Thinking Out of Sight
Writings on the Arts of the Visible
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- $64.99
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- $64.99
Publisher Description
Jacques Derrida remains a leading voice of philosophy, his works still resonating today—and for more than three decades, one of the main sites of Derridean deconstruction has been the arts. Collecting nineteen texts spanning from 1979 to 2004, Thinking out of Sight brings to light Derrida’s most inventive ideas about the making of visual artworks.
The book is divided into three sections. The first demonstrates Derrida’s preoccupation with visibility, image, and space. The second contains interviews and collaborations with artists on topics ranging from the politics of color to the components of painting. Finally, the book delves into Derrida’s writings on photography, video, cinema, and theater, ending with a text published just before his death about his complex relationship to his own image. With many texts appearing for the first time in English, Thinking out of Sight helps us better understand the critique of representation and visibility throughout Derrida’s work, and, most importantly, to assess the significance of his insights about art and its commentary.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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. The pieces span from 1979 to the last year of his life and are divided into three sections. The first deals with visibility and language; the second concerns the "rhetoric of the line" (particularly in drawing and painting); the third is about photography, video, and theater. In one interview, Derrida speaks of film offering "the means to rethink or refound all the relations between the word and silent art." In "Marx is (Quite) Somebody," he muses on a play about Marx and what it means to bear a name. Themes include Derrida's self-proclaimed incompetence about drawing, and his obsession with blindness (he suggests that it is "in a way the origin of drawing"). His writing requires careful parsing, as even simple ideas are written complexly: "Silence is my most sublime, my most peaceful, yet my most undeniable declaration of war or scorn," he writes in an essay on how he is seen. Philosophically minded readers will find much to consider in the way of art criticism.
