Painting as an Embodied Act of Framing: Toward a Phenomenological Aesthetics with Merleau-Ponty and Derrida

Author(s): Lisa van Sorge (Tilburg University) Year: 2025 (Accepted 22 April 2025; Published online 25 July 2025) Type: paper (Open Access, CC-BY-4.0; journal not stated in extracted PDF metadata)

A short and tightly-argued contribution to phenomenological aesthetics. Van Sorge argues that Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of painting — developed for modernist painting and seemingly tied to paint-on-canvas — can address the radically expanded practices of contemporary painting once it is reread through Derrida's deconstruction of the frame, the parergon, in The Truth in Painting (1978/1987). The resulting account — "painting as an embodied act of framing" — operates in two registers: the material act of proposing a frame (exemplified by Katharina Grosse's spray-painted rooms) and framing as a critical manner of configuring sense (exemplified by Amy Sillman's process-as-work). The paper is also a quiet internal critique of MP: in §6, van Sorge argues MP's painterly rhetoric of "rendering visible" and universal accessibility is inconsistent with his own theory of situated perception, and must be tightened by extending the perception-theoretic commitments (limited perspective, lining of invisibility, body schema) more rigorously into the painting essays.

Core Arguments

  1. Claim: MP's phenomenology of painting can address contemporary painting once reread through Derrida's parergon. Because: MP supplies the embodied working process; Derrida supplies the deconstruction of inside/outside. Together they yield two registers of framing — material and configuring sense — both governed by undecidability. Against: views that MP is too modernist (Greenbergian medium-specificity); views that Derridean deconstruction alone suffices (since Derrida lacks a robust subject).

  2. Claim: MP is already attentive to the undecidability of frame, even though he writes only of paint-on-canvas — visible in his reading of Cézanne's "multiple, seemingly moving or unstable outlines" that "simultaneously connect and separate objects from their surroundings." Because: Cézanne's outlines are not strict borders, "they cannot be made visible as such" (MP EM 143–145; CD 15). MP holds painting is never finished: "no painting completes painting" (EM 149); "abortive effort to say something which still remains to be said" (IL 79). Against: a flat reading of MP as confined to modernist medium-specificity.

  3. Claim: MP's account of painting is too beholden to presence and visibility, more so than his theory of perception broadly construed; this needs rebalancing by extending his own situated-perception commitments rigorously to painting. Because: MP says painting "gives visible existence to what profane vision believes to be invisible" (EM 127); "[o]nly the painter is entitled to look at everything without being obliged to appraise what he sees" (EM 123); a successful work "will dwell undivided in several minds, with a claim on every possible mind like a perennial acquisition" (CD 20); the silent world becomes "uttered and accessible" (IL 51, emphasis van Sorge's). But MP's perception theory holds the subject has only a "limited perspective" (WoP 53), and "the hallmark of the visible is to have a lining of invisibility in the strict sense, which it makes present as a certain absence" (EM 147; VI 136). Against: readings that take MP's painting essays as fully consistent with his perception theory; readings that treat painting as privileged neutral access to the genesis of visibility.

  4. Claim: Derrida's parergon is best read as an instance of différance — not a concept but the deferral of stable essence — yielding the frame as "neither work (ergon) nor outside the work [hors d'œuvre]" (TiP 9). Because: Kant's parergon in §14 of the Critique of Judgment (frame, drapery, columns; KU 72) presupposes a knowable essence of the work; Derrida shows "the ergon's lack is the lack of a parergon" (TiP 59–60) — the supplement is internally constitutive. The lack inherent to painting is "the impossibility of fully defining what the essence (or truth) of painting is." Against: Kantian parergon-as-mere-supplement; presupposition of medium-essence.

  5. Claim: Painting works through "the ordeal of the undecidable"; every framing decision is impossible-yet-required, and that impossibility is what generates responsibility. Because: Derrida (1992 "Force of Law" 24): "All decisions need to go through the ordeal of the undecidable." A pre-decided choice is calculation, not decision. Deconstruction "calls for an increase in responsibility" (Derrida 1992, 20). Applied to painting: "if it is already decided that a painting stops at the edges of the canvas, no responsibility can be taken for the choice." Against: pre-decided / calculative accounts of artistic choice; the conflation of contemporary open-endedness with arbitrariness.

  6. Claim: A phenomenological account of contemporary painting must be contextual and opens onto the socio-political register — embodied habits foreground and background, "make certain things available to us, and make other things appear out of our reach." Because: Each painting is partial, situated, expression of a particular lifeworld; Joselit's "transitive painting" (October 130, 2009) names the same context-sensitivity from the art-history side; Ahmed (2006, 552) supplies the connecting theorem: "Phenomenology helps us explore how bodies are shaped by histories, which they perform in their comportment, their posture, and their gestures." Against: aestheticisms that abstract painting from the lifeworld and the politics of attention.

Key Findings

  • The two cases — Grosse and Sillman — are not interchangeable. Grosse's Mumbling Mud (K11 Shanghai 2018–19), Das Bett (2004), and The Bedroom (2023) instantiate the material register of framing-as-decision: spray-painted walls, beds, and objects diffuse the work/surroundings boundary. Sillman's Temporary Object (Naples 2023) and Thirteen Possible Futures: Cartoon for a Painting (Tate London 2012) instantiate the configuring-sense register: process-as-work, no "final" painting, frame-as-decision-about-visibility.
  • Cézanne is the shared anchor between MP and Derrida. Both engage the letter to Bernard ("I owe you the truth in painting"); MP focuses on Cézanne's working process and doubts, Derrida on the unfulfilled promise and à-venir. Van Sorge's wager: their joint reading of Cézanne is the bridge that lets MP-Derrida be read together rather than contrasted.
  • The MP-internal corrective (§6) is the paper's most original move: reading MP's perception-theoretic commitments against MP's painting-essay rhetoric, and using contemporary painters (Sillman) as the empirical lever that surfaces the inconsistency.
  • The parergon is read as différance (TiP 80, briefly): not a concept-to-be-applied but a structure that defers stable essence. Heller-Andrist (2011) provides the literary-critical use of the same reading; Duro (2019) the art-theoretical.
  • Painting "beside itself" (after Joselit) names the open-ended yet still-painting condition: contemporary painting "explicitly subverts or deconstructs what it is traditionally taken to be" while "still marginally engages with itself."

Methodology

Close textual reading of MP's painting essays ("Cézanne's Doubt" 1948; "Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence" 1960; Eye and Mind 1961; Phenomenology of Perception 1945; The Visible and the Invisible 1964; World of Perception 1948 lectures) and Derrida's Truth in Painting (1978) and "Force of Law" (1992). Constructive synthesis (not comparison-and-contrast) anchored in the shared Cézanne reference. Cases drawn from contemporary art-practice (Grosse, Sillman) used as empirical levers rather than as illustrative ornaments.

Concepts Developed

Concepts this source is primary on — where it does original work:

  • embodied-act-of-framing — van Sorge's signature concept; painting reread as the embodied subject's two-register decision (material frame + configuring sense) under undecidability.
  • parergon — first wiki home for Derrida's parergon and the surrounding Derridean cluster (différance, undecidability, à-venir, responsibility); the source is not the only treatment of parergon but is its first ingest on this wiki.

Concepts Referenced

Concepts the source touches on but does not develop:

  • visible-invisible — MP's central pair, deployed in §2 and §6 with critical inflection.
  • making-visible — Klee's Sichtbarmachen implicit in MP's "gives visible existence to what profane vision believes to be invisible"; van Sorge's diagnosis is that MP's wielding of this formula in EM/CD is over-strong.
  • expression — see primordial-expression / coherent-deformation; van Sorge presents MP's "process of expressing" as the alternative to Husserlian image-thing/image-object/image-subject.
  • motor-intentionality — referenced as the perceptual structure underlying painting as second-order expression.
  • lebenswelt — implicit in "particular lifeworld" / "particular manner of being embodied and situated."
  • institution / stiftung — MP's I&P 41 cited (footnote 77) for painting's expressive ongoingness; not developed.
  • paul-cezanne — the shared MP/Derrida anchor; Mont Sainte-Victoire; the letter to Bernard.

Terminology (philosophical anchors)

Term Source-context Role in van Sorge Wiki anchor
parergon (παρ-έργον) Kant KU §14; Derrida TiP The figure that disconcerts inside/outside opposition; instance of différance parergon
différance Derrida Of Grammatology (1967) The deferral of stable essence; the structure of parergon parergon (subsection)
à-venir / to-come Derrida 1992, 27 Structural future of the unfulfilled promise parergon (subsection)
undecidability Derrida 1992, 24–25 The "ordeal" through which any decision must pass parergon (subsection)
Sichtbarmachen / rendering visible Klee 1920 → MP Implicit operating phrase of MP's painting essays; van Sorge contests its over-strong wielding making-visible
inside of the outside / outside of the inside MP EM 126 MP's compressed formula for painting as second-order expression primordial-expression / chiasm
image-thing / image-object / image-subject Husserl Hua XXIII §9 Husserl's tripartite analysis of pictorial consciousness; MP's expression-account departs from this (Husserl-side; not yet on wiki)
transitive painting / "painting beside itself" Joselit October 130 (2009) Contemporary painting's context-sensitivity (no wiki page; cited from this source only)

Key Passages

"I owe you the truth in painting and I will tell it to you." (Paul Cézanne to Emile Bernard, October 23, 1905, as quoted in Derrida TiP 2; van Sorge §1 epigraph)

"[T]he parergon is neither work (ergon) nor outside the work [hors d'oeuvre], neither inside nor outside, neither above nor below, it disconcerts any opposition but does not remain indeterminate and it gives rise to the work." (Derrida TiP 9, cited van Sorge §4)

"What constitutes them as parerga is not simply their exteriority as a surplus, it is the internal structural link which rivets them to the lack in the interior of the ergon. And this lack would be constitutive of the very unity of the ergon. Without this lack, the ergon would have no need of a parergon. The ergon's lack is the lack of a parergon." (Derrida TiP 59–60, cited van Sorge §4)

"All decisions need to go through the ordeal of the undecidable." (Derrida 1992, "Force of Law" 24, cited van Sorge §4)

"[The painter] gives visible existence to what profane vision believes to be invisible." (MP EM 127, cited van Sorge §6) — the very passage van Sorge contests as over-strong, given MP's perception-theoretic commitments.

"[O]nly the painter is entitled to look at everything without being obliged to appraise what he sees." (MP EM 123, cited van Sorge §6) — anchors the diagnosis of MP's over-attribution.

"[A successful work] will dwell undivided in several minds, with a claim on every possible mind like a perennial acquisition." (MP "Cézanne's Doubt" 20, cited van Sorge §6)

"[T]he silent world of the painter, henceforth uttered and accessible." (MP "Indirect Language" 51, emphasis van Sorge's; §6)

"[T]he hallmark of the visible is to have a lining of invisibility in the strict sense, which it makes present as a certain absence." (MP EM 147, also VI 136, cited van Sorge §6) — the resource MP himself supplies for the corrective.

"If no painting completes painting, if no work is itself ever absolutely completed, still, each creation changes, alters, clarifies, deepens, confirms, exalts, re-creates, or creates by anticipation all the others." (MP EM 149, cited van Sorge §5)

"Phenomenology helps us explore how bodies are shaped by histories, which they perform in their comportment, their posture, and their gestures." (Ahmed 2006, 552, cited van Sorge §7)

"Even though it is beyond the scope of this attempt to describe the connection and its implications in full, Merleau-Ponty brings painting's ongoing expressive process in close connection to the concept of Institution [Stiftung] as an ongoing event. See Merleau-Ponty (2010, p. 41)." (van Sorge footnote 77) — flagged but not developed; cross-reference to stiftung / institution.

What's Not Obvious

Three things about this paper that would not appear in a conventional summary:

  1. The MP-internal corrective is the paper's most original move, and it works by reading MP against MP. Van Sorge does not import Derrida to fix MP from outside; she uses Derrida to surface a tension already inside MP's text — between the rhetoric of the painting essays ("uttered and accessible," "claim on every possible mind") and the rhetoric of the perception essays ("limited perspective," "lining of invisibility"). The paper's most distinctive thesis (argument 3) is that MP's perception theory under-determines MP's painting theory — a phenomenologist criticizing MP for not being phenomenological enough about painting. Specific passage: §6, in which van Sorge places MP's "[Cézanne] wanted to depict matter as it takes on form" (CD 13) and "the painter recaptures and converts into visible objects what would, without him, remain walled up in the separate life of each consciousness" (CD 17–18) directly alongside MP's own admission of "limited perspective" (WoP 53) and "depth of the visible" (VI 142–43). The juxtaposition is the argument.

  2. The paper's conclusion is socio-political, not aesthetic. Despite presenting itself as a phenomenological aesthetics paper, the §7 closing turns to Ahmed's Orientations: Toward a Queer Phenomenology (2006) and frames painting as a gesture through which "bodies are shaped by histories" — i.e., as one site at which the politics of comportment, attention, and orientation become visible (and invisible). The paper's actual payoff is not "MP can be applied to Grosse and Sillman" but "phenomenological aesthetics opens onto a politics of what counts as visible," and Grosse/Sillman are loci where this opening becomes thematic. Cross-reference: this lines van Sorge up with sara-ahmed's extension of the body-schema / habitual body to "diversity work."

  3. The parergon-as-différance reading is taken from Derrida's brief footnote, not from his sustained argument. Derrida himself only mentions the connection between parergon and différance in a single line (TiP 80, cited at van Sorge footnote 36). Most of The Truth in Painting is concerned with frame as discrepancy of inside/outside without explicit reference to différance. Van Sorge takes this brief gesture and makes it the load-bearing reading, because it allows her to connect the parergon to undecidability and to the "Force of Law" framework she needs for the responsibility-claim (argument 5). This is a strong, defensible reading, but it is a constructive one — van Sorge's parergon is more différance-inflected than Derrida's own deployment of the term in TiP. Readers of this wiki should not assume "parergon = différance" simpliciter; the equation is van Sorge's interpretive choice, anchored in but not exhausted by Derrida's text.

Critique / Limitations

  • The "necessitates" claim in §6 oscillates with the "MP already has the resources" claim in §3 and §5. Van Sorge moves between "MP needs to be corrected" and "MP already accommodates contemporary painting"; the argument would be cleaner if she located precisely the internal tension. The MP-corpus-internal evidence she marshals (EM 147 on the lining of invisibility; EM 142–43 on looking at a landscape together) actually leans toward the "MP already has the resources" reading more than the corrective one. The paper would be stronger if it acknowledged this tension explicitly, or if it identified a specific MP passage that cannot be reconciled with the perception-theoretic commitments.

  • The transfer of "Force of Law" undecidability from justice to painting is asserted, not argued. Derrida's 1992 "Force of Law" is about justice and the impossibility of a just decision; van Sorge transplants its framework to artistic decision. The transfer is intuitive but van Sorge does not address the obvious objection — that justice's stakes (life, freedom, equality) are categorically different from painting's, and that the ordeal of the undecidable may be diminished or different in kind for an artist deciding whether to spray-paint a bed.

  • The Grosse and Sillman cases are introduced descriptively but not developed empirically. Van Sorge does not engage Grosse's or Sillman's own writings or interviews at any length; the cases function as philosophical illustrations, not as empirical contributions. A more sustained engagement with Sillman's writings (e.g., Faux Pas: Selected Writings and Drawings, 2020) might have tested or complicated the configuring-sense reading.

  • No engagement with MP's late ontology (V&I, Nature) beyond visibility/invisibility. Stiftung is mentioned (footnote 77) and dropped. Flesh is not engaged at all, despite Derrida's 2000 critique of MP-on-flesh being one of the major sites of Derrida-MP polemic in the literature (carbone-2015-flesh-of-images). The paper restricts itself to MP's painting essays, which is a defensible scoping but leaves the late ontology untouched.

  • Joselit and Krauss are cited but not engaged philosophically. Van Sorge takes "post-medium" and "transitive painting" as contextual terms without arguing for them; readers familiar with the art-theoretical debate may want a more sustained engagement.

Connections

  • applies parergon to primordial-expression and motor-intentionality — the paper's signature constructive move
  • contests making-visible as MP wields it in EM/CD — the Sichtbarmachen rhetoric is held up against MP's perception theory and found over-strong (live claim, see claims#mp-painting-account-too-presence-bound)
  • complements visible-invisible — adds a critical reading of MP's painterly deployment of the visible/invisible structure
  • extends paul-cezanne — adds the Derrida-on-Cézanne dimension (Cézanne's promise to Bernard) to the wiki's MP-anchored Cézanne treatment
  • parallels carbone-2015-flesh-of-images structurally — both engage MP-Derrida around painting; Carbone defends MP-via-Gauguin against Derrida's flesh-critique; van Sorge synthesizes MP-with-Derrida around the parergon. False-friend caution: these are different polemical registers (flesh vs. frame); do not collapse them.
  • uses sara-ahmed (2006) for the socio-political conclusion
  • engages jacques-derrida's Truth in Painting (1978) and "Force of Law" (1992) — the wiki's first ingest of Derrida-on-painting (the existing Derrida page handles only the 2000 On Touching / flesh critique)
  • contextualizes contemporary painting against immanuel-kant's Critique of Judgment (the parergon of §14)
  • shares the Cézanne-as-anchor structure with merleau-ponty-1961-eye-and-mind and merleau-ponty-1945-phenomenology-of-perception's Preface — Cézanne as the painter through whom phenomenology learns to see itself