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A Tale of Grids and Supports , in the Style of Rauschenberg (AI-Generated Image) Introduction: Thinking Through Metaphors How should creativity and truth be explained? Do they arise from the insight of individual subjects, or do they depend on impersonal conditions that precede and exceed those subjects? Rather than treating knowledge as the achievement of exceptional minds, much twentieth-century theory turned its attention toward the frameworks that make thought possible in the first place. This article does not propose a synthesis of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, it examines, instead, a shared methodological gesture: both thinkers rely on tangible or schematic figures—such as grids, wooden forms, frames, canvases, subjectiles—to render non-subjective conditions of thought graspable. This gesture belongs to a long philosophical tradition. Plato resorted to the divided line, Kant to schemata that mediate concept and intuition, Freud to the mystic writing-pad. In each case, ...