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Derrida, Heidegger, and Van

Gogh's ‘old shoes‘
a
Michael Payne
a
Bucknell University ,
Published online: 30 Jun 2008.

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shoes‘, Textual Practice, 6:1, 87-100, DOI: 10.1080/09502369208582131

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 MICHAEL PAYNE

Derrida, Heidegger, and Van

Gogh's 'Old Shoes'

Derrida's debt to Heidegger is immense. In Positions he says, 'What I

have attempted to do would not have been possible without the opening
of Heidegger's questions'; and in a later interview, published in the same
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volume, 'Heidegger's text is extremely important to me; . . . it constitutes

a novel, irreversible advance all of whose critical resources we are far
from having exploited'. Indeed, Derrida claims that all of the essays he
published up to 1971 constitute 'a departure from Heideggerian problem-
atic'; they display a kind of 'fanaticism' in their calling into question
'the thought of presence1 in Heidegger.1 Heidegger's concepts of origin,
fall, propriety, proper meaning, proximity to the self, body, conscious-
ness, language - especially etymologism in philosophy and rhetoric -
Derrida puts into question. Yet he is careful to distance himself from
those who have reduced Heidegger to German ideology between the wars
or to antisemitism. During the last fifteen years, Heidegger's importance
for Derrida has in no way subsided. Unlike Derrida's readings of Plato,
Rousseau, Poe, Mallarme, Freud, Saussure, Genet, Artaud, Levi-Strauss,
however, his readings of Heidegger have been more thematic than tex-
tual, focusing more on single words or concepts than on their full textual
embodiment.2 The notable exception to this procedure is the long final
section of The Truth in Fainting, entitled 'Restitutions of the truth in
pointing'. Here Derrida offers a meticulous reading of Heidegger's The
Origin of the Work of Art and his most sustained meditation on a
Heideggerian text.
'Restitutions' is one of Derrida's most complex texts. It takes the form
of a polylogue for an indeterminable - 'n + V - number of voices.
Although Derrida's headnote identifies the voices as female, one is
explicitly revealed to be the author of Margins of Philosophy? Quo-
tations or allusions to Glas and The Post Card, the closest textual
relatives to 'Restitutions', also disrupt the dramatic frame. One speaker
has a fixation on the question, 'What is a pair?', insisting, 'I came here
[as a woman] to ask this question' (p. 325). Yet another voice speaks,
often eloquently, at great length and by doing so invites the others'
sceptical questions. At least one of the speakers arrives later than the
others and, thus, works at an ironic disadvantage (p. 291). Two-thirds
of the way through the dialogue one of the voices speaks directly about
the form of the text in the self-reflexive manner of a character out of

87
 Shakespeare or Beckett who has known all along that she or he is a
dramatic fiction; but by revealing that he knows that she is a fiction, he
steps out of the frame that can no longer contain him/her. This voice
says,
It remains that the figure of this interlaced correspondence (for a long
time we have no longer known who is talking in it and if there is
talk) does not come under any established rhetoric, because it is not
simply a discourse, of course, but also because even if transported, by
rhetoric, outside of discursive rhetoric, tropes and figures would not
work here. This interlacing correspondence, for example the intermi-
nable overflowing of the whole by the part which explodes the frame
or makes us jump over it . . . is not produced inside a framing or
framed element, like the figures of rhetoric in language or discourse,
like the figures of 'pictorial' 'rhetoric' in the system of painting.
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(p. 344)
Much later in the dialogue this textual self-reflection gives way to dra-
matic despair: 'We no longer know', says one of the voices, 'whose turn
it is to speak and how far we've got' (p. 358).
The form of this text, then enacts a number of Derridean grammatolog-
ical themes: texts are always multi-voiced; they constitute structures that
already include the deconstructive resources for their own critiques; what
is inside the text and what is outside it — as well as what is in the margin
and what at the centre — refuse to remain in their proper places; each
text is a link in a chain of texts that refuses to yield its first or original
link; texts seem uncannily aware that they are being read and take
evasive action accordingly. Even more importantly than the reiteration
of these grammatological themes, the dialogue form dramatizes the con-
ceptual metaphor of interlacing that recurs throughout this reading of
Heidegger. True to its dramatic genre, 'Restitutions' both presents and
disrupts a narrative, which is here interlaced by and with the voices. At
one point (p. 371) the narrative is assigned the figure of a square with
the corners presumably named Van Gogh, Heidegger, Kurt Goldstein
and Meyer Schapiro. The story might then be laced together this way:
From 1881, the year Van Gogh decided to become an artist, through
1888, two years before his death, he completed eight paintings of shoes.
In his letters to his brother, Van Gogh distinguishes two phases in his
career. From 1881 to 1885 his work concentrated on peasant life. 'My
intention was', he writes, 'that it should make people think of a way of
life different from that of our refined society.' Thus 'The Potato Eaters',
for example, tries, as he puts it, 'to instil . . . the idea that the people it
depicts at their meal have dug the earth with the hands they are dipping
into the dish'. In 1886 Van Gogh left Antwerp for Paris. Of the pictures
painted in this second period, epitomized, perhaps, by 'Night Cafe', he
writes, 'Instead of trying to reproduce exactly what was before my eyes,
I use colour more arbitrarily so as to express myself more forcefully.'4
The paintings of the first period, this interpretation suggests, emphasize

88 TEXTUAL PRACTICE
 . ,1 " -
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Vincent Van Gogh, 'Oude Schoenen (Old Shoes)' (F 255). (By permission
of Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.)

otherness - the minute physical details of peasant life - while the paint-
ings of the second period are forceful expressions of Van Gogh himself.
The eight paintings of shoes are not confined to either period. Although
Derrida mentions none of these details, which form a parergon of sorts
(an outside that refuses to remain neatly outside the text), he does allude
to Van Gogh's letters and to his 'peasant ideology' (pp. 273, 368).
In 1935-6 Heidegger delivered a series of lectures that were soon
published as The Origin of the Work of Art. In his text Heidegger refers

DERRIDA, HEIDEGGER, AND VAN GOGH'S 'OLD SHOES' 89

 to 'a well-known painting by Van Gogh' as a pictorial example of 'a
common sort of equipment — a pair of peasant shoes'. He says they are
the shoes of a peasant woman. It is 'only in the picture', Heidegger
insists, that certain things about the shoes are noticeable:
From the dark opening of the worn insides of the shoes the toilsome
tread of the worker stares forth. In the stiffly rugged heaviness of the
shoes there is the accumulated tenacity of her slow trudge through the
far-spreading and ever-uniform furrows of the field swept by a raw
wind. On the leather lie the dampness and richness of the soil. Under
the soles slides the loneliness of the field-path as evening falls. In the
shoes vibrates the silent call of the earth, its quiet gift of the ripening
grain and its unexplained self-refusal in the fallow desolation of the
wintry field. This equipment is pervaded by uncomplaining anxiety as
to the certainty of bread, the wordless joy of having once more with-
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stood want, the trembling before the impending childbed and shivering
at the surrounding menace of death. This equipment belongs to the
earth, and it is protected in the world of the peasant woman. From
out of this protected belonging the equipment itself rises to its resting-
within-itself.5
This passage becomes the focal point of Derrida's dialogue.
Two years before Heidegger delivered his lecture course, the Jewish
psychologist Kurt Goldstein fled from Nazi Germany by way, signifi-
cantly, of Amsterdam. Goldstein later took up a position at Columbia
University and did extensive work on the psychopathology of war vic-
tims. Goldstein drew the attention of the art historian Meyer Schapiro,
a colleague of his on the Columbia faculty, to The Origin of the Work
of Art. Soon after Goldstein's death Schapiro wrote a brief paper entitled
The still life as personal object: a note on Heidegger and Van Gogh',
which he contributed to a volume published in Goldstein's memory in
1968.6 In preparation for writing his paper, Schapiro wrote to Heidegger
asking him to identify which of the eight paintings of shoes by Van
Gogh he had referred to in his text. In a personal letter to Schapiro,
Heidegger identified the painting in question as no. 255, usually given
the title 'Old Shoes'. In his paper, Schapiro claims that Heidegger is in
error when he assigns the shoes to a peasant woman. The shoes are Van
Gogh's, Schapiro claims. In 1977 at Columbia Derrida 'acted out or
narrated' (p. 272) part of the text of 'Restitutions' with Schapiro taking
part in the debate that followed. Schapiro's original paper was subse-
quently translated into French and published with Derrida's polylogue
in the journal Macula.
One way of thinking of the shoes, in terms of this narrative, is to see
them moving from one point to another on the square: from Van Gogh
to Heidegger to Schapiro (by way of Goldstein) and then back to Van
Gogh. Another way of thinking about them is to see them taken from
Heidegger by Schapiro to be given as a memorial offering to his friend
Goldstein. In Derrida's dialogue, however, the lines of argument run

90 TEXTUAL PRACTICE
 between Derrida and Heidegger and Schapiro; and restitution is no longer
as much a matter of restoring the shoes to their rightful owner as it is
a matter of truth in painting and in the texts of Schapiro and Heidegger.
The text of 'Restitutions' exploits the tension between the forward
narrative drive - the 'ghost story' (p. 257), as it is called - and the
dramatic or dialogic interplay among the speaking voices, which both
disrupt the narrative drive and constitute the only source of the story.
The questions asked by the voices generate both the narrative and its
interruptions; these include but are not limited to the following problems:
Whose are the shoes? What are they made of? (p. 257). Why always
say of a painting that it renders, that it restitutes? (p. 258). Are the
shoes a pair? What is a pair? (p. 259). What is one doing when one
attributes a painting. . . ? (p. 266). Could it be that, like a glove turned
inside out, the shoe sometimes has the convex 'form' of the foot
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(penis), and sometimes the concave form enveloping the foot (vagina)?
(p. 267). . . . Who is going to believe that this episode [between Sch-
apiro and Heidegger] is merely a theoretical or philosophical dispute
for the interpretation of a work or The Work of art? (p. 272). . . .
Which picture exactly [was Heidegger] referring to? (p. 276).. . . How
do we explain [Heidegger's] naive, impulsive, precritical attribution of
the shoes in a painting to such a determined 'subject',... the peasant
woman. . . ? (pp. 286-7). Is it a matter of rendering justice to Heideg-
ger, of restituting what is his due, his truth. . . ? (p. 301). Is Schapiro
right? (p. 308). What is reference in painting? (p. 322). Are we read-
ing? Are we looking? (p. 326). [Is the point] to make ghosts come
back? Or on the contrary to stop them from coming back? (p. 339).
In the interest of considering at least some of these questions, let us now
unlace Derrida's dialogue, trying to forget for a moment that the entire
text is mediated by an indeterminate number of female voices, in an
attempt to listen to Schapiro and Heidegger on these questions. 'Schapiro'
and 'Heidegger' are here not only names for dramatic speakers presented
to the reader of Derrida's text by the female voices. They are also writers
not framed by the text any more than the text frames itself. Indeed,
'Restitutions' so aggressively insists on its own intertextual dependencies
that on two occasions (pp. 294, 345) Derrida prints three rows of dots in
place of key quotations in three languages from Schapiro and Heidegger.
Reading 'Restitutions' returns the reader to the Schapiro and Heidegger
texts as much as to the Van Gogh painting. What is outside and what
inside - where the truth of the text or painting lies - is as much a
textual problem as a topic discussed 'in' the text. Pointing (pointure)
becomes Derrida's principal metaphor in the dialogue for this piercing
of the text or canvas with an invisible lace that stitches it 'onto its
internal and external worlds' (p. 304).
First, then, in this unlacing of the text, we hear from Schapiro: Heideg-
ger's interpretation of the painting by Van Gogh, Schapiro argues, illus-
trates 'the nature of art as a disclosure of truth'. Heidegger turns to the

DERRIDA, HEIDEGGER, AND VAN GOGH'S 'OLD SHOES' 91

 picture when he is distinguishing between three modes of being: 'useful
artifacts', 'natural things', and 'works of art'. Without recourse to any
philosophical theory, he proceeds to describe 'a familiar sort of equip-
ment - a pair of peasant shoes'; and he chooses 'a well-known painting
by Van Gogh' in the interest of facilitating 'the visual realization' of the
shoes. He further argues that to grasp the 'equipmental being of equip-
ment', one must know 'how shoes actually serve'. They serve the peasant
woman who stands and walks in them without her thinking about them
or looking at them. For her, their being is their use. For the one who
looks at Van Gogh's painting, however, the equipmental being of the
shoes is undiscoverable. By looking at the picture of the 'empty' shoes,
however, the life of the peasant woman, her labour, the earth with which
she toils, her anxieties and joys, her world can be seen to rise 'to its
resting-in-itself'.7
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Heidegger knew Van Gogh painted such shoes many times, but he
does not specify the picture he has in mind, apparently thinking they all
present 'the same truth'. In response to Schapiro's question, Heidegger
identifies the picture as no. 255, which he saw in Amsterdam in March
1930. Nevertheless, Schapiro suggests, he may have conflated no. 255
with no. 250 in which the sole of a shoe is exposed, since he refers to
the sole in his account. 'But from neither of these pictures, nor from any
of the others', Schapiro insists, 'could one properly say that a painting
of shoes by Van Gogh expresses the being or essence of a peasant
woman's shoes and her relation to nature and work.'8 These are the
shoes not of a peasant woman but of the artist, he concludes, 'a man
of the town and city'. In misattributing the shoes, Heidegger has 'deceived
himself. The sets of associations with peasants 'are not sustained by the
picture itself but are grounded rather in his own social outlook with its
heavy pathos of the primordial and earthy'. Heidegger's 'error' is not
only the result of projection, 'which replaces a close and true attention
to the work of art'; it also lies in his concept of 'the metaphysical power
of art', which 'remains here a theoretical idea'. The position of the shoes,
'isolated on the floor . . . facing us' gives them the appearance of 'veridi-
cal portraits of aging shoes'. Van Gogh's 'feeling for these shoes' is close
to Knut Hamsun's description of his own shoes in his novel Hunger,
and the identification of them as the artist's own shoes is supported by
Gauguin's reminiscences of Van Gogh. Nevertheless, it is not clear which
of the paintings of shoes Gauguin had seen. 'It does not matter. . . .
Gauguin's story confirms the essential fact that for Van Gogh the shoes
were a piece of his own life.'9
Now Heidegger: What we notice about the shoes we notice in the
picture.10 It would be the 'worst self-deception' to suggest that the
description offered is 'a subjective action' (p. 35) or a projection 'into
the painting' (p. 36). Van Gogh's painting discloses what the pair of
peasant shoes 'is in truth' (p. 36). 'If there occurs in the work a disclosure
of a particular being, disclosing what and how it is, then there is here
an occurring, a happening of truth at work' (p. 36). A work of art 'sets

92 TEXTUAL PRACTICE
 up a world' that is never itself an object but rather 'the ever-nonobjective
to which we are subject' (p. 44). The material of a work of art (stone,
paint, metal, wood, words) does not disappear but rather comes into the
open when a work is made (p. 46). The earth comes forth in the work
of art, the earth upon which 'historical man grounds his dwelling in the
world' (p. 46). 'The establishing of truth in the work' is to bring forth
a unique being that was not previously present and will never be again
(p. 62). 'Truth establishes itself as a strife within a being that is to be
brought forth only in such a way that the conflict opens up in this
being...' (p. 63).
Derrida's dialogue in its dramatic form and in its strategy of pointing
to Heidegger's text by piercing through Schapiro's becomes heavily
invested in this conception of truth as a strife that opens up. For Schapiro
truth in art is correspondence between visual image and written text -
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thus the attempt to make the Gauguin reminiscences relevant; this view
he develops in his monograph, Words and Pictures.11 Heidegger, how-
ever, insists that the opening up is into metaphysics, into the essence of
being. Derrida, on the other hand, argues that it is an exploitation of
the self-critical resources within one structure of thought that opens that
structure up from the inside to what is beyond it. I take it that this is
the critical point of departure: Heidegger into metaphysics by way of
strife, Derrida out of metaphysics by way of the self-critical resources of
metaphysical texts. The argument at this point returns to Derrida's earlier
critique of Heidegger's An Introduction to Metaphysics in Grammatol-
ogy. That Heideggerian text, like The Origin of the Work of Art, comes
from Freiburg in 1935; there, too, reference is made, however briefly, to
'a painting by Van Gogh' and to 'a pair of rough peasant shoes'.12 As
Derrida here reads him, Heidegger asks the what of the what and the
why of the why by pursuing the question, 'Why are there essents [seien-
des] rather than nothing?' (p. 1). This question, Heidegger argues, is the
broadest, deepest, and most fundamental of questions. It is the essential
question that lies at the heart of metaphysics and, in turn, of philosophy.
It is the essentialist question. It can be seen in the original meaning of
the Greek word physis and in the fate of that meaning when physis is
translated into the Latin natura. Physis, Heidegger argues, denotes 'self-
blossoming emergence . . . opening up, unfolding, inward-jutting-beyond-
itself [in-sich-aus-sich-hinausstehenY (p. 14) or what might be called
longing or desire. In this context Heidegger invokes the blossoming of
the rose, the rising of the sun, the rolling of the sea, and 'the coming
forth of man and animal from the womb' (p. 14). The word itself is of
great importance to him because 'words and language are not wrappings
in which things are packed for the commerce of those who write and
speak. It is in words and language that things first come into being and
are' (p. 13). Furthermore, he argues, it is not from the experience of
natural phenomena that the Greeks learned about physis, but rather from
their 'fundamental poetic and intellectual experience of being' (p. 14).
The modern reduction of physis to the phenomena of physics is a pitiful

DERRIDA, HEIDEGGER, AND VAN GOGH'S 'OLD SHOES' 93

 narrowing of the original concept, in Heidegger's view. To ask the funda-
mental question of philosophy - 'Why are there essents rather than
nothing?' - is to ask at once the fundamental 'What is . . .?' question -
'was ist das ist?' - and the all-encompassing, self-reflexive 'Why...'
question: Why is what is what is? Finally, both in the fate of the Greek
word physis and in what Heidegger puts language through to ask what
he wants to ask, the question of language - how, why, and what do
words mean? — arises as well.
Although Derrida does not say so explicitly, or so crudely, he implies
that Heidegger's interpretation of Greek words and Greek thought
uproots individual words from their textual ground. When Heidegger
does examine specific texts in detail - the two fragments of Heraclitus
(pp. 127ff), the first chorus of Antigone (pp. 146ff), the maxim of
Parmenides (pp. 166ff) — the translations he offers are highly inventive.
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Yet in examining these texts, Heidegger warns his reader, 'We must
attempt to hear only what is said' (p. 146). Although Derrida does not
directly call attention to this seemingly innocuous sentence, it nevertheless
reveals two features of Heidegger's practice that Derrida will scrutinize
in some detail. First, Heidegger refers to texts as though they are spoken
rather than written; second, he substitutes his voice for the text's even
before the text is 'heard'. The logocentric fiction of truth's presence in
the word requires the obscuring of these processes of mediation. Even
as he examines the importance of poetic intelligence, thus foregrounding
his own distinctively metaphorical language, Heidegger distracts attention
from the mediating function of metaphor, which maintains its under-
ground role in his writing. Derrida describes that function as 'a sign
signifying a signifier itself signifying an eternal verity, eternally thought
and spoken in the proximity of a present logos' (p. 15). Differing, defer-
ring, distancing are the ways of metaphor; when the presence of truth
is claimed for the word, metaphor is denied, forced back underground,
repressed.
'Restitutions' has its own network of metaphors. Four of these -
pointure, lace, trap, and ghost — are elaborately developed in the course
of the dialogue and shape much of its thought. Pointure has the advan-
tage for Derrida of being a term from printing and shoemaking: a 'small
iron blade with a point, used to fix the page to be printed on to the
tympan', 'the hole which it makes in the paper', and a 'term from
shoemaking' referring to the 'number of stitches in a shoe or glove' (p.
256). In the title of the dialogue pointing (pointure) replaces the word
painting in the phrase 'truth in painting', which allows simultaneously
the sense that the painting in question is an exercise in the art of pointure
and that its truth is not simply framed by the picture — truth, then, not
simply contained in painting — rather it pricks, punctures, penetrates the
canvas when the picture is bombarded with interpretative questions. Here
is a critical difference between Cezanne and Van Gogh, both of whom
Derrida quotes on his title page. Cezanne writes, 'I owe you the truth
in painting, and I will tell it to you' (p. 256). He promises pictocentric

94 TEXTUAL PRACTICE
 truth, truth present in painting, though he is still compelled to speak it.
The consequence of this view - that the truth of painting cannot be
rendered in paint but only in words - Heidegger thought through and
affirmed: 'art is in essence poetry', he writes in The Origin of the Work
of Art (p. 73). Despite their disagreement on the attribution of the shoes,
Schapiro and Heidegger agree on the relation of language to painting,
except that Heidegger argues that the visual arts are on the way to
language as they break 'open an open place in whose openness everything
is other than usual' (p. 72). Schapiro, on the other hand, thinks of
painting as emerging from language; the word is the origin of the picture.
The art critic, in his view, performs an act of restitution when he restores
the truth of the shoes by matching them, for example, to the text of
Gauguin's reminiscences. Van Gogh, on the other hand, writes, 'But truth
is so dear to me, and so is the seeking to make true [Derrida's italics],
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that indeed I believe . . . I would still rather be a cobbler than a musician

with colors' (p. 256). Despite Heidegger's privileged place for poetry, it
is Van Gogh who maintains the metaphor; 'a cobbler . . . with colors'
sustains and develops the ambiguity of pointure.
Now to betray that metaphor for a moment, let us say what we can
about the image of truth it offers us in the dialogue. Truth is not
formalistically contained by the painting any more than the signified can
be found within the signifier. In his catalogue for the exhibition he
mounted at the Louvre in the autumn of 1990 on the theme of blindness,
Derrida further develops this Saussurean parallel: 'There is an abyss of
heterogeneity between the thing drawn and the drawing line, even
between a thing represented and its representation, the model and the
image.'13 Language in its search for truth punctures the painting, not as
one might take a knife to a canvas but as one might lace a shoe. Writing
about art has the effect of lacing one canvas to another. This pictural
intertextuality points not only to the interrelations among paintings but
also to the relationships of painting to the world and to language.
Derrida's insistence here on the metaphor - the link between two distinct
things in such a way as to bring into the open a point of otherwise
hidden similarity — restitutes the distinctness of the individual paintings,
as well as the distinctiveness of painting, language, painter and critic.
Derrida would have us see the frame of the picture, like the margins of
the printed page, as that which 'cuts out but also sews back together
. . . by an invisible lace which pierces the canvas', just as the pointure
pierces the paper, passes into it in order to sew it back into its milieu,
into its 'internal and external worlds' (p. 304).
The metaphor of the lace is already active in the shoemaking aspect
of pointure, but the painting in question provides considerable specificity
and a pictorial ground for this metaphor. The lace of one shoe curls in
the lower right corner of the picture as though to encircle the name of
the artist. But there is no name. The absence of 'Vincent' from its usual
place, a place here seemingly marked by the O of the lace, is convenient
for Derrida's calling into question Schapiro's assertion that still life is a

DERRIDA, HEIDEGGER, AND VAN GOGH'S 'OLD SHOES' 95

 'personal object' and Heidegger's logocentrism of truth's presence in the
word to which painting aspires. Already, however, I have said more than
the voices do about the circle of lace and have fallen into its trap. The
voices say, 'the loop is open', it is 'as though . . . it stood in place of
the signature' (p. 277; my italics). The temptation to fill in the strange
loop is to succumb to another meaning of the French word for lace (le
lacet), which is 'trap' or 'snare'. The loop of lace is a metonymy for the
empty shoes, a trap that Van Gogh tempts us to fill in.
Pointure, lace and trap are also related to ghosts. A voice calls the
dialogue a ghost story (p. 258); the shoes are 'hallucinogenic; (p. 273);
for Schapiro they seem to face the viewer and are a kind of spectral
portrait of the artist; for Heidegger, too, they are a portrait, and as he
looks into their 'dark opening' he sees staring at him the toilsome life
of the peasant woman. The shoes do not quite seem to touch the ground
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or the floor; there is an underneath beneath their underneath. As Heideg-

ger's visual example of 'thing' and 'work', they are metaphysically haun-
ted by 'the fundamental Greek experience of the Being of beings in
general' (p. 287). In his conflation of the several paintings of shoes,
Heidegger allows the paintings themselves to take on a ghostly quality,
as though they were visible yet transparent. Then there is the matter of
the disembodied voices in the dialogue who invite the reader to doubt
that what is at stake between Schapiro and Heidegger is simply the
interpretation of the pictures. 'There are other, more urgent things at
stake' (p. 329), one voice says. Then this:
But an army of ghosts are demanding their shoes. Ghosts up in arms,
an immense tide of deportees searching for their names. If you want
to go to this theatre, here's the road of affect: the bottomless memory
of a dispossession, an expropriation, a despoilment. And there are tons
of shoes piled up there, pairs mixed up and lost.
(pp. 330-1)
These words recall the unbearable photographs of the Holocaust with
the nightmarish visual metonymy of piles of personal property recalling
the millions who died. On 6 February 1943, Himmler received an inven-
tory that lists '22,000 pairs of children's shoes' collected from Birkenau.
An eyewitness at Dachau recalls, 'We were shaken to the depths of our
soul when the first transports of children's shoes arrived from Ausch-
witz.'14 Photographic essays of life in the Warsaw ghetto have also
stressed the ragged shoes of Jews, deported, dispossessed, expropriated,
disspoiled, and nameless.15 The voices suggest the painting is haunted by
such ghosts of a later time.
At the risk of falling into the trap formed by the loop of the lace, we
can nevertheless not ignore how Heidegger's Nazi involvement is a part
of the textual network that includes Derrida's text. Heidegger's references
to the Van Gogh painting of shoes explicitly links The Origins of the
Work of Art with An Introduction to Metaphysics. The notorious
description in that volume of 'the inner truth and greatness' of National

96 TEXTUAL PRACTICE
 Socialism (p. 199), which immediately precedes Heidegger's conclusion,
completes his theme of greatness in the 'works and destinies of nations'
(p. 11). And before the strangely isolated reference to 'a painting by Van
Gogh', Heidegger asks whether a state is situated 'by virtue of the fact
that the state police arrest a suspect' (p. 35). Although Schapiro makes
no overt reference to Heidegger's Nazi activities, despite the circum-
stances that made him aware of Heidegger's essay and the occasion of
his writing in memory of Kurt Goldstein, one voice in Derrida's dialogue
says, 'You're trying to justify him at any price' (p. 320). This meets the
reader's suspicion that Heidegger is indeed being restituted in the face
of Schapiro's critique, however meticulously Schapiro's precritical naivete
has been exposed. What is apparently another voice uncannily anticipates
the first part of Victor Farias's argument in Heidegger et le nazisme
(1987) that links Heidegger's own peasant ideology with his later party
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membership. That voice says,

It does not suffice to analyze the motivations of all sorts (metaphysical,
'ideological,' political, idiophantasmatic, all knotted together) which
drove him in 1935, almost half a century after their production and
entry onto the market, to annex these shoes, on the pretext of repatria-
ting them back to their authentic rural landscape, back to their native
place.
(p. 338)
The argument here is against Schapiro, but now, more than a decade
after the publication of 'Restitutions', it has wider implications, which
are manifest in two recent impassioned and sustained attacks on decon-
struction, Heidegger and Derrida.
John Ellis, who does not deal with Heidegger at all in his book,
Against Deconstruction, nevertheless sets out 'to analyze deconstruction
itself and from this effort concludes that deconstruction is not just a
collection of arguments in different areas of theory or even a group of
related doctrines; it is possible to abstract from all of this a particular
strategy, a kind of deconstructive logic of inquiry.16 Indeed, he proceeds
with the unusual task of rendering the essence of deconstruction's sus-
picion of essentialism. Deconstruction's strategy manifests 'the most
important handicaps and liabilities especially of American criticism' (p.
153), he argues; it perpetuates the unthinking attitudes of critics and
resists genuine change in critical practice; it is incoherent, ineffective,
riddled with errors, and illogical (p. 154-5); it fosters 'unrestrained
pluralism' of interpretation (p. 156); it is 'inherently antitheoretical' in
its 'accommodation with the prevalent laissez-faire of critical practice'
(p. 158); its apparent novelty has shattered the 'communal process' of
earlier literary theory; it has provided no check on 'the indigestible,
chaotic flow of critical writing' (p. 159). As these citations suggest, Ellis's
text develops an elaborate network of personifications that creates a
bloated monster, Deconstruction, which has needs, desires, strategies; it
commits errors, violates logic, retards change; it undermines standards

DERRIDA, HEIDEGGER, AND VAN GOGH'S 'OLD SHOES' 97

 and commits irresponsible acts. If this thing existed, who wouldn't want
to join with Ellis's ironic forces to oppose it. I cannot find a place where
Ellis steps back to reflect on his metaphorical creation. Instead, when
different practitioners of deconstruction disagree with each other, he sees
evidence of deconstruction's logical disarray; when they agree, he finds
in their thinking nothing but the mongering of slogans. Ellis creates an
essentialist fiction and labels it 'deconstruction' without once examining
in detail a text by Derrida or anyone else he calls a 'deconstructionist'.
Derrida warned in Part 1 of Grammatology that deconstruction, because
of its oppositional posture, risks having its project named for it;17 Ellis
has attempted to do just that.
Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut, in Heidegger and Modernity, have created
an even larger collective monster and named it 'French intellectuals'.
Their primary concern is with the continued importance of Heidegger in
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France, even after the appearance of Victor Farias's book Heidegger and
Nazism. Ferry and Renaut claim that this collective creature, 'French
intellectuals', disseminates an 'orthodox Heideggerian interpretation of
Heidegger's Nazism' under such names as Jacques Derrida, Philippe Lac-
oue-Labarthe and Elisabeth de Fontenay, whose writing has put modern-
ism and humanism under critical pressure. Ferry and Renaut, like Ellis,
do not refer to The Truth in Painting nor do they undertake to examine
any of Derrida's texts in detail. They are quick to argue — very plausibly
— that the specificity, plurality and textuality of modernism needs careful
reassessment. They do not consider the possibility that French theory is
also a plurality. This, however, leads them into the inconsistent argument
that there is an unorthodox French interpretation of Heidegger's Nazism,
which they call the 'Derridean interpretation'.18 This interpretation
includes such texts as Derrida's Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question
and Lacoue-Labarthe's Heidegger, Art and Politics, which consider texts
by Heidegger critical of Nazism. The 'Derridean interpretation' does
not, however, include works by Derrida himself that critically examine
Heidegger's accommodation of Nazism. Here, then, the effort is to create
a category to which Derrida's name is attached but which includes texts
he did not write and excludes many he did.19 Ferry and Renaut want to
claim that Derrida's only work critical of Heidegger appeared after Fari-
as's book was published in 1987. To maintain this claim they must
ignore the critique of An Introduction to Metaphysics in Grammatology
(1965) and the related examination of The Origins of the Work of Art
in 'Restitutions' (1977—8). It does not suffice, as the dialogue warns, to
analyse the metaphysical, ideological, political, ideophantasmatic motiv-
ations - 'all knotted together' — of French intellectuals, deconstruc-
tionists, Derrida, or Heidegger without giving careful consideration to
what they have written and how they have written it.
I began by writing that Derrida owes Heidegger an immense debt. He
has not set out to repay it by avoiding Heidegger's writings of the thirties
but rather by giving that work his most sustained critical attention. In
doing so, he has not been an apologist for Heidegger's Nazism; instead,

98 TEXTUAL PRACTICE
 especially in 'Restitutions', he has relentlessly exceeded Heidegger's exam-
ple in giving careful attention to the textuality of philosophy, here apply-
ing deconstructive critical procedures, as in so much of his earlier writing,
to Heidegger's own texts. Even when he has available to him Schapiro's
note, which manifests a generous, personal motive and a political or
textual unconscious to which he would, doubtless, otherwise have been
more than sympathetic, Derrida refuses to allow the issue of truth to be
sacrificed. The task of a deconstruction of the history of ontology', as
Heidegger calls it,20 continues to be Derrida's principal project, none the
less when it exposes the terrible fallibility of one of the greatest thinkers
of our time.

Bucknell University
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NOTES
1 J. Derrida, Positions, trans. Alan Bass (London: Athlone Press, 1987
(French edn, 1971) ), pp. 9, 54-5.
2 See, for example, the six papers on Heidegger in Psyche: Inventions de
l'autre (Paris: Galilee, 1987) and De l'esprit. Heidegger et la question
(Paris: Galilee, 1987).
3 J. Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian
McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987 (French edn,
1978) ), p. 264. Further citations from this text are noted in round
brackets.
4 Quoted in Harold Osborne (ed.), The Oxford Companion to Art
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), pp. 486-7.
5 M. Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter
(New York: Harper & Row, 1971), pp. 32-4.
6 The Reach of Mind: Essays in Memory of Kurt Goldstein, ed. Marianne
L. Simmel (New York: Springer, 1968).
7 Schapiro, in The Reach of Mind, pp. 203-4.
8 ibid., p. 205.
9 ibid., pp. 205-8.
10 Heidegger, p. 34. Further citations from this text are noted in round
brackets.
11 M. Schapiro, Words and Pictures (The Hague: Mouton, 1973).
12 M. Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Ralph Manheim
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959 (1935) ), p. 35. Further
citations from this text are noted in round brackets.
13 'The blindness of beginning', trans. Geoffrey Bennington, Guardian (2
November 1990), p. 25.
14 M. Gilbert, The Holocaust: The Jewish Tragedy (Glasgow: Collins,
1987), pp. 539-41.
15 See, for example, Ulrich Keller, The Warsaw Ghetto in Photographs
(Magnolia, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1941).
16 J. Ellis, Against Deconstruction (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1989), pp. 3, 137. Further citations from this text are noted in round
brackets.

DERRIDA, HEIDEGGER, AND VAN GOGH'S 'OLD SHOES' 99

 17 J. Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Balti-
more: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976 (1965) ), p. 4.
18 L. Ferry and A. Renaut, Heidegger and Modernity, trans. Philip Franklin
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990 (1988) ), p. 43.
19 See esp. pp. 119-20.
20 M. Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John MacQuarrie and Edward
Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962 (1927) ), p. 86.
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100 TEXTUAL PRACTICE