A moving prism

Louis de Brocquy, Head and horizon (1960) » When we say “in us,” when we speak so easily and so painfully of inside and outside, we are naming space, we are speaking of a visibility of the body, a geometry of gazes, an orientation of perspectives. We are speaking of images. What is only in us seems to be reducible to images, which might be memories or monuments, but which are reducible in any case to a memory that consists of visible scen es that are no longer anything but images, since the other of whom they are the images appears only as the one who has disappeared or passed away, as the one who, having passed away, leaves “in us” only images. He is no more, he whom we see in images or in recollection, he of whom we speak, whom we cite, to whom we attempt to give back words, to let speak—he is no more, he is no longer here, no longer there. And nothing can begin to dissipate the terrifying and chilling light of this certainty. As if respect for this certainty were still a debt, the l...

Image: The Key, Jackson Pollock , 1946 » Are we hearing from Derrida again, does he still live, or is this what is left of him in the words we read and speak? A certain haunting or spectrality is induced through this equivocation, and this equivocation, he tells us, is structural, even originary. We expect survival to come later, as a concept that follows a life, as a predicament we face upon the death of the author, but Derrida tells us, here, at the end of his life, that the predicament was always there and that this equivocation, this question of survival, even this imperative to affirm survival, is there from the outset, built into the language that precedes us.  – Judith Butler, On Never Having Learned How to Live