Drawing in the Dark: Derrida’s Mémoires d’aveugle and the Deconstruction of Vision

Memoirs of the Blind. AI image

 Introduction

Jacques Derrida’s philosophical project has long been associated with the dismantling of binary oppositions underpinning Western metaphysics: speech/writing, presence/absence, and sense/reference. In Mémoires d’aveugle: L’autoportrait et autres ruines (1990), Derrida extends this deconstructive inquiry to the field of visuality. Conceived initially as a text for an exhibition at the Louvre and later published as a richly illustrated book, the work questions the privilege traditionally accorded to sight and redefines the relationship between vision, memory, and representation. Derrida’s meditation on blindness, self-portraiture, and the ruin continues his exploration of the trace—the mark that both reveals and conceals, inscribes and effaces. Through the intertwined figures of the hand and the eye, Mémoires d’aveugle exposes the fragility of all acts of seeing, drawing, and knowing.

From Text to Exhibition

In 1990, the Louvre invited Derrida to curate an exhibition in its series Parti pris, where thinkers from outside the visual arts were asked to interpret the museum’s collections. Derrida selected drawings depicting blindness and self-portraiture—works by Dürer, Rembrandt, and Le Brun among others. The accompanying text, stencilled directly onto the gallery walls, surrounded the drawings, forming a dialogue between word and image. When later published, the book reproduced many of these images along with Derrida’s prose, creating a hybrid between catalogue and philosophical essay. The project thus blurred disciplinary boundaries: the philosopher became curator, and the exhibition became an act of writing. The resulting Mémoires d’aveugle exemplifies Derrida’s lifelong fascination with unstable forms—texts that are at once philosophical and artistic, visual and verbal, complete and fragmentary.

Blindness and Insight

At the centre of Mémoires d’aveugle lies an inversion of a classical hierarchy: the primacy of sight as the medium of truth. In the Western philosophical tradition, to see has been synonymous with to know; clarity of vision equated with clarity of thought. Derrida undermines this association by turning attention to blindness. The figures of Oedipus and Tiresias illustrate a paradox already latent in ancient myth: the blind are those who see beyond appearances. Not able to see the present, these figures saw the future.¹ What sight excludes, blindness discloses. The metaphor extends to thought itself, echoing Paul de Man’s Blindness and Insight (1983), where the author argued that every critical perspective contains conceptual blind spots that paradoxically generate the text’s most revealing moments. Derrida’s meditation similarly transforms blindness into a metaphor for the limit of vision, the necessary shadow without which sight would be impossible. Every act of looking harbours an invisible residue, a trace of what it cannot encompass.

The Self-Portrait and the Ruin

The theme of the self-portrait serves as a concrete dramatization of this blindness. The artist drawing herself must look away from the page to observe her reflection; at the very instant of depiction, she no longer sees what she draws. The hand moves blindly, guided by memory and anticipation rather than direct perception. Derrida turns this paradox into a metaphor for writing: the philosopher, like the painter, inscribes what cannot be fully seen. Each mark on the page—whether line or letter—testifies to an absence, an unseen origin.

The ruin amplifies this logic of incompletion. A ruin is never a mere remnant of the past; it is a structure that endures through decay, a form that survives by losing itself. In Derrida’s view, everything  is a ruin in progress.² The ruin, like the written trace, preserves presence through absence, bearing witness to impermanence while opening a space for projection and renewal. It resists closure, refusing to signify a finished whole. In this sense, Mémoires d’aveugle itself is a ruin—an exhibition turned book, a text haunted by its vanished material form.

Touch, Trace, and the Body

Underlying Derrida’s meditation is a phenomenological concern with the senses. Drawing and writing both depend on the interplay of the hand and the eye, of touch and sight. By emphasizing the tactile gesture—the artist’s tâche, or touch—Derrida recalls the phenomenology of Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty, for whom perception is rooted in bodily experience. The artist’s hand leaves a trace on the surface, transforming physical contact into representation. The viewer, in turn, reconstructs meaning through her own bodily and cultural memory. Meaning thus emerges not from an isolated act of vision but from a network of gestures, habits, and recollections—a tactile hermeneutics.

Conclusion

Mémoires d’aveugle broadens deconstruction beyond language to encompass the visual field. In exploring blindness, touch, and the ruin, Derrida reveals that every representation—whether drawing, writing, or philosophical concept—is an act of faith performed in partial darkness. The artist’s blind hand mirrors the philosopher’s pen, each guided by what cannot be entirely seen or known. Far from lamenting this blindness, Derrida celebrates it as the very condition of creation. Every image, like every text, is a ruin in progress: an unfinished trace of what once sought to appear.

Notes and References

¹ Derrida, J. (1993). Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins (P.-A. Brault & M. Naas, Trans.). University of Chicago Press, p. 26.
² Ibid., p. 5.

Bibliography 

Derrida, J. (1990). Mémoires d’aveugle: L’autoportrait et autres ruines. Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux.

Derrida, J. (1993). Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins (P.-A. Brault & M. Naas, Trans.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

De Man, P. (1983). Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (2nd ed.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Merleau-Ponty, M. (1964). Le visible et l’invisible. Paris: Gallimard.

Husserl, E. (1970). The crisis of European sciences and transcendental phenomenology. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

Richards, K. M. (2008). Derrida reframed. London: I.B. Tauris.