Derrida, Merleau-Ponty, depth, and the body, almost concluded

Continued, once more, from last time:

“We are talking here about drawing, not painting,” Derrida says in Memoirs of the Blind (cited as MB, p 44). Are we to understand this as a signal of a turn away from Merleau-Ponty, even though we have not yet developed fully what painting is for him and whether it has a relationship to drawing? In some sense, we must answer this in the affirmative. For the sense in which Merleau-Ponty is developing his idea of depth already forecloses any interpretation of drawing that would not already appropriate it to the sphere of painting. This is because we can already tell that it must interpret the line not as something that functions as a sort of division of space that would outline or give boundaries, remaining in itself something flat and without thickness. We know that it must itself be depth, or have a thickness that would indicate some sort of volume is constituted in its simple and slight mark. In short, the line cannot be a surface, since what is fleshly has no surfaces: as we saw, it only sets up arrangements of presences that do not collapse into anything that one could call a representation on a “flat canvas.” The line, therefore, would have to be itself one of these presences, even though we might think that it is itself the only thing that would be able to organize or arrange them. And this is what Merleau-Ponty indeed says in “Cézanne’s Doubt,” his great tribute to the artist published just after the Phenomenology of Perception:

It is Cézanne's genius that when the overall composition of the picture is seen globally, perspectival distortions are no longer visible in their own right but rather contribute, as they do in natural vision, to impression of an emerging order, an object in the act of appearing, organizing itself before our eyes. In the same way, the contour of an object conceived as a line encircling the object belongs not to the visible we but to geometry. If one outlines the shape of an apple with a continuous line, one makes an object of the shape, whereas the contour is rather ideal limit toward which the sides of the apple recede in depth. Not to indicate any shape would be to deprive the objects of their identity. To trace just a single outline sacrifices depth—that is, the dimension in which the thing is presented not as spread out before us but as an inexhaustible reality full of reserves. That is why Cézanne follows the swell of the object in modulated colors and indicates several outlines in blue. Rebounding among these, one's glance captures a shape that emerges from among them all, just as it does in perception (in Sense and Non-Sense, 9-25).

“To trace just a single outline sacrifices depth:” this remarkable sentence betrays the fact that for Merleau-Ponty, drawing, as he says quite explicitly in “Eye and Mind,” is merely a “mode of expression” of painting, a derivative or privative status of a richer phenomenon: “one drawing, even a line, can embrace all its”—that is, painting’s—“bold potential” (“EM,” 172). That is, when the line is conceived properly within the element of the flesh, it is a mark that opens up into the depth that painting figures: it suggests not only the edge of an apple when seen straight-on or in only two-dimensions, but extends or “recedes” into the canvas to suggest that it continues to wrap itself around the apple as its edge in space—the fleshy space of the visible. When it is conceived as an outline, however, it is precisely like conceiving the depth of the pool as the mathematical distance between the surface and the bottom: depth qua flesh is sacrificed.
If Derrida considers drawings in Memoirs of the Blind, then, we understand him to be trying to rethink the phenomenon of the surface and the outline—that is, if he is not talking about the line in the terms that Merleau-Ponty uses. We must ask, then, whether his drawings are appropriated within the sphere of painting or whether they remain independent from it. Or, perhaps a better question: is the self-portrait, in Derrida’s eyes, a painting? This question might lead us to more answers since the self-portrait is that object that Derrida continually studies throughout Memoirs of the Blind, claiming that, in fact, all self-portraits are drawings of the blind (MB, 2, 45 and passim). He says this for one simple reason, which constitutes merely the other side of this claim: drawing itself is blind, in the sense that at the point at which a trace is put down upon the sheet of paper, the point itself which makes the trace cannot be seen by the draftsman (“the drawing is blind,” MB, 2).

Obviously these two claims mean that Derrida considers the drawing, insofar as it is visible, somewhat differently than we might expect. Is not the drawing, completed and there before us in a gallery, visible? How could it still be blind—even if we do grant that the point where the lines that make it up remains unseen to the draftsman (the “aperspective of the graphic act,” as Derrida calls it; MB, 44-45)? Derrida shows us that these marks or traits we claim to see before us disappear when we look a little more closely:

What is to be thought now of the trait once traced? That is, not of its pathbreaking course, not of the inaugural path of the trace, but of that which remains of it? A tracing, an outline, cannot be seen. One should in fact not see it (let’s not say however: “One must not see it”) insofar as all the colored thickness that it retains tends to wear itself out so as to mark the single edge of a contour: between the inside and the outside of a figure. Once this limit is reached, there is nothing more to see, not even black and white, not even figure/form, and this is the trait, the line itself: which is thus no longer what it is, because from then on it never relates to itself without dividing itself just as soon… This limit is never presently reached, but drawing always signals towards this inaccessibility, toward the threshold where only the surroundings of the trait appear—that which the trait spaces by delimiting and which thus does not belong to the trait. Nothing belongs to the trait, and thus, to drawing… not even its own “trace” (MB, 53-4).

The lines we claim that we see in a drawing we do not see. And yet, it seems that this is because they precisely do not do what Merleau-Ponty says—that is, disappear into a structure of presences, into a painting. Rather, Derrida says they disappear before us because the two-dimensional representations that the line gives a contour to encroach upon it and blot it out (this is the “withdrawal or the eclipse, the differential inappearance of the trait;” MB, 53). If we look hard for just a line in any drawing, we miss it. And because these representations are precisely not the presences of a painting, the fullness of depths and colors, but merely the empty white space of a page—because of this all presence is obliterated by the representation that effaces itself, and we must conclude that the self-portrait that Derrida gives us cannot be a painting in Merleau-Ponty’s sense of the word.
But something more is happening here: we claimed that we saw the drawing, that it was precisely that object that was visible, when it turned out that exactly in the lines that supposedly made it up, it disappeared before us. Radical changes to our conception of the visible result from this, because this does not suggest that what is visible is merely what is unseen. Rather, the marks disappeared or withdrew when we tried to look at them more closely. What is crucial about this fact is that we must understand that the act of looking again in effect redraws the line, according to Derrida: the looking closer or lending a narrative to the trait such that we can isolate it from the figures that overtake it therefore turns us into something of a draftsman (this is the “rhetoric of the trait;” MB, 56). Looking past this fact that the drawing thus has truly become a self-portrait for us (we will come back to it soon enough), what is important about this is that what is visible, for Derrida, always prompts us to redraw what is seen: it is therefore not just that the line is not visible for us, that the visible is the unseen.
But does this mean, then, that Derrida seems to have a radically different idea of the visible than Merleau-Ponty?

(To be continued...)