Par ou ímpar? Uma aposta sobre o traço de Jacques Derrida em Restitutions – de la Vérité en Pointure

Abstract

In Restitutions – de la Vérité en Pointure, Jacques Derrida writes about the pictorial and the truth from two texts about a van Gogh’s famous painting – one written by the philosopher Martin Heidegger and the other by the art critic Meyer Schapiro. Derrida opens some fissures in those discourses in order to bring to the surface what haunts them from the inside: the desire of appropriation encrypted by the desire of restitution of the painted shoes to someone real. Derrida’s writing about art and aesthetics operates the trace’s performative movement, considering mainly what he wrote in Memoirs of the Blind. We conclude, therefore, that thinking about aesthetics from the trace is a possible manner to not pose the ontological question about what art is, as well as to question the need of a return to a proper and of a defining limit between what is intrinsic to art and what is not.