Touch can be understood as the first form of inscription – an imprint, a contact, a haptic experience between mother and child, a tactile memory. Maurice Merleau-Ponty emphasized that touch is both active and passive at the same time – when we touch someone, we simultaneously feel their touch in return. This dual moment can be perceived as a fundamental form of "meaning transmission," Derrida’s archi-écriture or the "proto-writing" of corporeality.
Derrida would argue that images are not merely representations but part of a complex system of signs and traces that are never fully graspable. In relation to proto-writing, images could be understood as "graphic traces" that preserve meaning without the need for speech or linear text.
In his text Memoirs of the Blind*, Derrida conceives of drawing as a trace inherently linked to absence (blindness, the inability to see the original). It is often tied precisely to touch – the drawing hand senses shape rather than copying the external world. This corresponds to the idea that writing (and drawing) does not originate primarily from visual representation but from bodily traces, touch, and gesture. Drawing is pre-linguistic, existing before structural grammar, and may be closer to meaning than conventional writing.
*Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins
Mémoires d‘aveugle: autoportrait et autres ruines‘, Éditions de la Reunion des Musées Nationaux, 1990.
Mémoires d‘aveugle: autoportrait et autres ruines‘, Éditions de la Reunion des Musées Nationaux, 1990.
A portrait is usually considered a representation of a person, but an excessive presence of the face can lead to its disappearance – as if, at a certain point, the portrait ceases to be a representation and becomes a blinding "excess of reality."
A pattern neither begins nor ends—it leaps and swirls, disappears and returns (often by another route). Its peripheries tend to slip out of our field of vision. It vanishes beyond the scheme. We expect something to shift beyond the horizon. But a pattern has no horizon. It is cyclical.
The hand-made cement tiles, when arranged randomly, suggest a pattern – though they were initially conceived as a form of self-portraiture. The figure encoded within them serves as both a pretext and a space for haptic experience. The eye perceives shape through touch, engaging with its materiality rather than merely scanning its surface. Its code is embedded in our personal software. To decipher it privately, we need, above all, intuition.
Différance* is a key concept in Derrida’s philosophy, denoting both difference (différence) and the deferral (déférer) of meaning. Not only do things acquire meaning in relation to other things (through differentiation), but their meaning also never fully stabilizes—it is always deferred, pushed into the future.
In relation to patterns, this means that no repetition is a pure reproduction. Every iteration of a pattern contains a certain difference, a shift, a subtle variation—each pattern thus bears the trace of difference. From a Derridean perspective, a pattern cannot be understood as a fixed, stable entity but rather as a series of traces, where each iteration inevitably differs from the previous one.
Patterns are not static structures but fluid systems of signs, whose meanings continuously transform across time and space. And so too, an image—a portrait—is not merely the face we see, but the movement behind it. This movement is present in every drawing, in every letter, in every pattern.
*Jacques Derrida, „Margins of Philosophy“ (Marges de la philosophie, 1972)
