Jacques Derrida’s Concepts On The ‘Trait’ Of Drawing

In this literature review I will be addressing Jacques Derrida’s concepts on the ‘trait’ of drawing. Jacques Derrida explores issues of vision, blindness, self-representation, and their relation to drawing, while offering detailed readings of an extraordinary collection of images. Selected by Derrida from the prints and drawings department of the Louvre, the works depict blindness. In fictional, historical, and biblical form.

We are confronted with a question, that assumptions need to be deconstructed and deciphered, thus becomes the content of the reading. Memoirs of the Blind looms over the perception of art in a comparable way to De La Grammatologie 1976. (Of Grammatology) Derrida foreshortens the writing processes to their most basic element identifiable as the “the gramme ́” or “the trace ́”. In Memoirs of the Blind the trace ́ is identified as the process that makes drawing indispensable. It is comparable to the miner and their lamp. Articulated by the of the artist, presenting objects but making them otherwise absent out of blind bleakness. “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 sceptical”. Derrida then continues to describe the procedure of creating drawings and pinpointing their significance. Using blindness as a cliché for repeated processes moving beyond the significance of the trac(e ) ́as measurement of the artists or art critic success. Derrida signifies a consciousness of the drawings themselves. For Derrida, artists producing self- portraits is a journey of self-reflection and an expression of how the artist is feeling at a specific time. That affects the significance of a particular drawing. Every self-portrait is a memoir that reflects the story and the history that was, is and always will be. Each and every drawing is inevitably a ruin, signifying an unclear trac(e ) ́due to profound blindness and insight.

When we view a piece of work, we look but we do not see. We read what the representation of the work is, we make assumptions of what the work means from what we have previously seen before. We make a relationship between gestural marks and visual representation. We make sense of that work by using descriptive language. But when we are confronted with a question Derrida insinuates that our assumptions need to be deconstructed. This is then derived as the content. The trait of the mark indicates blindness. When we see something, art blinds us to something else. We are then bound and restricted by linguistic features and preconceptions of the world. Derrida speaks of the blind drafts men, not that they are visually blind in general but blind to the act. “in the tracing potency of the trait, at the instant when the point at the point of the hand moves forward upon making contact with the surface, the inscription of the inscribable is not seen.” In essence, a perspective of the act, you cannot see the point that you are drawing, you can never watch the subject and the paper at the same time. There is a gap in the relationship between the object and the mark. Overlapping elements create spaces, linework flatterns the shape of the object. This is described as the first powerlessness of the eye. The second powerlessness of the eye is when a line is made, it is not static, and it needs to be related to everything around it. Derrida demonstrates “Once the limit is reached, there is nothing more to see, not even black and white, not even a figure/ form, and this is the trait, this is the line itself.” And finally, the third powerlessness of the eye is described as the as the rhetoric f the trait. Its as if we cannot hold ourselves to look at a line in its physical state and form. We have to verbalise them. Blind to see it as it were. “is it by chance in order to speak of the trait we are falling back upon the language of narrative theology” Derrida insinuates that language will always be present to decode and decipher the draftsman’s art. Drawings and sketches if you will.