Includes bibliographical references and index.

The traces of the visible. The spatial arts : an interview by Peter Brunette and David Wills ; Thinking out of sight ; Trace and archive, image and art -- Rhetoric of the line: painting, drawing. To illustrate, he said ; The philosopher's design : an interview by Jerome Coignard ; Drawing by design ; Pregnancies ; To save the phenomena : for Salvatore Puglia ; Four ways to drawing ; Ecstasy, Crisis : an interview with Valerio Adami and Roger Lesgards ; Color to the letter ; The "undersides" of painting, writing, and drawing : support, substance, subject, suppost, and supplice -- Spectralities of the image : photography, video, cinema, and theater. Aletheia ; Videor ; The ghost dance : an interview by Mark Lewis and Andrew Payne ; Cinema and its ghosts : an interview by Antoine de Baecque and Thierry Jousse ; The sacrifice ; Marx is (quite) somebody -- The survivor, the surcease, the surge.

"Derrida is one of the few Continental philosopher-critics as esteemed for his writings about visual topics as for his attention to more textually based subjects. This volume collects key and scarce writings about the making and apprehension of "visual objects," though the chief focus is on drawing, painting, and photography (with sorties into video and film). What preoccupied Derrida when it came to the visual arts is visibility: what does a pencil actually trace-make visible- when someone is making a drawing? What aspect of the drawing documents the artist's thought and what part documents an external object? What comes from painting other than a painting? The writings collected range from essays originally published in small magazines and journals to never-before translated talks and interviews. There are 19 pieces in all, of which seven have been previously published in English.. The rest have been translated into English for the first time. None is included in the Press's already substantial inventory of works by Derrida. The collection comprises three thematic sections: (1) "The Traces of the Visible" is attuned to the field's preoccupation with the "trace," what is an "image," visibility, and space. (2) "Rhetoric of the Line: Painting, Drawing" engages nearly every register in which one can experience art: the materiality of line and text, the eros of aesthetic experience, the politics of color, and the components of painting, writing and drawing taken together. (3) "Spectralities of the Image: Photography, Video, Cinema and Theatre" explores the media we most readily associate with modern and contemporary art practices"--