Description
Book SynopsisTrade Review“Who other than Jacques Derrida could have demonstrated with this degree of insight and lucidity the essential relationship between the visual arts and invisibility, nonappearance, absence, the night, blindness, even death? This superb collection of essays on painting, drawing, photography, video, cinema, and theater will forever transform both the way we understand Derrida and the way we look at the visual arts.” -- Michael Naas, DePaul University
“This wonderful collection brings together several of Derrida’s most beautiful and wildly engaging thoughts on the visual and performing arts. Many of the essays, lectures, and interviews are presented here for the first time in English, and others are even published for the first time anywhere. Together, not only do they delineate the relations among drawing, painting, photography, film, theater, and writing, but they also suggest that the arts are never just art; they are different modes of thinking and writing. This collection offers an exquisitely rich introduction to Derrida’s singular contribution to the arts of reading and thinking.” -- Eduardo L. Cadava, Princeton University
"This wide-ranging collection of essays, lectures, and interviews, shows philosopher Jacques Derrida (
Acts of Religion) (1930–2004) applying his signature deconstructionist thinking to the visual arts...Philosophically minded readers will find much to consider in the way of art criticism." * Publisher's Weekly *
Table of ContentsEditors’ Foreword
Part 1: The Traces of the Visible The Spatial Arts: An Interview by Peter Brunette and David Wills
Thinking Out of Sight
Trace and Archive, Image and Art
Part 2: Rhetoric of the Line: Painting, Drawing To Illustrate, He Said
The Philosopher’s Design: An Interview by Jérôme Coignard
Drawing by Design
Pregnances
To Save the Phenomena: For Salvatore Puglia
Four Ways to Drawing
Ecstasy, Crisis: An Interview with Valerio Adami and Roger Lesgards
Color to the Letter
The “Undersides” of Painting, Writing, and Drawing: Support, Substance, Subject, Suppost, and Supplice
Part 3: Spectralities of the Image: Photography, Video, Cinema, and Theater Aletheia
Videor
The Ghost Dance: An Interview by Mark Lewis and Andrew Payne
Cinema and Its Ghosts: An Interview by Antoine de Baecque and Thierry Jousse
The Sacrifice
Marx Is (Quite) Somebody
The Survivor, the Surcease, the Surge
Notes
Bibliography on the Arts and Architecture
Filmography
Notes on Editors and Translators
Index
