You'll forgive me in advance for not writing a typical review; there is no nodetype (yet!) for 'atypical review'. The situation, when writing a review on a philosophy book is much different than writing a review of a book in a different genre, say, murder mystery. If this were a review of "Secret Window, Secret Garden" then I could tell you things about the main character (Mort Rainey), his background (author), and other things irrelevant to the end of the book. But while there is a plot to The Truth in Painting, it is not a linear plot, and as such does not lend itself to a linear review (which happens to be the only type of review I'm willing to write). Also, it is assumed that, as this is a book written by an esoteric (because philosopher, not because French) French philosopher, Jacques Derrida, if you wanted to know about it, you would read it.

God knows it's been translated into almost too many languages.

"The Truth in Painting" is a book in four parts on aesthetics. It is a reading of, among other things, Immanuel Kant's Critique of Judgment — namely, the fourteenth paragraph. The first part formally links the latter parts to this text, though it is not at all clear in most cases how the four parts are related. The book is a labyrinth whose shape is determined more by its borders than by what it contains. I'm certain I've terribly misread it. So now my task is to don the axe, shield, and a spool of woolen thread to slay the minotaur lurking within the truth... But there's always the risk of walking one's own labyrinth, or in Derrida's terms, "writing with oneself" (of quoting oneself? — see aesthetics).

Allow the rest of the book to fade — after all, to walk a labyrinth one only concentrates on its local structure, trusting to faith that the global structure is settled and fixed. I wish to focus in on this one paragraph from The Truth in Painting which is essentially a quotation from the decidedly non-linear Glas. I have no French version to compare, unless some patron would send me it. On the left is the passage from The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and others; on the right is the passage from Glas, trans. John P. Leavey, Jr. and others. Almost too many translators to cite (thankfully, cabin fever has already supplied the true citations in Jacques Derrida). I have confined the text to 80 characters a line in the hopes that this is enough room for most browsers to fail at mangling it:

"With resources which would lead        "With resources which would lead
to the interior of the system           within the language's system
of painting, importing into                           importing into
the theory of painting all the          linguistics all the
questions and all the question-         questions and all the codes
codes developed here,                   of questions that are developed here,
around the effects of the               around the effects of the
'proper name' and the 'signature',      'proper name' and the 'signature',
stealing, in the course of this         concealing, in the course of this
break-in, all the rigorous criteria     break-in, all the rigorous criteria
of a framing -- between the inside      of a framing -- between the inside
and the outside -- carrying off         and the outside; taking away
the frame (or rather its joints,        the frame
its angles of assembly) no less                                 no less
than the inside or the outside,         than the inside or the outside,
the painting or the thing               the picture or the thing (just
(imagine the damage caused by a         imagine the havoc of a
theft which robbed you only of          theft that would only deprive you
your frames, or rather of their         of frames
joints, and of any possibility                  and of every possibility
of reframing your valuables or          of reframing your valuables or
your art-objects" (18).                 your art-objects" (93, right).

The inspiration for this tableau comes from yet another book by Derrida, Paper Machine, in which he is translated as saying, "previously, erasures and added words left a sort of scar on the paper or a visible imagine in the memory" (24, trans. Rachel Bowlby, links added).

So in these two paragraphs which don't really say the same thing (even though they both refer to the same French, presumably) I can isolate a few of the concepts he throws about in The Truth in Painting. The framing, for instance. He goes back to Kant's word for the boundary of a work of art, parergon, and from there tears apart the rest of the critique. He makes (to my disappointment, actually) the self-referential leap to considering the third Critique as a work of art — and is it beautiful?

The last three parts, which I have to gloss over because they drift away from my field and into others I'm unprepared to broach (art criticism, for instance) deal with actual pictures. "+R" relates to a drawing by Valerio Adami inspired by Derrida's earlier work, Glas. "Cartouches" was inspired by an odd overabundance of images — 127 pictures of the same artifact, an odd box containing an oval partially wrapped in fur. And "Restitutions of the truth in pointing" is a written discussion between so many participants that I can't tell if Derrida kept their identities straight or just made up new disembodied heads as he went along.

Having read J.D. for a while, though, I imagine he probably knew which written-voice was which. That's the way legends are made, after all.