"Let"s say that, to keep the frame, to the limit, I here write four times around painting.
1. In order to make a disturbance in the philosophy (Plato, Kant, Hegel, Heidegger) which still dominates discourse on painting. All that Kant glimpsed under the name parergon (for example the frame) is neither in the work (ergon) nor outside it. As soon as the par ergon takes place, it dismantles the most reassuring conceptual oppositions.
2. In order to decrypt the singular contract which links the phonic trait, even before the word (Gl, Tr, +R), to the so-called graphic trait. Also at issue are the letter and the proper name, autobiography and political narration in painting. The chance to do this is provided by The fourney of the Drawing (Adami).
3. In order to analyze the ductus (idiom of the trait as draftsman"s signature) and the system of duction (production, reproduction, reduction, etc.). At issue are initial and paradigm, series and genealogy, mourning and remains in painting. Cartouches (proper and common noun, masculine or feminine), here entitles the chance provided by The Pocket Size Tlingit Coffin (Titus-Carmel).
4. Witnessing, not without taking part in it, a duel between Heidegger and Schapiro in order to find out to whom, in truth, are due the unlaced shoes of Van Gogh, I ask what happens with the desire for restitution when that desire has to do with the truth in paining.
Four times, then, around painting, and therefore in the environs which, via a self-authorization - and this is the whole story - are contained as the surrounds of or approaches to the work: frame, passe-partout, title, signature, museum, archive, discourse, marketplace, in short wherever there is legislation by marking of the limit, even that of color. Of the Right to Painting; that is the ambitious title to which I should have liked to attune this book, its trajectory as much as its object, their common trait, which is none other, neither one nor indivisible, than the trait itself".
J. D.