The Blindness of Vision: Derrida, Memory, and the Ruin of the Self

AI-generated image inspired by Norman Rockwell’s Self-Portrait.

Introduction

In Memoirs of the Blind (1990), Jacques Derrida turns to the practice of drawing, particularly the self-portrait, to meditate on the paradox of sight. Vision, he suggests, depends upon a constitutive blindness. The very act of seeing oneself implies a limit, a moment when the gaze falters and must rely on memory. Through the self-portrait, Derrida reveals that self-representation is never pure presence but an interplay between absence and recollection.

This essay examines that paradox through his notions of origin and supplement, connecting them to Lacan’s account of the mirror stage. It argues that the blind spot functions as one of Derrida’s characteristic liminal zones, spaces where boundaries blur and meaning emerges from interruption. What appears trivial—the blink, the pause, the turn—becomes the hinge upon which perception, memory, and selfhood depend.

The Self-Portrait and the Structure of Blindness

For Derrida, the self-portrait embodies the fragility of self-knowledge. When artists paint their own likeness, they must repeatedly turn from mirror to canvas. This brief turning away—what Derrida calls the Augenblick, or “blink of the eye”—marks the interval of blindness that makes drawing possible. The artist cannot rely solely on vision; they must draw from memory, from an image already receding into the past.

Derrida writes, “Every drawing of the blind, if there is such a thing, would be a drawing of the invisible” (Memoirs of the Blind, 48). The invisible here is not the negation of sight but its condition. Just as the artist depends on what they no longer see, every act of perception involves a trace of what has slipped from view. The blink, seemingly trivial, reveals a structural truth: vision is never pure immediacy but a composition of absences—memory, imagination, anticipation.

Derrida elevates the trivial to the level of the essential. The blink, the gesture that passes unnoticed, discloses the metaphysical structure of perception. The smallest interruption, the instant when the hand draws what the eye no longer sees, exposes the dependence of the visible on the invisible. The trivial, far from insignificant, becomes the site where being and non-being intertwine.

Memory, Ruin, and the Question of Origin

In his meditation on memory and ruins, Derrida extends this logic of blindness to the concept of origin. A memory, he notes, is both presence and absence: it preserves something that no longer exists in its initial form. A ruin, likewise, is a fragment that gestures toward a lost totality. Both figures inhabit the space between what endures and what has vanished.

Derrida’s point is not merely that origins are lost, but that they never existed as pure beginnings. The origin is always contaminated by its own aftermath; it depends on what comes after for its recognition. As he observes elsewhere, “The supplement adds itself, it is a surplus, a plenitude enriching another plenitude… but which compensates for a lack at the heart of the first” (Of Grammatology, 144). The supplement is thus both addition and foundation: it fills and produces the origin.

In this light, the ruin is not the accidental degradation of a prior whole but the visible form of its incompleteness. Memory does not simply follow experience, it constitutes the very possibility of experience’s survival. The origin, then, is not a temporal point of departure but a retrospective construction, an image assembled from fragments. Derrida’s deconstruction of origin exposes the nostalgia behind metaphysical thought: the desire to find an untouched beginning unspoiled by difference. The blink of blindness, the ruin of memory, the supplement of recollection—all reveal that what we call the beginning is always already marked by loss.

The Mirror and the Division of the Self

Derrida’s reflection on the self-portrait resonates with Jacques Lacan’s theory of the mirror stage. For Lacan, the child’s recognition of its image inaugurates the ego, but through misrecognition. The subject identifies with an external image of unity, mistaking coherence for self-possession. The ego is born in alienation: the self becomes other to itself.

In self-portraiture, a similar structure unfolds. Artists encounter themselves as both seer and seen, subject and object. The mirror returns a unified image, yet the act of representing it exposes a gap between appearance and being. The moment of blindness—the blink, the turn—reveals that the self cannot coincide with its reflection. Like Lacan’s mirror stage, Derrida’s blink reveals the temporal structure of identity: it arises through delay, mediation, and loss.

The self, therefore, is not a stable origin but a process of differentiation. To draw oneself is to pursue an image that continually escapes. The subject, like the portrait, is always unfinished, haunted by what exceeds its frame.

The Blind Spot as Liminal Zone

Throughout his work, Derrida is drawn to thresholds: doors, mouths, margins, and now, the blind spot. These are the places where distinctions—inside and outside, seeing and not-seeing—collapse into each other. The blind spot exemplifies this liminality. It is not merely a defect in perception but a generative interval, a hinge where visibility and invisibility meet.

This blind interval functions like the pause in speech or the spacing in writing: it interrupts continuity and thereby produces meaning. The blind spot is not outside vision; it is the opening that allows vision to occur. To acknowledge blindness is not to renounce sight but to recognize its condition of possibility.

In the end, Derrida’s blind spot is an ethical and ontological invitation: to dwell within the limits of self-knowledge, to resist the fantasy of total vision. The trivial blink becomes the gesture through which the self admits its dependence on what it cannot see.

Conclusion

In Memoirs of the Blind, Derrida transforms the act of drawing into a philosophical allegory of subjectivity. The self-portrait, oscillating between sight and blindness, demonstrates that memory, like the ruin, is both loss and survival. Every origin, every act of self-representation, already bears its supplement within it.

To see oneself is always to mourn what cannot be seen: to trace, in blindness, the outline of a self that is both present and perpetually deferred. Derrida’s insight is that the most trivial gestures—the blink, the pause, the forgotten trace—harbor the truth of vision itself: that seeing is a way of remembering what we can no longer behold.

Bibliography

• Derrida, Jacques. Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins. Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. University of Chicago Press, 1993.
• Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976.
• Husserl, Edmund. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. Trans. F. Kersten. Martinus Nijhoff, 1983.
• Lacan, Jacques. “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function.” In Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan. Norton, 1977.
• Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Visible and the Invisible. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Northwestern University Press, 1968.
• Nancy, Jean-Luc. The Ground of the Image. Trans. Jeff Fort. Fordham University Press, 2005.