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Tâche. AI image Introduction In 1990, Jacques Derrida was invited by the Louvre to curate an exhibition as part of its Parti pris series, an initiative that paired thinkers from other fields with the museum’s vast archives. Derrida’s contribution, Mémoires d’aveugle: L’autoportrait et autres ruines ( Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins ), explored themes of sight, self-portraiture, and blindness. The accompanying text, printed on the gallery walls, transformed the exhibition into a hybrid space where word and image intertwined. The project was neither purely philosophical nor strictly artistic, but rather a meditation on how the visible and the legible overlap and complicate one another. Among its many reflections, Derrida dwelled on the notion of tâche —the artist’s mark or touch. This simple gesture, the trace left by the hand, opens a deep reflection on creation, interpretation, and the production of meaning. Seen through a broader lens, the tâche can be r...

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 in...