* Dorothy Rosaman Hartley (4 October 1893 – 22 October 1985)
The very meaning and mission of deconstruction is to show that things–texts, institutions, traditions, societies, beliefs, and practices of whatever size and sort you need–do not have definable meanings and determinable missions, that they are always more than any mission would impose, that they are always more than any mission could impose, that they exceed the boundaries they currently occupy. A “meaning” or a “mission” is a way to contain and compact things, like a nutshell, gathering them into a unity, whereas deconstruction bends all its efforts to stretch beyond these boundaries, to transgress these confines, to interrupt and disjoint all such gatherings. Whenever it runs up against a limit, deconstruction presses against. Whenever deconstruction finds a nutshell–a secure axiom or a pithy maxim–the very idea is to crack it open and disturb this tranquility. Indeed, that is a good rule of thumb in deconstruction. That is what deconstruction is all about, its very meaning and mission, if it has any. One might say that cracking nutshells is what deconstruction is. In a nutshell.
Jacques Derrida, to an audience of academics at Villanova in 1994 (in English).
“Building on theories of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, Derrida coined the term différance, meaning both a difference and an act of deferring, to characterize the way in which linguistic meaning is created rather than given.” (Britannica)
“Derrida cited parergon in his wider theory of deconstruction, using it with the term “supplement” to denote the relationship between the core and the periphery and reverse the order of priority so that it becomes possible for the supplement – the outside, secondary and inessential – to be the core or the centerpiece. In The Truth in Painting, the philosopher likened parergon with the frame, borders, and marks of boundaries, which are capable of “unfixing” any stability so that conceptual oppositions are dismantled. It is, for the philosopher, “neither work (ergon) nor outside work”, disconcerting any opposition while not remaining indeterminate. For Derrida, parergon is also fundamental, particularly to the ergon since, without it, it “cannot distinguish itself from itself”.” (Wikipedia)
https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/sargent-and-fashion
Tate exhibition caption: “Miss Elsie Palmer, or A Lady in White (1889-90) Oil paint on canvas. In this work, 17-year-old Elsie Palmer wears a white satin tea gown, suitable for daywear at home. Such gowns, which were less formal and structured than typical day or evening wear, were popularised by Liberty‘s, a clothing and furniture shop in London. The symmetry of Sargent’s composition, interrupted only by a pale lavender shawl, creates a hypnotic effect. This portrait was painted in the Tudor chapel at Ightham Mote, a 14th-century manor house in Kent. Palmer’s pleated dress echoes the linenfold panelling on the wall behind.” (my emphases)
“The ancient Romans had two words for white; albus, a plain white, (the source of the word albino); and candidus, a brighter white. A man who wanted public office in Rome wore a white toga brightened with chalk, called a toga candida, the origin of the word candidate. The Latin word candere meant to shine, to be bright. It was the origin of the words candle and candid.” (Wikipedia)
“During the 1890s, Liberty built strong relationships with many English designers. Many of these designers, including Archibald Knox, practised the artistic styles known as Arts and Crafts and Art Nouveau, and Liberty helped develop Art Nouveau through his encouragement of such designers. The company became associated with this new style, to the extent that in Italy, Art Nouveau became known as the Stile Liberty, after the London shop.” (Wikipedia)
“One particularly popular form of fielded panel was the linenfold, featuring stylized carvings that represent vertically folded linen; Hampton Court Palace near London contains many superb examples.” (Britannica)
“We can see how John’s inner garment falls about his calves and shins as linenfold (lignum undulatum wavy wood), a stylized form Ruscone (Camillo Rusconi (14 July 1658 – 8 December 1728), Italian sculptor of the late Baroque) may have known from wainscoting. The undergarment then is enfolded by broadly conceived, windswept, puckering, and undulating swathes of heavy garments that angle up from lower left to upper right like rising and spiralling jets of water issuing from a baroque fountain. The heavy wool then circles John’s body and passes over his left shoulder…
https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo/rusconi-john.html?sortBy=relevant
…Drapery establishes some of the conditions of meaning in the Lateran Apostles: as I suggest here and elsewhere, Derrida’s meditation on the frame leads to one’s thinking about interiority and exteriority, body and clothing.
The parergon plays a role in and is narratively related to Derrida’s discussion of différance. The architecture of the Lateran tabernacles establishes its reality and its ontology in terms of the difference between sculpture and architecture, between Rusconi and Borromini, and ultimately between body and drapery.
The Renaissance conceit of the “clothed nude” addresses the ontological issues – the topics for discussion, in other words – on which I am trying to draw a bead. Both inside and outside, body and drapery defer to one another. Our understanding of the two together must take account of their mutual and reciprocal relationship.” (Baroque Visual Rhetoric, by Vernon Hyde Minor (University of Toronto Press, 2016)
“My use of the term ‘folding’ is informed by Jacques Derrida’s ‘Living on: border lines’, an essay that seeks to challenge the integrity of texts themselves. As Derrida argues:
if we are to approach [aborder] a text, for example, it must have a bord, an edge… But when do you start reading it? What if you started reading it after the first sentence (another upper edge), which functions as its first reading head but which itself in turn folds its outer edges back over onto inner edges whose mobility – multilayered, quotational, displaced from meaning to meaning – prohibits you from making out a shoreline? There is a regular submerging of the shore. (Bloom et al. 1979: 81)
Although Derrida’s description of the impossibility of limiting the reference of a text can apply to the whole system of language rather than merely various iterations of one fictive universe, his interest in textual topology – itself a re-articulation of his concept of ‘differance’ – is a fertile one.” (Adaptation in Contemporary Culture: Textual Infidelities (2009), by Rachel Carroll)
“The 19th-century American painter James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903), working at the same time as the French impressionists, created a series of paintings with musical titles where he used color to create moods, the way composers used music. His painting Symphony in White No. 1 – The White Girl, which used his mistress Joanna Hiffernan as a model, used delicate colors to portray innocence and fragility, and a moment of uncertainty.” (Wikipedia)
“Ightham Mote was rented in 1887 to the American railway magnate William Jackson Palmer and his family and for three years became a centre for artists and writers of the Aesthetic Movement, with visitors including John Singer Sargent, Henry James and Ellen Terry.” (Wikipedia)
Pleasingly, you can buy from Tate Britain’s shop a magnet featuring this portrait of the magnate’s daughter.
Online Etymology Dictionary:
magnate (n.)
mid-15c., “high official, great man, noble, man of wealth,” from Late Latin magnates, plural of magnas “great person, nobleman,” from Latin magnus “great, large, big” (of size), “abundant” (of quantity), “great, considerable” (of value), “strong, powerful” (of force); of persons, “elder, aged,” also, figuratively, “great, mighty, grand, important,” from suffixed form of PIE root *meg- “great.”
magnet (n.)
“variety of magnetite characterized by its power of attracting iron and steel,” mid-15c. (earlier magnes, late 14c.), from Old French magnete “magnetite, magnet, lodestone,” and directly from Latin magnetum (nominative magnes) “lodestone,” from Greek ho Magnes lithos “the Magnesian stone,” from Magnesia (see magnesia), region in Thessaly where magnetized ore was obtained. Figurative sense of “something which attracts” is from 1650s.
It has spread from Latin to most Western European languages (German and Danish magnet, Dutch magneet, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese magnete), but it was superseded in French by aimant (from Latin adamas; see adamant (n.)). Italian calamita “magnet” (13c.), French calamite (by 16c., said to be from Italian), Spanish caramida (15c., probably from Italian) apparently is from Latin calamus “reed, stalk or straw of wheat” (see shawm) “the needle being inserted in a stalk or piece of cork so as to float on water” [Donkin]. Chick magnet attested from 1989.”
https://etd.library.emory.edu/concern/etds/2801pg51k?locale=de
Julia Upton 