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Right of Inspection
The product of a collaboration between French philosopher Jacques Derrida and Belgian photographer Marie-Françoise Plissart, Right of Inspectionis a visually alluring and engaging tour de force. Beginning with Plissart's hundred-page photo-novel, both the images and Derrida's text meditate on a variety of issues including gender, photographic genre, spectrality, and the interpretive act of seeing. Having seen Plissart's haunting black-and-white imagery, Derrida himself confesses that one cannot resist the compulsion to "make up stories." Recalling his recent preoccupation with ghosts, Derrida spectrally engages two of the most influential visual arts theorists -- Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes. Within the framework of Plissart's project, Derrida engages a discussion of the relation of the photographic image to memory, authenticity, and reality. Responding to the impression of Plissart's world of artifice, reversibility, and seduction, Derrida's text illuminates what is at stake in "the right to look."
- GenresPhotographyPhilosophyArt
144 pages, Paperback
First published April 1, 1999
3 people are currently reading
41 people want to read
About the author
Jacques Derrida
652 books1,798 followersJacques Derrida was a French philosopher best known for developing deconstruction, a method of critical analysis that questioned the stability of meaning in language, texts, and Western metaphysical thought. Born in Algeria, he studied at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where he was influenced by philosophers such as Heidegger, Husserl, and Levinas. His groundbreaking works, including Of Grammatology (1967), Writing and Difference (1967), and Speech and Phenomena (1967), positioned him at the center of intellectual debates on language, meaning, and interpretation.
Derrida argued that Western philosophy was structured around binary oppositions—such as speech over writing, presence over absence, or reason over emotion—that falsely privileged one term over the other. He introduced the concept of différance, which suggests that meaning is constantly deferred and never fully present, destabilizing the idea of fixed truth. His work engaged with a wide range of disciplines, including literature, psychoanalysis, political theory, and law, challenging conventional ways of thinking and interpretation.
Throughout his career, Derrida continued to explore ethical and political questions, particularly in works such as Specters of Marx (1993) and The Politics of Friendship (1994), which addressed democracy, justice, and responsibility. He held academic positions at institutions such as the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales and the University of California, Irvine, and remained an influential figure in both European and American intellectual circles. Despite criticism for his complex writing style and abstract concepts, Derrida’s ideas have left a lasting impact on contemporary philosophy, literary theory, and cultural criticism, reshaping the way meaning and language are understood in the modern world.
Derrida argued that Western philosophy was structured around binary oppositions—such as speech over writing, presence over absence, or reason over emotion—that falsely privileged one term over the other. He introduced the concept of différance, which suggests that meaning is constantly deferred and never fully present, destabilizing the idea of fixed truth. His work engaged with a wide range of disciplines, including literature, psychoanalysis, political theory, and law, challenging conventional ways of thinking and interpretation.
Throughout his career, Derrida continued to explore ethical and political questions, particularly in works such as Specters of Marx (1993) and The Politics of Friendship (1994), which addressed democracy, justice, and responsibility. He held academic positions at institutions such as the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales and the University of California, Irvine, and remained an influential figure in both European and American intellectual circles. Despite criticism for his complex writing style and abstract concepts, Derrida’s ideas have left a lasting impact on contemporary philosophy, literary theory, and cultural criticism, reshaping the way meaning and language are understood in the modern world.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
February 18, 2025
“The pose, all the poses, including the photographic one, it reinscribes them all, both the position of bodies and whatever else is placed — the bets, the sequence of moves, the risks taken, the game that is calculated on the surface of a checkerboard, the escalating stakes, the outbidding, the challenge, and the patience of a bout with chance. Each put on stage and play right here, mandated and demanded, commanded, summoned to tell each other virtually every story there is, though the order is immediately overlaid by a proscription that seems to come from only one of them, you understand, from a single, discreetly ordered juxtaposition of stills, from a discontinuous series of poses.”
—
“In saying that it alludes, or even what it alludes to, you violate its silence, you break the law, the command of silence that presides like a categorical protocol over the whole ceremony.”
—
“Precisely, this abyssal inclusion of photographs within photographs takes something away from looking, it calls for discourse, demands a reading. These tableaux, scenes, or stills provoke a deciphering beyond any simple perception. Instead of a spectacle they institute a reader, or either gender, and instead of voyeurism, exegesis. But the interpreters can read and demonstrate their competence only by telling stories, whence the trap of stupidity laid for us. You must invent such stories, you owe it to yourself, at least within the limits imposed by the order. […] No longer as an order that is given, nor as a consequence or consecution, but in terms of the cloistering of a religious community or secret society bound by a contract that may take the form of a vow.”
—
“To the order of photography. It falls to you to invent stories, but you don’t know whether by doing so you will be included within or excluded from the order. It falls to you as a right of inspection, you are for the moment someone whom the photographic apparatus serves notice on, requiring you to relate to these images a large number of possible narratives. Like pieces on a checkerboard, there are at your disposal – but there are rules to be observed.”
—
“You are not, in the first place, a subject who writes, looks, or reads, you are she who tells me stories night and day, tells me what she thinks she sees as she looks, but by looking only and always”
—
“As soon as the author, narrator, or character speaks, the visible reduces to a single meaning, or at least a single focus of meaning. You are then under house arrest, permanently restricted to the domesticity of a single story; the thread of the labyrinth is firmly held”
—
“There are visible blanks, charged with potential meaning, like the white squares of the board or the whole symbolism opposing angels of light and darkness; but there are also the blanks composed of the empty moments between images, scenes, pages, or squares. [...] Here you have an indeterminate, indifferent, or aleatory fund of meaning, as insignificant as the discourse you might imagine in the place of a punctuation mark — at least to the extent that that discourse remains confined, and above all controlled, in its grammar and significance, by what is already written. But the scope of play still remains almost limitless.”
—
“The primal scene, as with everything that follows, is not really witnessed, that it is seen thanks only to the photography. It is only reproduced photographs that you have before your eyes: thus the scene is not observed through immediate evidence, but through photographs of photographs, photography of photography. The point of reference is already photography: it is looked at, developed, extended or projected, analyzed as it unfolds under the gaze, the right to the gaze […] You see what the other sees. And you have to know how to look, listen, and be good at it.”
—
“The way one takes pieces in checkers, the way women are taken by photography. They all behave like image hunters scouring the territory, bounty hunters charged with bringing back ot the wanted person whose photograph is displayed, but the photograph itself.”
—
“If you hold to this hypothesis, you have to recognize it as academic, as a hypothesis based on reading. Yes, one can only read. I repeat, this work is only about looking and the right to it, but since everything is at war over this right, it becomes solely a matter of lines of demarcation, marks or boundaries, limits, frames, and borders that leave traces of having overstepped the mark, photographic imprints — but nothing to see, if by that one means ‘perceive.’”
—
“There is no perception of a natural or naturally present reality. We thus learn that looking has nothing to do with perception, it doesn’t see.”
—
“She draws you into a photographic speculation, you cannot even distinguish what is specular, you must speculate on all possible developments, give yourself over to phantomatic or phantasmatic reconstructions. Phantoms and phantasms, always the writing of appearance, of apparition, and of semblance, the brilliance of the phainesthai and of light, photography. A genesis in reverse: let there were light!”
—
“Naming them would bring to a halt the discreet shifting from one place to another, the game of substitutions, the indecisive superpositions or superimpositions to which each figure is overexposed.”
—
“There are so many courses brought to a halt in front of the camera, as well as simultaneities, rivalries, competing desires.”
—
“One has to bring enormous attention to bear on each detail, enlarge it out of all proportion, slowly penetrate the abyss of these metonymies — and yet manage to skim through, diagonally. Accelerate, speed up the tempo, as if there were no more time.”
—
“Nowhere is anything really exhibited, pronounced, presented as such. You have here photographs, fragments of photographs of photographs. Not even the words ‘fragment’ or ‘detail’ are appropriate, for they indicate a bygone totality or one still to come.”
—
“That is why it filters. One of the ‘parties’ is always under the gaze of the other, whether that gaze is shown by the photograph or not, whether it is imposed on or posed for the photograph. Another of the ‘parties’ watches itself in the mirror. But you will never see the look of the one looking — right in the eyes — at the look of the other, nor for that matter at your own.”
—
“The title dominates, orders, and obliquely prescribes all possible readings of the photographic text. It is this lack of a verb, this ellipsis that prevents it from being a sentence that literally renders it master of the game, the dame, the king. […] You can never escape the from its system: you are before it, before the law, more beautiful than ever, a great master, as if before an impassive camera. Under the supreme authority of the title, a right of inspection is exercised over you, supervising your relation to the very thing that you see with your naked eyes.”
—
“A war of love is waged over the right to the gaze. They – male or female — look at one another according to the first two grammars […] and because, thanks to the technical apparatus, the surface being photographed, the partners or parties see the other in effigy.”
—
“It is true that that corpus offers itself and gives itself up to the gaze, to it alone. It only concerns the eye. Therefore anybody at all, provided he is skilled at looking, has a right of inspection, which also means the right to interpret whatever is taken into view. In order to invoke this jurisdiction, and first of all this jurisprudence, this providence, one needs simply to be able to take possession of the image, to foresee it or see it coming, and then develop it, recount one’s perspective on it, tell whatever stories one wishes. Thus one can give names, lend voices, imply certain things.”
—
“The polylogue we are involved in here does indeed presuppose that a right of inspection had been entrusted to us. An offer was made to us. We didn’t turn a deaf ear — that is the first condition to be accepted in approaching these imaged. But it was important that they be delivered to us without any accompanying word, given to us to look at without even the slightest commentary, the most elliptical explanation, nothing.”
—
“One needs to generate a ‘public’ by means of discourse (titles, a preface or postface, acknowledgements, supposedly expert evaluations, effects of authority) to make the work presentable, admissible, worthy of showing, legitimate.”
—
“One can always project the totality of a larger photograph and inscribe the artifact within it. Try to see that. We can see it. No you interpret it, develop or contrive it, you construct it.”
—
“In saying that it alludes, or even what it alludes to, you violate its silence, you break the law, the command of silence that presides like a categorical protocol over the whole ceremony.”
—
“Precisely, this abyssal inclusion of photographs within photographs takes something away from looking, it calls for discourse, demands a reading. These tableaux, scenes, or stills provoke a deciphering beyond any simple perception. Instead of a spectacle they institute a reader, or either gender, and instead of voyeurism, exegesis. But the interpreters can read and demonstrate their competence only by telling stories, whence the trap of stupidity laid for us. You must invent such stories, you owe it to yourself, at least within the limits imposed by the order. […] No longer as an order that is given, nor as a consequence or consecution, but in terms of the cloistering of a religious community or secret society bound by a contract that may take the form of a vow.”
—
“To the order of photography. It falls to you to invent stories, but you don’t know whether by doing so you will be included within or excluded from the order. It falls to you as a right of inspection, you are for the moment someone whom the photographic apparatus serves notice on, requiring you to relate to these images a large number of possible narratives. Like pieces on a checkerboard, there are at your disposal – but there are rules to be observed.”
—
“You are not, in the first place, a subject who writes, looks, or reads, you are she who tells me stories night and day, tells me what she thinks she sees as she looks, but by looking only and always”
—
“As soon as the author, narrator, or character speaks, the visible reduces to a single meaning, or at least a single focus of meaning. You are then under house arrest, permanently restricted to the domesticity of a single story; the thread of the labyrinth is firmly held”
—
“There are visible blanks, charged with potential meaning, like the white squares of the board or the whole symbolism opposing angels of light and darkness; but there are also the blanks composed of the empty moments between images, scenes, pages, or squares. [...] Here you have an indeterminate, indifferent, or aleatory fund of meaning, as insignificant as the discourse you might imagine in the place of a punctuation mark — at least to the extent that that discourse remains confined, and above all controlled, in its grammar and significance, by what is already written. But the scope of play still remains almost limitless.”
—
“The primal scene, as with everything that follows, is not really witnessed, that it is seen thanks only to the photography. It is only reproduced photographs that you have before your eyes: thus the scene is not observed through immediate evidence, but through photographs of photographs, photography of photography. The point of reference is already photography: it is looked at, developed, extended or projected, analyzed as it unfolds under the gaze, the right to the gaze […] You see what the other sees. And you have to know how to look, listen, and be good at it.”
—
“The way one takes pieces in checkers, the way women are taken by photography. They all behave like image hunters scouring the territory, bounty hunters charged with bringing back ot the wanted person whose photograph is displayed, but the photograph itself.”
—
“If you hold to this hypothesis, you have to recognize it as academic, as a hypothesis based on reading. Yes, one can only read. I repeat, this work is only about looking and the right to it, but since everything is at war over this right, it becomes solely a matter of lines of demarcation, marks or boundaries, limits, frames, and borders that leave traces of having overstepped the mark, photographic imprints — but nothing to see, if by that one means ‘perceive.’”
—
“There is no perception of a natural or naturally present reality. We thus learn that looking has nothing to do with perception, it doesn’t see.”
—
“She draws you into a photographic speculation, you cannot even distinguish what is specular, you must speculate on all possible developments, give yourself over to phantomatic or phantasmatic reconstructions. Phantoms and phantasms, always the writing of appearance, of apparition, and of semblance, the brilliance of the phainesthai and of light, photography. A genesis in reverse: let there were light!”
—
“Naming them would bring to a halt the discreet shifting from one place to another, the game of substitutions, the indecisive superpositions or superimpositions to which each figure is overexposed.”
—
“There are so many courses brought to a halt in front of the camera, as well as simultaneities, rivalries, competing desires.”
—
“One has to bring enormous attention to bear on each detail, enlarge it out of all proportion, slowly penetrate the abyss of these metonymies — and yet manage to skim through, diagonally. Accelerate, speed up the tempo, as if there were no more time.”
—
“Nowhere is anything really exhibited, pronounced, presented as such. You have here photographs, fragments of photographs of photographs. Not even the words ‘fragment’ or ‘detail’ are appropriate, for they indicate a bygone totality or one still to come.”
—
“That is why it filters. One of the ‘parties’ is always under the gaze of the other, whether that gaze is shown by the photograph or not, whether it is imposed on or posed for the photograph. Another of the ‘parties’ watches itself in the mirror. But you will never see the look of the one looking — right in the eyes — at the look of the other, nor for that matter at your own.”
—
“The title dominates, orders, and obliquely prescribes all possible readings of the photographic text. It is this lack of a verb, this ellipsis that prevents it from being a sentence that literally renders it master of the game, the dame, the king. […] You can never escape the from its system: you are before it, before the law, more beautiful than ever, a great master, as if before an impassive camera. Under the supreme authority of the title, a right of inspection is exercised over you, supervising your relation to the very thing that you see with your naked eyes.”
—
“A war of love is waged over the right to the gaze. They – male or female — look at one another according to the first two grammars […] and because, thanks to the technical apparatus, the surface being photographed, the partners or parties see the other in effigy.”
—
“It is true that that corpus offers itself and gives itself up to the gaze, to it alone. It only concerns the eye. Therefore anybody at all, provided he is skilled at looking, has a right of inspection, which also means the right to interpret whatever is taken into view. In order to invoke this jurisdiction, and first of all this jurisprudence, this providence, one needs simply to be able to take possession of the image, to foresee it or see it coming, and then develop it, recount one’s perspective on it, tell whatever stories one wishes. Thus one can give names, lend voices, imply certain things.”
—
“The polylogue we are involved in here does indeed presuppose that a right of inspection had been entrusted to us. An offer was made to us. We didn’t turn a deaf ear — that is the first condition to be accepted in approaching these imaged. But it was important that they be delivered to us without any accompanying word, given to us to look at without even the slightest commentary, the most elliptical explanation, nothing.”
—
“One needs to generate a ‘public’ by means of discourse (titles, a preface or postface, acknowledgements, supposedly expert evaluations, effects of authority) to make the work presentable, admissible, worthy of showing, legitimate.”
—
“One can always project the totality of a larger photograph and inscribe the artifact within it. Try to see that. We can see it. No you interpret it, develop or contrive it, you construct it.”
April 11, 2023
Builds on ideas from Lacan to Barthes and even similar stuff to Ranciere. Written pretty accessibly, but literarily of course, compared to what I've heard on Derrida, but probably because he's writing about an artist. Sucks that it's difficult to find a lot of Plissart's work online. Pretty good stuff that resonates with me, especially since I'm doing analog photography at the moment.
“Misse en demeure [a summons to perform] is an untranslatable expression because it concerns [...] legitimacy, one’s entitlement to look, to arrange or hold within one’s gaze [...] to “take” a photograph — hence it concerns the title, [Right of Inspection].”
“The photographic prey becomes prey to another’s desire. The appropriation of a point of view [...] still unleashes violence. Possession — I mean leading all the way to ecstasy — is negotiated through the right of inspection, and that right reverts to whoever possesses the camera.”
“Misse en demeure [a summons to perform] is an untranslatable expression because it concerns [...] legitimacy, one’s entitlement to look, to arrange or hold within one’s gaze [...] to “take” a photograph — hence it concerns the title, [Right of Inspection].”
“The photographic prey becomes prey to another’s desire. The appropriation of a point of view [...] still unleashes violence. Possession — I mean leading all the way to ecstasy — is negotiated through the right of inspection, and that right reverts to whoever possesses the camera.”
June 6, 2010
When I first read this my thoughts about communication and media completely changed.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews