Derrida’s Deconstruction of Presence in Of Grammatology and Mémoires d’aveugle

The Sign in Language and Painting

 

Introduction

Across his writings, Jacques Derrida relentlessly interrogated the metaphysical assumptions that underlie Western thought — the belief that meaning, truth, or being could be present to consciousness in its fullness. This critique begins with language, in the structure of the sign, and extends into the domains of art and perception. The present essay traces this movement from Of Grammatology (1967) to Mémoires d’aveugle: L’autoportrait et autres ruines (1990), showing how the logic of the sign and that of the portrait are structurally homologous. Both dismantle the metaphysical dream of presence by revealing that representation — whether linguistic or visual — is always a substitution, a writing of absence.

The Metaphysics of the Sign

In the chapter “The Signifier and Truth / The Written Being / The Being Written” of Of Grammatology, Derrida reexamines the philosophical heritage of the sign. From Aristotle through Augustine and the Scholastic tradition, the sign had been defined by the formula aliquid stat pro aliquo — “something stands for something else.” This definition presupposes two stable poles: a signifier (the sensible mark) and a signified (the ideal content or meaning it represents). The model assumes that the signified is present, and that the signifier merely points to it, functioning as a transparent mediator between mind and world.

For Derrida, this structure conceals a deep metaphysical commitment. It relies on the notion of a transcendental signified — an ultimate meaning or origin that would anchor the play of signs. The sign’s apparent stability thus depends on an illusion: that there exists a final presence, whether truth, essence, or God, that grounds all signification. As Derrida writes, “the signified concept is never present in itself, in an adequate presence that would refer only to itself” (Of Grammatology, 1967, p. 70). The very idea of presence is already marked by mediation.

The Deconstruction of Presence

By undermining the transparency of language, Derrida exposes the dependence of meaning on difference. The signifier is never a mere vehicle for an already given content; it is the condition for the possibility of meaning itself. Hence Derrida’s neologism différance — a term that simultaneously evokes difference and deferral. Meaning arises not from immediate presence but from the spacing between signs, the play of traces that defer final signification. Every signified becomes a signifier in another chain, producing an infinite regress that precludes any fixed origin.

This logic also overturns the traditional hierarchy between speech and writing. Western metaphysics had privileged speech as the medium of presence — the voice of the self — while relegating writing to a derivative, secondary status. Derrida reverses this order by showing that writing, understood as archi-écriture, is not a mere instrument but the very condition for signification. Writing is the originary spacing and temporalization that makes any sign possible. As he observes, “writing, before being the image of language, is the condition of its possibility” (Derrida, 1967, p. 56). Meaning, then, is always already written.

The Ruinous Portrait: Mémoires d’aveugle

In Mémoires d’aveugle, Derrida transposes this semiotic logic from language to vision. The portrait, he argues, obeys the same structure as the sign: it “stands for” the one who is represented. Like the signifier, the portrait depends on absence. The depicted subject is never fully present; the image commemorates a disappearance. The drawing substitutes for someone about to vanish, much like the silhouette traced by the Corinthian maid in the ancient myth that Derrida recalls. The portrait, therefore, functions as the visual analogue of the linguistic sign — a trace that gestures toward what is no longer there.

This absence is not merely negative. The portrait survives its referent and thus preserves what it simultaneously mourns. Derrida likens the image to a ruin: both memorial and tomb. In The Truth in Painting (1978), he describes the cartouche — the framed space for an artist’s signature — as “a miniature tomb” that both names and buries (p. 32). Mémoires d’aveugle extends this insight: the portrait becomes the signature of an absence, a name for what is already lost. To portray oneself is to inscribe one’s own disappearance. The image writes the visibility of what withdraws from sight.

Homology of Sign and Portrait

The logic of the sign in Of Grammatology and the logic of the portrait in Mémoires d’aveugle thus mirror one another. Both dismantle the metaphysical desire for presence, whether of meaning or of identity. In both, representation does not restore what is absent but stages its loss. Yet this absence is generative: it is the very condition of possibility for signification and for art. Derrida transforms absence from a defect into a source of creativity. Just as the written sign opens a space for meaning by differing and deferring, the portrait opens a space for visibility through the very withdrawal of its subject. To draw, like to write, is to trace a ruin, a mark that survives by detaching from its origin.

Conclusion

From Of Grammatology to Mémoires d’aveugle, Derrida’s work unfolds as a meditation on representation’s impossibility and necessity. Both the linguistic sign and the visual portrait are acts of substitution that generate meaning only through absence. They reveal that presence — of meaning, truth, or self — is never immediate but always mediated by the trace. In this sense, every act of representation is a writing of absence, an inscription of mortality. The portrait, like the sign, becomes a memory of what withdraws, the visible form of différance itself.

References

Derrida, J. (1967). De la grammatologie. Paris: Minuit.
Derrida, J. (1978). La vérité en peinture. Paris: Flammarion.
Derrida, J. (1990). Mémoires d’aveugle: L’autoportrait et autres ruines. Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux.