Nico Daniel Schlösser

Position Paper

 

 

 

Vincent Van Gogh: Vieux souliers aux lacets (1886)

 

Jacques Derrida: “Restitutions of the truth in pointing [pointure]”

 

 

“POINTURE (Latin punctura), sb. fem. Old synonym of prick. Term in printing, small iron blade with a point, used to fix the page to be printed on the tympan. The hole which it makes in the paper. Term in shoemaking, glovemaking: number of stitches in a shoe or glove.” Littré

 

[Â…]

 

— What interested me, was finally to see explained from a certain angle why I had always found this passage of Heidegger’s on Van Gogh ridiculous and lamentable. So it really was the naïveté of what Schapiro rightly calls a “projection”. One is not only disappointed when his academic high seriousness, his severity and rigor of tone give way to this “illustration” (bildliche Darstellung). One is not only disappointed by the consumerlike hurry toward the content of a representation, by the heaviness of the pathos, by the coded triviality of this description, which is both overloaded and impoverished, and one never knows if it’s busying itself around a picture, “real” shoes, or shoes that are imaginary but outside painting; not only disappointed by the crudeness of the framing, the arbitrary and barbaric nature of the cutting-out, the massive self-assurance of the identification: “a pair of peasants’ shoes”, just like that! Where did he get that from? Where does he explain himself on this matter? So one is not only disappointed, one sniggers. The fall in tension is too great. One follows step by step the moves of a “great thinker”, as he returns to the origin of the work of art and of truth, traversing the whole history of the West and then suddenly, at a bend in a corridor, here we are on a guided tour, as schoolchildren or tourists. Someone’s gone to fetch the guide from the neighboring farm. Full of goodwill. He loves the earth and a certain type of painting when he can find himself in it [quand il s’y retrouve]. Giving up his usual activity he goes off to get his key while the visitors wait, slowly getting out of the coach. (There is a Japanese tourist among them, who in a moment will ask a few questions of the guide, in a stage whisper.) Then the tour begins. With his local (Swabian) accent, he tries to get the visitors going (he sometimes manages it and each time this happens he also trembles regularly, in time), he piles up the associations and immediate projections. From time to time he points out of the window to the fields and nobody notices that he’s no longer talking about painting. All right. And one says to oneself that the scene, the choice of the example, the procedure of the treatment, nothing in all this is fortuitous. This casual guide is the very person who, before and after this incredible tirade, carries on with his discourse on the origin of the work of art and on truth. It’s the same discourse, it has never been interrupted by the slightest digression (what all these professorial procedures with regard to the shoes are lacking in, moreover, is the sense of digression: the shoes have to make a pair and walk on the road, forwards or backwards, in a circle if pushed, but with no digressions or sidesteps allowed; now there is a link between the detachability of the step and the possibility of the digressive). I see that your are shocked, in your deference, by the scene which I have, how shall I put it— projected.

 

[Â…]

 

From: Jacques Derrida: The truth in painting. Translated by Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press 1987. 255, 292-3.

 

 

Staging Martin Heidegger as a tourist guide: Jacques Derrida’s “Restitutions of the truth in pointing [pointure]”

 

Nico Daniel Schlösser

 

I have always admired the beautiful eloquence with which Jacques Derrida, in the short passage quoted above, molds his philosophical critique of Martin HeideggerÂ’s The Origin of the Work of Art (1935/36) into a genuinely literary form.

 

The passage is an excerpt from Derrida’s text “Restitutions of the truth in pointing [pointure],” the last chapter of the book The Truth in painting, originally published by Derrida in 1978. In this chapter, Derrida restages and comments on a sort of duel which takes place between Heidegger and Meyer Schapiro, an American art historian. In his article “The Still Life as a Personal Object,” Schapiro argues that Heidegger, in The Origin of the Work of Art, projects his (national socialist) ideology of the primordial and earthy into Vincent Van Gogh’s painting Vieux souliers aux lacets (1886) by attributing the shoes depicted to a peasant woman. Schapiro, on his part, claims: “They are the shoes of the artist” (Schapiro 205), that is, they are Van Gogh’s own shoes.

 

For Derrida (or Derrida’s text), there is projection on both sides. He agrees with Schapiro to the extent that Heidegger’s pathetic verbalization of the truth disclosed in the painting reveals his proximity to national socialist ideology: “From the dark opening of the worn insides of the shoes […]” (Heidegger 159). The projection, Derrida asserts, rests on Heidegger’s choice of object. The assumed content of the canvas meets Heidegger’s ideological tendency, he “can find himself in it” (Derrida 293). However, Derrida’s critique of Heidegger goes further. He points out that Heidegger breaches his own philosophical stance.

 

As Derrida writes, Heidegger, in his endeavor to define the origin of the work of art, reaches back through the whole history of occidental philosophical thought in order to get beyond what he calls its “rootlessness” [Bodenlosigkeit] (Heidegger 149). In his example of Van Gogh’s painting —and Heidegger does not specify which canvas he means—, “the equipmental being of equipment” (158), its truth, discloses itself in the moment of the isolation from its context of equipment. This is only possible in the work of art. Heidegger writes: “The essence of art would then be this: the truth of beings setting itself to work” (162). Later, Heidegger resolutely aims to distingish his thoughts from (rootless) subjectivism: “Modern subjectivism, to be sure, immediately misinterprets creation, taking it as the sovereign subject’s performance of genius” (200). He asserts: “The truth that discloses itself in the work can never be proved or derived from what went before” (200).

 

Nevertheless, without any further explication and, in Derrida’s words, “with massive self-assurance” (Derrida 293), Heidegger dictates the content of the painting: “a pair of peasant shoes” (Heidegger 158). Heidegger, the interpreting subject, is able to easily and clearly identify the object which Van Gogh, the creating subject, had intented to represent. Moreover, he refers to Van Gogh’s canvas as “pictorial representation” [bildliche Darstellung] (158), thereby evoking the abolished theory of art as mimetic representation. Satirizing his analysis of Heidegger’s aberration, Derrida adopts an everyday concept and transforms it into the embodiment of both the Cartesian subject par excellence and the most adequate representative of mimetic theory: He stages Martin Heidegger as a tourist guide.

 

Derrida skillfully plays with HeideggerÂ’s personality. Heidegger, not exactly of a modest but serious character, had a preference for pathos, and he was very attached to GermanyÂ’s Black Forest region (for instance, Heidegger did not accept several calls to Berlin). In the ridiculous role of a tourist guide, Heidegger performs as the knowing subject, revealing the truth to his listeners by anchoring the representation to its origin, enriching his speech with details and associations. Heidegger trembles, regularly overwhelmed by his own performance.

 

However, one could make objections against Derrida’s critique of Heidegger’s use of aesthetic theories he aims to overthrow. Heidegger explicitly points out that he is describing his example “without any philosophical theory” (158). Still, Derrida’s critique concerns Heidegger’s general philosophical approach. He is opposed to Heidegger’s somehow mythical attempt to define the origin of the work of art, he questions his claim of a totally determinable truth. As Derrida comments: “[…] nothing in all this is fortuitous” (Derrida 293).

 

For Derrida, the term pointure, due to its polysemy, is a synonym for rest, for something which is annexed to any substantialistic assertion. That is his fundamental opposition to Heidegger. The truth, to use Van GoghÂ’s painting as allegory, is always leaking, has always holes (see the shoes), and is process-related (see the coming and going of the shoelaces). DerridaÂ’s text, written as a discussion between several non-identifiable speakers, inscribes itself into the platonic tradition of maieutics. There too, only a partial truth is revealed, the end is always open.

 

The appropriate literary means for this philosophical stance is digression. The whole satirical paragraph about Heidegger as tourist guide can be read in that sense. It seems as if Derrida is drifting away from his comment on the duel between Heidegger and Schapiro. But in doing so, he is able to elaborate his philosophical critique of Heidegger. The use of the literary form of digression itself is its expression.

 

Given Derridas stance, it is obvious that my reading can merely be one possible understanding of DerridaÂ’s beautiful text. Always incomplete, it has to be continued. Just as Derrida puts it at the very end of the text:

 

— It’s just gone.                                                — Ça vient de partir.

 

— It’s coming round again.                                 — Ça revient de partir.

 

— It’s just gone again. (Derrida 382)                   — Ça vient de repartir.

 

 

 

Jacques Derrida: The truth in painting. Translated by Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press 1987.

 

Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings from Being and Time (1927) to The Task of Thinking (1964). Edited by David Farrell Krell. Revised and expanded edition. San Francisco: Harper 1993.

 

Meyer Schapiro: "The Still Life as a Personal Object – A Note on Heidegger and van Gogh." In: The Reach of Mind. Essays in Memory of Kurt Goldstein. Edited by Marianne L. Simmel. New York: Springer 1968, S. 203-209.