Can drawing be born from blindness?
Some books are read with reason, others with the heart… and a few, like *Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins* by Jacques Derrida, with the gaze—the kind that dares to get lost in order to find something more.
Derrida doesn’t write about drawing, but from within drawing itself. He does so with the sharp edge of a question: What does an artist see when they draw? Or rather, what do they not see? From this premise, the French philosopher builds an essay where images, art history, and thought intersect, blurring the boundaries between looking and imagining.
It’s a text to be read slowly, like walking through a gallery in semi-darkness. Names like Delacroix, Rembrandt, or Degas appear—not to be illustrated, but to be interrogated. Derrida uses them as mirrors for a greater idea: blindness is not a limitation of art, but its most radical condition.
*Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins* is for those who feel there’s something invisible in every line. For those who keep asking, time and again, what do we see when we think we are seeing?
And believe me, after reading it, you’ll never look at a drawing—or a line—the same way again.