A Reflexive Gaze on Art History: ‘Pregnances’

This article examines one of Jacques Derrida’s essays concerning aesthetics, ‘Pregnances’ (first published in 1993), which comments on the work of a woman artist, Colette Deblé, in relation to the question of the ‘feminine’ and to a feminist gaze in art history. Derrida argues that Deblé avoids oppositional or ‘reactive’ logic regarding Western pictorial tradition in favour of what can be called a reflexive gaze of this undoubtedly phallogocentric tradition. Deblé’s work also represents a reassessment of the traditional opposition between (masculine) activity and (feminine) passivity, as well as male/masculine penetration and female/feminine impregnation, but also of chronological temporality, hierarchy between the original and the copy, and precedence of the original over the quotation.