so long as a conversion saves it. A sort of allegory makes corporeal vision conform to divine vision. In this case, allegory would not exclude analogy. Quite the contrary. Such an allegorical conversion would recall a relation of resemblance between the human eye and this divine eye that is at once the one and only source of light, visibility itself, and the place of a monocular vision. The hymn would sing the praises of the divine eye simply by looking at it, by looking at itself looked after and looked at, guarded and regarded, by God. Just as "those who blindly love" this "corporeal light" can save themselves by taking in and taking up (adsumunt) this light to praise the light of the Lord, so the
painter saves his painting by showing this exchange of glances. Such an exchange is at once specular and hierarchized, that is, oriented, respectful of the infinite distance that the painter contemplates, and dissymmetrical (a mirror from on high below, or from below on high): between human and divine vision. The painting becomes this allegory, it shows the exchange of glances that makes painting possible. Whatever its symbolic overdetermination, Jan Provost's Sacred Allegory - of which this is not an analysis - must always be able to be contemplated as the representation or reflection of its own possibility. It puts on the scene, it stages, the opening scene of sacred painting, an allegorical self-presentation of this "order of the gaze" to which any Christian drawing must submit.
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69. Jan Provost Sacred Allegory Louvre Museum |
This putting to work of the self-presentation does not suspend - no more than it ever does - reference to the outside, as is so often and so naively believed. The desire for self-presentation is never met, it never meets up with itself, and that is why the simulacrum takes place. Never does the eye of the Other recall this desire more sovereignly to the outside and to difference, to the law of disproportion, dissymmetry, and expropriation. And this is memory itself. To "contemplate" this picture in this way, the gaze must become Christian; it is not that it must already be converted, but it must be in the process of conversion, learning to see the divine condition of the picture itself. Learning to see on this condition, which is possible only in hymn or prayer.
A Christian drawing should be a hymn, a work of praise, a prayer, an imploring eye, an eye with joined hands, an imploring that is lifted up, an imploring of surrection and resurrection (everything here becomes ascension and verticality of the gaze, except for the eye of God, without which everything would be blinded), like the eyes of the son and his mother who look in the same direction. Imploration, revelation, sacrifice (even the
sacrificial Lamb holds between his hoofs, like so many of the blind, the raised banner of salvation): this allegory shows the eye of the Other only by
unveiling the allegory of showing itself, the allegory of drawing as apocalypse. For this shows an apocalypse, as the allusion to the Apocalypse of John - to the book "sealed with seven seals"
- suggests. As its name indicates, the apocalypsis is nothing other than a revelation or a laying bare, an unveiling that renders visible, the truth of truth: light that shows itself, as and by itself.
This is an apocalypse of painting - as Christian painting. Everything here is at once overturned and put back in place, from on high to down below, from top to bottom and all the way through. Yet the second meaning of apocalypse does not come as a secondary grafting onto the first, for if revelation or contemplation (Hazôn) brings to light what was already there from the beginning, if the apocalypse shows this there) then it also unveils in accordance with the event of a catastrophe or cataclysm. Order and ruin are no longer dissociated at the origin of drawing - and neither are the transcendental structure and the sacrifice - even less so when drawing shows its origin, the condition of its possibility, and the coming of its event: a work. A work is at once order and its ruin. And these weep for one another. Deploring and imploring veil a gaze at the very moment that they unveil it. By praying on the verge of tears, the sacred allegory does [fait] something. It makes something happen or come, makes something come to the eyes, makes something well up in them, by producing an event. It is performative, something vision alone would be incapable of if it gave rise only to representational reporting, to perspicacity, to theory or to theater, if it were not already potentially apocalypse, already potent with apocalypse. By blinding oneself to vision, by veiling one's own sight - through imploring, for example - one does something with one's eyes, makes something of them. One does something to one's own eyes.
Memoirs and self-portrait, Saint Augustine's Confessions no doubt tell a prehistory or pre-story of the eye, of vision or of blindness. But before saying why I have always read them as the great book of tears, I would like to recall here the Dionysian counter-confessions of another blind man, Nietzsche's
Ecce Homo. It is once again a question of a duel in contre-jour) a duel between Dionysus and his other, Perseus,
his half-brother, or Apollo, the god of light and of the gaze, of form
or of figure, the Apollonian ecstasy "maintaining the eye above all else at the level of excitation so that it might receive the power of vision" (Twilight of the Idols).
Between Apollo and Dionysus a "fraternal bond" is certainly possible, if we are to believe Nietzsche, but only after a war of eyes and an apotropaic scene between enemy brothers. Nietzsche sees the Medusa between them, like a figure of death. The Birth of Tragedy had described the Dionysian festivals, with
their "extravagant sexual licentiousness" and "savage natural instincts," their "horrible mixture of sensuality and cruelty":
Nietzsche never had words cruel enough for Saint Paul and Saint Augustine. Yet however much his Ecce Homo plays off the Anti-Christ and Dionysus "against the Crucified" (Dionysos gegen den Gekreuzigten), the book is still the self-portrait of a blind man, and of a blind son gifted with a second, even a third, sight. He presents himself as an expert on shadows, to whom was given the experience of blindness. Such blindness threatened him, in fact, when he reached the age at which his father died:
And Nietzsche wept a lot. We all know about the episode in Turin, for example, where his compassion for a horse led him to take its head into his hands, sobbing. As for the
Confessions, we said that it is the book of tears. At each step, on each page, and not only at the death of his friend or his mother, Augustine describes his experience of tears, those that inundate him, those in which he takes a surprising joy, asking God why tears are sweet to those in misery (cur
fletus dulcis sit miseris), those that he holds back, in himself or in his son. Now if tears come to the eyes, if they well up in them, and if they can also veil sight, perhaps they reveal, in the very course of this experience, in this coursing of water, an essence of the eye, of man's eye, in any case, the eye understood in the anthropo-theological space of the sacred allegory. Deep down, deep down inside, the eye would be destined not to see but to weep. For at the very moment they veil sight, tears would unveil what is proper to the eye. And what they cause to surge up out of forgetfulness, there where the gaze or look looks after it, keeps it in reserve, would be nothing less than aletheia, the truth of the eyes, whose ultimate destination they would thereby reveal: to have imploration rather than vision in sight, to address prayer, love, joy, or sadness rather than a look or gaze. Even before it illuminates, revelation is the moment of the "tears of joy."
What does the anthropo-theological discourse (which we shall leave open here like an eye, the most lucid and the most blind) say about this? That if the eyes of all animals are destined for sight, and perhaps by means of this for the scopic knowledge of the animal rationale, only man knows how to go beyond seeing and knowing [savoir}, because only he knows how to weep. ("But only human eyes can weep," writes Andrew Marvell.) Only man knows how to see this [voir
ça] - that tears and not sight are the essence of the eye. The essence of the eye is proper to man. Contrary to what one believes one knows, the best point of view (and the point of view will have been our theme) is a source-point and a watering hole, a water-point-which thus comes down to tears. The blindness that opens the eye
is not the one that darkens vision. The revelatory or apocalyptic blindness, the blindness that reveals the very truth of the eyes, would be the gaze veiled by tears. It neither sees nor does not see: it is indifferent to its blurred vision. It implores: first of all in order to know from where these tears stream down and from whose eyes they come to well up. From where and from whom this mourning or these tears of joy? This essence of eye, this eye water?
In drawing those who weep, and especially women (for if there are many great blind men, why so many weeping women?), one is perhaps seeking to unveil the eyes. To say them without showing them seeing. To recall. To pronounce that which, in the eyes, and thus in the drawing of men, in no way regards sight, has nothing to do with it. Nothing to do with the light of clairvoyance. One can see with a single eye, at a single glance, whether one has one eye or two. One can lose or gouge out an eye without ceasing to see, and one can still wink with a single eye.
- Isn't that in fact what happened to you, as you explained earlier?
- Exactly, and that did not prevent me from seeing. In other words, two eyes can always become dissociated from the point of view of the view, of sight. From the point of view of their organic junction. But it is the "whole eye," the whole of the eye, that weeps. It is impossible to weep with a single eye when one has two, or even, I imagine, when one has a thousand, like Argus (whose eye is multiplied on the surface of his body, according to Hegel's Aesthetics, like the manifestation of the soul, like the light of the inside on the outside: "All in every part," said Milton's Samson, that is, completely whole, like the soul, in every part, in every place, at every point along its surface).
This is the moment to specify the abocular hypothesis - or the epoch of sight. Blindness does not prohibit tears, it does not deprive one of them. If the blind man weeps in asking for pardon (Samson: "His pardon I implore"), if a drawing of the blind recalls this, one catches a glimpse of this question: for whom does the drawing weep? For what? For sight or for the eyes? And what if these were not the same thing? For whose sight or whose eyes? Let's not forget that one can also hide one's tears (which amounts to dissimulating what comes to veil sight: look at
Lairesse's Venus Crying or Daniele da Volterra's weeping woman).
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| 70. Charles le Brun Weeping Louvre Museum |
71. Daniele da Volterra Woman at the Foot of the Cross Louvre Museum |
One can first of all weep without tears. In the descriptions it gives of "Weeping,"
Le Brun's A Method to Learn to Design the Passions hardly mentions tears. They do not appear in
Le Brun's graphic representations. Is this because he is describing man's Weeping? Would he oppose this to a woman's tear? What then is to be made here of sexual difference? And of the Tiresias within us?
Marvell [in "Eyes and Tears,"] compared his friend Milton to Tiresias. The poet of Samson Agonistes would have received blindness as a blessing, a prize, a reward, a divine "requital," the gift of poetic and political clairvoyance, the chance for prophecy. There is nothing marvelous or astonishing in this: Marvell believed he knew that in losing his sight man does not lose his eyes. On the contrary. Only then does man begin to think the eyes. His own eyes and not those of just any other animal. Between seeing and weeping, he sees between and catches a glimpse of the difference, he keeps it, looks after it in memory - and this is the veil of tears - until finally, and from or with the "same eyes," the tears see:
How wisely Nature did decree,
With the same eyes to weep and see!
That having viewed the object vain,
We might be ready to complain
......................................
Open then, mine eyes, your double sluice,
And practise so your noblest use;
For others too can see, or sleep,
But only human eyes can weep.
......................................
Thus let your streams o'erflow your springs,
Till eyes and tears be the same things:
And each the other's difference bears;
These weeping eyes, those seeing tears.
- Tears that see... Do you believe?
- I don't know, one has to believe...
1. Antoine Coypel, Study of the Blind - Louvre Museum
2. Antoine Coypel, Study of the Blind - Louvre Museum
3. Antoine Trouvain after Antoine Coypel, Christ's Healing of the Blind of Jericho - Bibiothèque Nationale
4. Raymond La Fage, Christ Healing a Blind Man - Louvre Museum
5. Theodule Ribot, Christ Healing a Blind Man - Louvre Museum, Orsay Collection
6. Federico Zuccaro, Christ Healing a Blind Man - Louvre Museum
7. After Lucas Van Leyde, Christ Healing a Blind Man - Louvre Museum
8. Antoine Coypel, The Error - Louvre Museum
9. Louis Desplaces, after Antoine Coypel, Truth Unveiled by Time - Bibliothèque Nationale
10. Jacques-Louis David, Homer singing his poems - Louvre Museum
11. Francesco Primaticcio, Isaac Blessing Jacob - Louvre Museum
12. Jacopo Ligozzi, Tobias and the Angel - Louvre Museum
13. Pietro Bianchi, Tobias healing his Father's Blindness - Louvre Museum
14. After Rubens, Tobias Healing his Father's Blindness - Louvre Museum
15. Rembrandt [attributed to], Tobias Healing his Father's Blindness - Louvre Museum
16. Bartolomeo Passarotti, Cain and the Eye of Abel - Louvre Museum
17. School of Guercino, Della Scoltura Si, Della Pittura No - Louvre Museum
18. Charles Baudelaire, Self-Portrait - Louvre Museum, Orsay Museum Collection
19. Joseph-Benoît Suvée, Butades or the Origin of Drawing - Bruges, Groeningemuseum
20. Jean-Baptiste Regnault, Butades Tracing the Portrait of Her Shepherd or The Origin of Drawing - Palace of Versailles
21. Henri Fantin-Latour, Self-Portrait - Louvre Museum, Orsay Museum Collection
22. Henri Fantin-Latour, Self-Portrait - Louvre Museum, Orsay Museum Collection
23. Henri Fantin-Latour, Self-Portrait - The Denver Art Museum
24. Henri Fantin-Latour, Self-Portrait - Louvre Museum, Orsay Museum Collection
25. Henri Fantin-Latour, Self-Portrait - Louvre Museum, Orsay Museum Collection
26. Henri Fantin-Latour, Self-Portrait - Louvre Museum, Orsay Museum Collection
27. Henri Fantin-Latour, Self-Portrait - Louvre Museum, Orsay Museum Collection
28. Théo Van Rysselberghe, The Sculptor Alexandre Charpentier in front of his Easel - Louvre Museum Orsay Museum Collection.
29. In the manner of Pieter Bruegel, Pieter Bruegel in his Studio - Louvre Museum.
30. François Stella, Ruins of the Coliseum in Rome - Louvre Museum
31. Cigoli, Narcissus - Louvre Museum
32. Cigoli, Study of Narcissus - Louvre Museum
33. Gavarni, Two Pierrots Looking into a Box - Louvre Museum
34. Jean-Baptiste Chardin, Self-Portrait with Eyeshade - Louvre Museum
35. Jean-Baptiste Chardin, Self Portrait with Spectacles - Louvre Museum
36. Jean-Baptiste Chardin, Self Portrait with Spectacles - Louvre Museum
37. Félicien Rops, Woman with Pince-nez - Louvre Museum, Orsay Museum Collection
38. Pisanello, Study of Three Heads - Louvre Museum
39. Odilon Redon, With Closed Eyes - Louvre Museum, Orsay Museum Collection
40. Bernard de Ryckere, Head of a Dying Man - Louvre Museum
41. German School, Portrait of Margarete Prellwitz - Louvre Museum
42. Francesco Vanni, The Blessed Pasítea Crogi - Louvre Museum
43. Gustave Courbet, The Wounded Man - Orsay Museum
44. Giacinto Calandrucci, Head of Medusa - Louvre Museum
45. 17th century Neapolitan School, Perseus Changing Phineus - Louvre Museum
46. Carel Van Mander, Perseus Changing Phineus into Stone - Louvre Museum
47. Luca Giordano, Perseus Beheading Medusa - Louvre Museum
48. Odilon Redon, The Eye with Poppy - The Louvre Museum, Orsay Museum Collection
49. Annibale Carracci, The Story of Polyphemus - Louvre Museum
50. Francesco Primaticcio, Vulcan's Workshop - Louvre Museum
51. After Giulio Romano, Fall of the Giants - Louvre Museum
52. Louis de Boulogne, Cyclops - Louvre Museum
53. Jean-Marie Faverjon, Self-Portrait in Trompe-l'oeil - Louvre Museum - Orsay Museum Collection
54. Jean-Baptiste Greuze, Blind Man Deceived - Moscow, Pushkin Museum
55. Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Blind Man's Buff - Washington, National Gallery Art
56. Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Blind Man's Buff [detail of the preceding]
57. Léonard Bramer, Scene of the Blind Man's Buff - Louvre Museum
58. Francesco Primaticcio, Isaac Blessing Jacob - Louvre Museum
59. Rembrandt, Jacob's Dream - Louvre Museum
60. Fontainebleau School, Orion's Death - Louvre Museum
61. Fontainebleau School, Diana Crying over Orion's Death - Louvre Museum
62. Giulio Clovio, Saint Paul Striking Elymas with Blindness - Louvre Museum
63. Dutch School - attributed to Hoet (end of 17th century), Samson Blinded by the Philistines - Louvre Museum
64. Pierre Peyron, Belisarius - Louvre Museum.
65. Jean-Baptiste Isabey, General Drouot - Louvre Museum
66. Lelio Orsi, The Conversion of Saint Paul - Louvre Museum
67. Laurent de La Hyre, The Conversion of Saint Paul - Louvre Museum
68. Caravaggio, The Conversion of Saint Paul - Rome, Santa Maria del Popolo
69. Jan Provost, Sacred Allegory - Louvre Museum
70. Charles le Brun, Weeping - Louvre Museum
71. Daniele da Volterra, Woman at the Foot of the Cross - Louvre Museum
ϟ
Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins
Jacques Derrida
Translated by
Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London 1993
Originally published as: ' Mémoires d'aveugle: autoportrait et autres ruines'
Jacques Derrida
Éditions de la Reunion des Musées Nationaux, 1990.
[10-Fev-2009]
Publicado por
MJA
