The Truth in Painting

Jacques Derrida
Parergon

The Sans of the Pure Cut

The without of the Pure Cut

In this essay Derida has analyzed the feeling of beautiful in Kant’s Analytic of Beautiful,
Derrida notes that it is in the pure, in the interruption, in the “haitus of the abyss” that
the beautiful arises.

In Kant’s definition the beautiful arises as a without, a sans : it is the object of

disinterested Wohlgefallen, which pleases universally without a concept and it is the
form of finality perceived without the representation of end. The being cut off from the
goal – absolutely cut from the end – is an absolute interruption is the “pure cut”.

This pure cut that structure the aesthetic feeling of the beautiful is the cut of a without

As Derrida says
“the without of the pure cut is without lack, without lack of anything”
It means it is complete in itself.

It is through this process of cutting that text establishes it authority and the aesthetic
feeling is the function of a cut.
He takes tulip flower as a constant example in this essay to explain it.

According to him, a tulip, is held to be beautiful because, in perceiving it, one encounters
a finality which, judged as we judge it, does not relate to any end.
This tulip is complete from the first because a concept cannot fill it up . The tulip or tulip-
print is installed within an economy of différance because the single tulip is
the parole within the langue of the tulips of the field, the tulips of Nature.

The beautiful object, the tulip, is a whole, and it is the feeling of its harmonious
completeness which delivers up its beauty to us. The without-goal, the without-why of
the tulip is not significant, is not a signifier, not even a signifier of a lack. At least sofar as
the tulip is beautiful.

Whereas science has nothing to say about the without of the pure cut. It remains open-
mouthed. "There is no science of the beautiful, only a critique of the beautiful" Not that
one must be ignorant to have a relation with beauty. But in the predication of beauty, a
non knowledge intervenes in a decisive, concise, incisive way, in a determinate place
and at a determinate moment, precisely at the end, more precisely with regard to the
end.

For the nonknowledge with regard to the end does not intervene at the end, precisely,
but somewhere in the middle, dividing the field whose finality lends itself to knowledge
but whose end is hidden from it.
The idea of difference also brings with it the idea of trace. A trace is what a sign
differs/defers from. It is the absent part of the sign’s presence. In other words, trace
can be defined as the sign left by the absent thing, after it has passed on the scene of
its former presence.

Every present, in order to know itself as present, bears the trace of an absent which
defines it. It follows then that an originary present must bear an originary trace, the
present trace of a past which never took place, an absolute past. In this way, Derrida
believes, he achieves a position beyond absolute knowledge.

According to Derrida, the trace itself does not exist because it is self-effacing. That is, in
presenting itself, it becomes effaced. Because all signifiers viewed as present in
Western thought will necessarily contain traces of other (absent) signifiers, the signifier
can be neither wholly present nor wholly absent.

Of this “trace” of sans in the tulip, knowledge has nothing to say. One can know
everything about the tulip, exhaustively, except for what it is beautiful. That for which it
is beautiful is not something that might one day be known, such that progress in
knowledge might later permit us to find it beautiful and to know why. Non knowledge
is the point of view whose irreducibility gives rise to the beautiful, to what is called the
beautiful.
Two kinds of beauty: free beauty and merely adherent beauty , literally, "merely
suspended beauty, hung-an-to, de-pendent on." Only free (independent) beauty gives
rise to a pure aesthetic judgment, to a predication of pure beauty.

He further explains these two type of beauties –

Free means free of all adherent attachment, of all determination. Free means
detached. It had been announced that this discourse dealt with detachment in all
senses, the sense [sens] and the sans of detachment. Free means detached from all
determination: not suspended from a concept determining the goal of the object. Free
beauty does not presuppose any concept.

Vague beauty, the only kind that gives rise to an attribution of pure beauty, is an
indefinite errance, without limit, stretching toward its orient but cutting itself off from
it rather than depriving itself of it, absolutely. It does not arrive itself at its destination.

Adherent beauty, from the moment it requires the determinant concept of an end, is
not the unconditional beauty of a thing, but the hypothetical beauty of an object
comprehended under the concept of a particular end.
This tulip is beautiful because it is free or vague, that is, independent. It enjoys, of
itself, a certain completeness. It lacks nothing. But it lacks nothing because it lacks an
end ( atleast in the experience we have of it). It is in-dependent, for itself, in as much as
it is ab-solute, absolved, cut-absolutely cut from its end

The beautiful this is thus beautiful for itself: it does without everything, it does without
you, it does without its class.

Envy, jealousy, mortification are at work within our affect, which would thus stem from
this sort of quasi –narcissistic independence of the beautiful this which refers to
nothing other than to itself, which signals toward nothing determinable, not even
toward you who must renounce it, but like a voyeur, at the instant that the this gives
itself, inasmuch as it gives itself, not signaling toward its end or rather, signing its end,
cuts itself from it and removes itself from it absolutely.

A beautiful flower is in this sense an absolutely coupable [guilty, cuttable) flower that is
absolutely absolved, innocent. Without debt. Not without law, but of a law without
concept.
Hence in this chapter, Derrida explains the concept of beautiful in aesthetic sense
by implying his deconstruction theory through the concept of pure cut.

To understand “Beautiful” one has to purely understand the object/image with its
end, without knowledge as it in itself is complete without a lack.
The Colossal

He discussed sublime here with Kant’s writing "Of the Evaluation of the Sizes
of the Things of Nature, Necessary to the Idea of the Sublime“

According to him, the things of nature, when their concept already contains a
determinate end, are equally incapable of opening us up to the sublime:
he cites the example of a horse here whose natural behavior is know to us, can
not produce sublime.

He says Sublime is super elevated, beyond itself. the natural object with a
determinable destination nor the art object (the column) can give an idea of
sublime super elevation.

Super elevation cannot be announced, it cannot provoke us to an idea of it,

motivate us to it, or arouse that idea, except by the spectacle of a nature, to be
sure, but a nature which has not been given form by the concept of any natural
end.

He says that super elevation will be announced at the level of raw nature.
nature which no final or formal contour can frame, which no limit can border,
finish, or define in its cise.
This raw nature on which sublime super elevation would have to be "shown"
is raw in that it will not offer any "attraction" and will not provoke any emotion
of fear before a danger. But it will have to comprise "grandeurs," vastnesses
which nevertheless defy all measure, exceed the domination of the hand or the
gaze and do not lend themselves to any finite manipulation.

It is also highly relevant to Blake’s arguments with his contemporaries about the
presentation and content of his pictures and poems.

According to Derrida, By opposition to works of art and to finite and finalized

things of nature, "raw nature" can offer or present the "prodigious," the
enormous, the immense, the excessive, the astonishing, the unheard-of,
sometimes the monstrous . "Prodigious“ things become sublime objects only if
they remain foreign both to fear and to seduction, to "attraction."

An object is "prodigious“ when, by its size, it annihilates and reduces to nothing,

the end which constitutes its concept.
The prodigious exceeds the final limit, and puts an end to it. It overflows its end
and its concept. Prodigious, or monstrous-let us pay close attention to this-is the
characteristic of an object, and of an object in its relation to its end and to its
concept.

The colossal, which is not the prodigious, nor the monstrous, qualifies the “mere
presentation" of a concept. But not just any concept: the mere presentation of a
concept which is "almost too large for any presentation" . A concept can be too
big, almost too big for presentation.

Colossal thus qualifies the presentation, the putting on stage or into presence,
the catching-sight, rather, of some thing, but of something which is not a thing,
since it is a concept. And the presentation of this concept in as much as it is
not presentable.

And by reason of its size: it is "almost too large ." This concept is announced and
then eludes presentation on the stage. One would say, by reason of its almost
excessive size, that it was outrageous.
The beautiful and the sublime present a number of traits in common: they please by
themselves, they are independent of judgments of the senses and of determinant
(logical) judgments, they also provide a pretension to universal validity, on the side of
pleasure, to be sure, and not of knowledge.

They both presuppose a reflexive judgment and appeal from their "pleasing" to
concepts, but to indeterminate concepts, hence to "presentations," and to the faculty
of presentation.

The colossal seems to belong to the presentation of raw, rough, crude nature. But we
know that the sublime takes only its presentations from nature. The sublime quality of
the colossal, although it does not derive from art or culture, nevertheless has nothing
natural about it.

The cise of the colossus is neither culture nor nature, both culture and nature. It is
perhaps, between the presentable and the unpresentable, the passage from the one
to the other as much as the irreducibility of the one to the other.
In this chapter of Colossal, Derrida established a relationship between
colossal and sublime, he has talked about the interrelation between
sublime ad colossal and positioned them in somewhere in between
presentable and unpresentable.
Bibliography

- Derrida Jacques trans. Geoff Bennnington(1987)/ he Truth in Painting/The

University of Chicago Press.