Dominique Zino

Drawing Conclusions: The Subject as Draftsman

Embedded in a number of works that speculate about the phenomenon of blindness are questions about what it means to see. How does one move from looking at to looking into an image (of self, of other)? When is the visual imbued with an aura of being able to discover the Real and when do sight and self-presence seem to be at odds?

In Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins (1993), Jacques Derrida explores this process of (self-)image making and comes to a few preliminary conclusions: (1) The draftsman always figures the blind, always draws the blind. (2) The draftsman himself is this blind one (thus all drawing is a self-portrait). (3) If the draftsman is drawing the blind which is himself, he himself is drawing blindly, is blind to his drawing (in drawing itself, putting the pencil on the paper covers the point at which the actual trace would be visible, thus “the inscription of the inscribable is not seen,” (45). (4) The self-portrait can only appear as a ruin, a prompting to recall what was never truly there: the work remains a constant “failure to recapture” a presence “outside of the abyss into which it is sinking” (68). Considering a range of fictional works, from Henry James’ The Real Thing (1892) to Jose Saramago’s Blindness (1997), I will explore how such texts enact Derrida’s hypotheses on positioning, presence and the “ruinous” project of depicting the self.

Dominique is in her third year at the Graduate Center where she is studying 19th and 20th century American literature, aesthetics and visual culture. She is interested in exploring the parallels between written and visual portraiture/self-portraiture and, on the side, attempts to draw and paint regularly.