There is genuine confusion here, intentional or not, significant or not. The figure facing us has grey hair, gathered higher on the head and slightly receding it could be taken as suggestive of Derrida’s meticulously maintained bouffant, but it might equally denote the later de Man of his final years at Yale. The one with his back to the viewer has black hair with a side parting. Indeed, the more one looks at the scene, the more difficult it becomes to be certain which figure is which. However, when my friend Kevin Newmark, who was unfamiliar with the Tansey paintings but familiar with the persons of both Paul de Man and Jacques Derrida, looked at Derrida Queries de Man, he asked: “Which one did you say de Man was?” For Newmark, it was not at all certain which of the two figures was de Man and which was Derrida, and he had known both de Man and Derrida well during their lifetimes. This is Redfield’s starting point for everything that follows: there is little doubt in his mind that de Man is the figure with his back to the viewer, and Derrida is the one facing us. The two figures are of significance here as Redfield describes the scene in his text, “Paul de Man faces away from us, toward Jacques Derrida and the abyss.” Footnote 3 Footnote 2 On a precipice two figures wrestle, or dance, or embrace, in the style of the Paget illustration, as mist and spray rises and falls from the cascade of water that runs through the center of the image, separating two sides of a gorge. The artwork itself is large at more than three square meters, monochrome in a blue-green hue, with a landscape made from blurred silkscreen lines of printed text, some of which is identifiable as pages 146–47 of de Man’s Blindness and Insight. Let me first recount an anecdote about “reading” the Tansey painting Derrida Queries de Man. I would like to use it as a point of departure for some consideration of the group of artworks by Tansey from around 1990 that Redfield calls “theory-paintings,” and then for a wider consideration of questions about the relationship between de Man and Derrida from the perspective of scholarship and art practice in the academy of 2017. In this essay, while saluting Redfield’s detailed reading of the two artworks, I do not intend to repeat the work so meticulously detailed in his 2016 study.
The second, Constructing the Grand Canyon (1990), is a landscape in the American sublime style in which de Man and Derrida sit at the perspectival center of the painting directing the construction and deconstruction of the national landmark. Footnote 1 The first, Derrida Queries de Man (1990), is an homage to an illustration in The Strand Magazine by Sidney Paget (1893) to the Sherlock Holmes short story “The Final Problem” in which Holmes and Moriarty wrestle above the Reichenbach Falls. In his book Theory at Yale: The Strange Case of Deconstruction in America, Marc Redfield closes with a reading of two works of art by Mark Tansey.
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