This essay will address Jacques Derrida's concepts of the "stroke" of drawing. Jacques Derrida explores issues relating to the faculties of sight, the indigence of vision, self-representation, and their relation to the draftsman's drawing and sketching, while offering close readings of a vast collection of images. Selected by Derrida from the Louvre's drawings and prints department, the pieces depict blindness in biblical, fictional and historical form. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay For Derrida the act of drawing is itself blind. It is a performance steeped in anticipation and memory. The sketches re-establish mediated and direct typologies of vision. We are faced with a question, the presuppositions of which need to be deconstructed and deciphered, thus becoming the content of the reading. Derrida reduces writing processes to their most basic element identifiable as “the gram ́” or “the trace ́”. In Memoirs of the Blind, the trace is identified as the process that makes drawing indispensable. It is comparable to the miner and his lamp. Articulated by the artist, presenting objects but otherwise rendering them absent through blind desolation. «The section must proceed at night. It escapes the field of vision. Not only because it is not yet visible, but because it does not belong to the realm of spectacle." Derrida then continues to describe the procedure for creating the drawings and identifying their meaning. Using blindness as a cliché for repeated processes that go beyond the meaning of the trace as a measure of the artist's or art critic's success. Derrida means an awareness of the drawings themselves. For Derrida, artists producing self-portraits are a journey of self-reflection and an expression of how the artist feels at a specific moment. This affects the meaning of a particular drawing. Each self-portrait is a memory that reflects history and the history that has been, is and always will be. Every drawing is inevitably a ruin, signifying an unclear trace due to blindness and profound intuition. When we look at a work, we look but we do not see. We read about what the play represents, we make guesses about what the play means from what we have seen previously. We relate gestural signs and visual representation. We make sense of that work using descriptive language. But when we are faced with a question, Derrida insinuates that our assumptions must be deconstructed. This is then derived as content. The mark trait indicates blindness. When we see something, art blinds us to something else. We are therefore bound and limited by the linguistic characteristics and preconceptions of the world. Derrida speaks of the men of the blind conscription, not that they are visually blind in general but blind to the act. “In the tracing power of the line, in the instant in which the tip of the hand advances and comes into contact with the surface, the inscription of the inscribable is not seen.” Essentially, from an act perspective, you cannot see the point you are drawing, you can never look at the subject and the paper at the same time. There is a gap between the relationship between object and brand. Overlapping elements create spaces, linework flattens the shape of the object. This is described as the first impotence of the eye. James Elkins agrees with Derrida's first statement about the impotence of the eye as he explains that "every brush stroke, pencil line, smudge and erasure must function as a sign and have meaning." Elkins proceeds to comment “the signs are those that “are part of what makes us interpret the work”. Elkins deduces.