Derrida, ruins, and love

There are several things I must fix about my summary of Memoirs of the Blind, below: first of all, I move too quickly to the scene of the self-portrait and overlook the more basic thrust of the two theses posed in the beginning and played with (that is, interwoven) throughout the text. These are that 1) drawing (the process, the act of tracing) is blind and 2) drawing (the trace itself) is of the blind (double genitive: what is drawn is some blind thing/person, what is drawn is for the blind). This sticks closer to the text but also stays closer to the trace and farther from the subject position implicated in the text--I was hunting for the latter while reading. Hopefully that makes it clearer: the entire book is an amazing meditation on the trace and, more significantly, on tracing, what it means to lay down a trace or compose a text (in the Derridian sense of this word, which includes drawing but also aspects of living more generally).

The reason I am correcting this is because this all led me to say "the self-portrait can only appear as a ruin, a prompting to recall what was never truly there," and only after--that is, only as something like an afterthought--sketch vaguely how this led to the gesture of the hands in prayer and the face in tears at this spectacle of ruin, at this "prompting to recall." While this is right, it seems a little too "negative," as Derrida will put it in "Force of Law,"a text he was writing near the same time as Memoirs of the Blind, from which I'll quote in a bit. That is, my inattention made the ethical possibility of this subject position in front of the self portrait (and who is involved in tracing more generally) seem to be a cryptic afterthought, when it is implicated in the "prompting" and in the ruin itself.

The amazing thing about the tears is that they turn the face of the observer into the ruin of which the self-portrait is a portrayal--and yet they escape the visual: one does not cry in order to see, but in reaction to something one is touched by. Sight has little to do with the tear: or rather, and more accurately, the possibility of sight is shot through with the possibility of being touched and thus having tears--they are coextensive possibilities that undermine each other. Even if someone cries at what they see, the tears fall because they were touched by what they saw--that is, were affected non-visually. Philosophy has always privileged sight at the expense of the tear (and touching): to assert that the position of the subject is that position always in front of a ruin, and that the "blindness" (to the fact that the ruin is oneself--one does not see that one is that ruin and thus is blind--and to the fact that what one stands in front of is a ruin--blind again) that constitutes this subject position "does not prohibit tears" (127), means precisely that philosophy can be shot through/deconstructed by another ethical possibility. This possibility would be to conceive of the visual as the non-visual, in the eye's being "destined not to see but to weep" (126-7): the visual standing in for whatever, throughout the history of philosophy, it has been a metaphor for: reason, justice, revelation, knowledge, presence etc. etc. What cannot be seen by this philosophy co-determines its possibility--it gets ensnared in a logic of the deferral and displacement of its own possibility by an ethics which exceeds it. 

I hope this clarifies what I was saying in that last post, and shows that the logic of drawing/tracing that Derrida is reflecting upon has this ethical possibility more tightly imbricated with it--if this is choppy and sketchy, I apologize, I had to take the dog out and make dinner! But we have to return to the important figure: the ruin. If the ruin is what the tear turns someone into, and if this ruin is what one is already, because the blindness of the visual is shot through with the possibility of tears, what is exactly that ethical act that involves crying in front of it? That is, what is that act that explicitly comports oneself to the ruin such that light is shot through with touch and with tears, that turns oneself into a ruin? Put differently, what is that act that ruins the destining of the eyes to make it weeping and not seeing, ruins them into eyes that feel and touch?

This act is love, according to Derrida, the love of the ruin. It is a ruining of oneself in front of a ruin, collapsing in front of it such that one respects its infinite inability to become anything other than a ruin, or restore oneself to a ruin. That is, it is an act that collapses again and again, infinitely, in front of its collapsing or ruining again and again. In other words, it is a respect for the ruin's self-deconstructing of itself by one's self-deconstructing of oneself, the iteration of one's traces in front of the other tracing itself into the infinitely other. This is not a mutual relation, and it is an impossible relation, but it remains what happens in an ethical call to respect the ruination that occurs already in a text or drawing (or a person) composed and composing itself in traces.

I don't think I've articulated this well, but hopefully the above will set up the more elucidating (and just amazing) passage from "Force of Law" that explains what happens in this love thoroughly. Note that this is not the ethical relation itself, but merely the "experience" (or rather non-experience) of it:

Ruin is not a negative thing. First, it is obviously not a thing. One could write... a short treatise on the love of ruins. What else is there to love, anyway? One cannot love a monument, a work of architecture, an institution as such except in an experience itself precarious in its fragility: it has not always been there, it will not always be there, it is finite. And for this very reason one loves it as mortal, through its birth and its death, through one's own birth and death, through the ghost or the silhouette of its ruin, one's own ruin [sa ruine]--which it already is, therefore, or already prefigures. How can one love otherwise than in this finitude?

--"Force of Law," in Acts of Religion, 278

Sorry again for the hastiness and sketchiness of all this--but if you can kinda see what all these fragments sort of revolve around (a reading of "ruin" as "tracing" or "deconstructing" that works against the "visual" tendencies of philosophy via that relation to the other and the self within the self-portrait), they might make this quote work for you.