The Restitution of Truth in Painting: Vincent Van Gogh's "Shoes" and their Explication in the Philosophy of Jacques Derrida.

Gaynutdinov Timur Rashidovich PhD in Philosophy Associate Professor of the Department of Philosophy at Yaroslavl Demidov State University 150000, Russia, Yaroslavl Region, Yaroslavl, str. Sovetskaya 10, room No. 58 jean-jacques@yandex.ru Other publications by this author

The Truth in paintingJacques Derrida's most significant work on aesthetics is the book "Truth in Painting" ^[1] – it is in it that he rethinks the main aspects of artistic creativity.

It is known that Derrida originally planned to name his book "Du droit ? la peinture", that is, "The Right to Painting", which was consonant with a number of other texts written by Derrida in the second half of the 1970s, eventually published under one cover in 1990 with the title "Du droit ? la philosophie" ("The right to philosophy"). It can be assumed that in this way he planned to combine his criticism of the art system and academic structures. Derrida himself claimed that he considered this project and the name fixing it too ambitious and therefore abandoned it. One way or another, in the end we have "Truth in Painting", or rather its promise, and it fills the artistic and philosophical discourse from all sides. The very existence of the "right to painting" would presuppose a law indicating its limit. Derrida deconstructs this limit from all sides, defining it after Kant through the parergon.

By developing deconstruction in the margins (parergue), Derrida shifts the habitual axis of perception ^[2] and the hierarchy that is dictated to her – he literally unties the habitual ties, as one unties the laces on shoes, taking them off upon returning home. In 1978, Derrida devoted a rather large article entitled "Restitutions, De la v?rit? en pointure" (in such punctuation) to shoes and laces untied on them, but also, at least partially, to untied speech, which can literally be translated as "Restitution, From truth to size". Starting from this publication, we would like to address the problem of truth in painting, as well as its persistent search in the works of Martin Heidegger and Meyer Shapiro.

Jacques Derrida's article was published in the artistic and philosophical magazine "Macula", founded shortly before, and some of the first readers naively believed that a mistake had crept into the title of the published article. The fact is that the French word painting (peinture) and size (pointure) are close both in spelling (with a difference of only one letter) and in sound, so at the first reading it seems that we are talking about a typo of an unlucky typesetter and the inattentive eye of the editor who missed an error when checking the text: "Restitution, From truth to painting" – it should be exactly like this (let's close our eyes for now to the ornate construction of the whole phrase). After all, of course, we are talking about restoring the truth in painting, which has always occupied Derrida, and refers us to the famous phrase of Paul Cezanne: "I owe you the truth in painting, and I will tell you it" ^[3].  It is around this promise of Cezanne that Derrida's book "Truth in Painting" will be built. The book itself will be published in the same year, and the above-mentioned article, expanded and supplemented, will be transformed there into the fourth chapter or, in the words of Derrida himself, "the fourth circle" ^{[4, p. 317]}. This text is dedicated to Vincent Van Gogh's shoes, or rather, their embodiment on canvas, and is built in the form of a polylogue, the starting point for which was Meyer Shapiro's essay "Still Life as a personal object" ^[5], in which he criticizes Martin Heidegger's famous reasoning about Van Gogh's painting depicting peasant shoes. 

Let's return, however, to the title of Derrida's article "Restitution, From Truth to Size". Of course, there was no typo in it, but only a conscious language game-a trick that is quite familiar to Derrida's deconstruction (let's recall at least the nodal concept of his philosophy, the neographism "difference", replacing the usual "e" at the root of the word with "a", which is reflected only in the letter, but is completely erased during pronunciation).   Perhaps it is also a way for Derrida to express his irony about the truth in painting, at least over those who believe in it – philosophers and art historians. So, following Derrida, we are moving "from the truth to the size", first of all, of course, shoes, because it is about her that Derrida's article is about, as if we are in a shoe store and trying on a pair of shoes suitable for us: one neat box taken off the shelf replaces another, but the right pair is all no and no. Suitable, in the sense of being able to return the truth to us, to restore its outlines again.  The only question is, to whom should we return this truth? The whole point of restitution is the return of the old rights, especially for a pair of old shoes, because who are we without shoes? Without a pair of familiar cozy shoes?  Justice must be restored. Meyer Shapiro demands this in his article for a friend of Kurt Goldstein, who was thrown into a Nazi prison immediately after Hitler came to power, and soon fled from Germany as soon as he left her dungeons. All this happened at the very moment when Martin Heidegger became rector of the University of Freiburg and began to write "The Source of Artistic Creation", reflecting on Vincent Van Gogh's shoes, which he saw at a large exhibition of the artist in Amsterdam in the early warm spring of 1930. Goldstein also visited this exhibition, but probably in 1933 his thoughts are very far from Van Gogh, although it is to the Netherlands that he flees, having been expelled by the distraught fatherland. So, Meyer Shapiro demands restitution – this "act of directional justice" ("actus iustitiae commutativae") of Thomas Aquinas ^[6], he demands retribution for the departed elder friend. He is responsible to him, and therefore appeals to Heidegger's answer. As soon as Goldstein dies, at the beginning of the new academic year of 1965, Shapiro writes to Heidegger. Of course, he does not demand satisfaction here and now, especially since it is too late, too late for his friend. Shapiro is ready for a protracted restitution, he calls Heidegger to account, if not for the "shoes from the Danube embankment", then at least for Van Gogh's shoes. Shapiro is preparing a trap for Heidegger so that he can finally return the shoes to their owner, the artist Vincent, who plows urban landscapes. The return of the shoes to the owner is the restoration of the truth – that is why it is so important for both venerable professors.     

Martin Heidegger and Meyer Shapiro: a discussion about Vincent Van Gogh's "shoes"It is known that Vincent Van Gogh was a tireless walker.

This is often associated with a lack of money, but the reason, obviously, is not only that. Perhaps the dimensionality of the step had a psychotherapeutic effect on him; perhaps, on the contrary, it was the inner expression that prevented him from staying at rest for a long time, constantly pushing him out into the street, forcing him to measure it with a quick, wide step. Wherever Van Gogh goes, wherever he goes, everywhere we see him in motion, walking. But walking requires shoes, and we can see it firsthand in a number of paintings by the artist. At least a dozen and a half of Van Gogh's canvases, starting with the earliest still lifes (the textbook here, of course, is "Still Life with cabbage and wooden shoes" in 1881) and ending with the latest works (for example, "Siesta" or "Midday rest after work (by the Mill)" in 1890), depict shoes: most often, old, battered shoes or traditional, Dutch, wooden bedbugs.

Martin Heidegger refers to Van Gogh's shoes in two texts: "The Source of Artistic Creation" ^[7] and "Introduction to Metaphysics" ^[8]. But what kind of picture is he talking about in both cases? For a long time this remained a mystery, and since Heidegger himself did not directly indicate which Van Gogh painting he was describing, Meyer Shapiro conducted his own little investigation. However, it did not allow him to come to an unambiguous conclusion, so, in the end, he still had to ask the philosopher directly about it. In a reply letter, Heidegger "kindly wrote" ^{[5, p.29]} that we are talking about a painting that he saw in March 1930 at the Van Gogh exhibition in Amsterdam. Comparing the list of works that were then at the exhibition with the most complete catalog of Van Gogh's paintings at that time, prepared by Jacob Bart de la Faye ^[9], Shapiro came to the conclusion that Heidegger refers to the painting number 255 from this catalog - "Een paar schoenen" (translated from Dutch "A pair of Shoes", but more often the picture is called simply "Shoes" or "Old shoes with laces", as we will do), painted in the early autumn of 1886. A small canvas, measuring 38 by 45 centimeters, oil on canvas, and now we know that the "Shoes" are painted on top of another painting depicting the view from the apartment of Vincent's brother, Theo. Van Gogh did this quite often because of the chronic lack of money, and with it the lack of canvas, so that the works were often painted one on top of the other – such a picturesque palimpsest.

So, two great teachers, Martin Heidegger and Meyer Shapiro, in 1965, in several letters to each other, expressed their vision of one of Wang Gogh's paintings depicting a pair of old, trampled shoes. Three years after the epistolary meeting, Shapiro's article "Still Life as a Personal Object: Notes on Heidegger and Van Gogh" was published in 1968. The article was published with a dedication to Kurt Goldstein, who just drew Shapiro's attention to Heidegger's book "The Source of Artistic Creation". Twenty–six years later, already many after Heidegger's death and shortly before his own death, Shapiro publishes an addition to the notes - "More about Heidegger and Van Gogh", that is, given that Heidegger's book "The Source of Artistic Creation" was written in 1935, we can say that the dialogue of the two great teachers it stretched for almost six decades, and even in 1994, when Heidegger was no longer alive, and Shapiro himself was over 90 years old, he continues to answer him, developing this invisible dialogue from the office of his New York apartment. 

The scene that we can imagine following the letter (just one, as we remember) and the size of Derrida are two venerable professors gazing at the same painting (or its illustration), the most famous "shoe" painting in the history of painting — "Old Shoes with Laces" by Vincent Van Gogh. The shoes on her, according to Derrida, seem no longer capable of serving any service (except as an object for the artist), not subject to return, not resurrectable.  They no longer work, do not belong to anyone, they are not present and are not absent. Nevertheless, two professors, like two magicians, persistently strive to revive them, and for them this is primarily a way to make them their own.  Heidegger and Shapiro argue about this pair of shoes, not even doubting that it is a pair, having concluded a kind of bet about a pair, and each of them believes himself to be the one who knows the truth. Of course, because as a teacher, each of them has some debt in truth – debt to his students, readers, the artist himself in the end. Each of them should return this debt by screwing in his word, do it confidently and beautifully, as befits a great teacher. That's why they talk about it so persistently, exchanging letters, entering into a dialogue, almost a scientific dispute.

For Heidegger, the peasant woman's shoes, depicted by Van Gogh, read the hardships of physical labor in their wear and tear; they literally belong to the earth, are physically connected with it. When we see a Van Gogh painting depicting a pair of worn shoes, we are not so much looking at this image as we find ourselves in the presence of these old shoes. According to Heidegger, these shoes actually exist, that is, through Van Gogh's painting, the truth is realized here. Moreover, in Martin Heidegger's "The Source of Artistic Creation", "shoeing becomes equal to being" ^{[10, p. 59]}: it is by the standards of this pair that some restoration of reality takes place, its return to being, to the true foundation. These once strong and solid shoes, which have passed thousands of trails, absorbed all the dust and dirt of humus, becoming the same color with it, are completely tired and exhausted now, trampled and battered, but at the same time have not lost their reliability, and therefore regularly continue to serve their owner — peasant, but, in a place with those, the earth, and therefore are almost indistinguishable from it: "From the dark trampled interior of these shoes, the hard work of feet walking heavily while working in the field stares at us motionlessly. Loneliness has sunk under the soles of these shoes, a lonely way home from the field in the evening sometimes. The mute call of the earth is given in these shoes, the land that generously gives the maturity of grain, the land with the inexplicable dedication of its fallow fields in the dead of winter. An anxious concern for the future of daily bread is evident in these shoes, a concern that knows no complaints, and joy that does not seek words when difficult days have been experienced, trembling fear in anticipation of childbirth and a trembling premonition of impending death. These shoes belong to the earth, this business, in the peasant woman's world – the shelter that keeps them. And from this stored belonging to the earth, the product rises in order to rest in itself" ^{[7, p. 119]}. The earth is what a person bases his stay on, the womb in which he thrives. Just as a person needs soil, a stable foundation, he needs a material from which he can create: stone, wood, metal, speech, sound. When we create a work, we do not make the material from which it is created disappear. On the contrary, we allow it to manifest itself. This is one of the dimensions of activity: to liberate the earth so that it becomes the earth, to make it visible in the light of its being and, at the same time, to take it out of itself, out of its inner reservation. The earth, in fact, is what is contained in itself; activity allows it to open itself or at least to reveal itself, thereby creating the world. There is a struggle between the earth and the world, but at the same time they belong to each other in the unity of being-work. Paradoxically, they are forever separated, separated, but rest on each other. Like Kant, Heidegger establishes a connection between a work of art and nature, but this is not a relationship of completeness, but a movement through which the work reveals, directly at the time of its creation, what, in fact, is closed to itself – the earth.

According to Heidegger, the object presented to us in Van Gogh's painting is not a reproduction or representation of a certain thing, it is not "treachery of images", to use the name of a famous painting by Rene Magritte, quite the contrary, it is a thing in its truth: "We found this usefulness of the product when we found ourselves in front of a Van Gogh painting. And the picture has said its word. Being near the creation, we suddenly visited a different place, not where we usually are. Thanks to the artistic creation, we have learned what this product, shoes, really is" ^{[7, p. 121]}. When this or that thing in its utilitarianism serves a certain cause, we cannot grasp its essence, it turns out to be hidden by its function, subordinated to the "serviceability" of its being. However, the artist is able to suspend the serviceability of the product, remove it from the "handy" of its own function and thereby reveal the truth of its own being.

Heidegger appeals to the Greek word "", which is most often translated as "truth", but more precisely, the philosopher insists, to think "" as non-concealment or non-concealment: "What is happening here? What is going on in creation? Van Gogh's painting is the disclosure, the dissolution of what this product truly is, peasant shoes. The being enters into the non-concealment of its being. The Greeks called the uncovered being “alethea". We say “truth” and do not think about this word.  In creation, if there is a revelation, a dissolution of the being for its being by this and that being, the fulfillment of truth is created" ^{[7, p. 124]}. According to Heidegger, the artwork allows the essence of the product to become uncovered. In Van Gogh's shoes, the embodiment of truth in being takes place, the restoration of authenticity, a certain ontological foundation.  Van Gogh gives us the very "truth in painting" that Cezanne is talking about, he returns this debt to us, even if it was not taken by him at all, and besides, not in front of us. 

Everyone knows that Van Gogh was not only a tireless walker, but also an eternal debtor, at least as soon as he picked up a brush, bought the first oil paints and stretched the canvas on a stretcher, made a thick smear. Constant lack of money! His letters to his brother Theo are a continuous plea for a coin for new paints, brushes and canvases.

Van Gogh and Cezanne were both in debt: the first owed money, the second owed the truth, and both readily admitted it, insistently promising to return everything to the last, close all debts, get even with them. Exactly like Meyer Shapiro, who also constantly feels in debt. First of all, before Van Gogh himself, but also Kurt Goldstein, who introduced him to Heidegger's text – a text, as Shapiro thought, vicious in its gross appropriation and distortion of identity.  Heidegger, under the guise of searching for the "source of artistic creation," stole the truth from Vincent, turned everything upside down and brazenly stole his identity, forced him to ventriloquize with other voices and even forced him to change his gender, turning him into a peasant woman, with a heavy tread, wandering through viscous humus. Therefore, it is necessary to return everything to its place, total restitution is necessary in accordance with the strict prescriptions of the history of art: it is important to tell the story of the painting, give it a name and establish a clear dating, determine the horizons of the identity of the objects depicted, as well as the circumstances of its writing by the artist.

Shapiro cannot allow the painting to remain without attribution, disappearing into the metaphysical smoke of the philosopher's idle arguments or, even worse, turning into a pure remnant of aesthetics, its idly abandoned fragment. Just as a piece of the artist's left ear, cut off by him with a straight razor a little earlier, was thrown on the threshold of a brothel as an irreversible gift on Christmas Eve 1888. Van Gogh presented his strange gift to eighteen-year-old Gabrielle Berlatier, who, being previously a minor, officially got a job in a "shameful" institution as a maid to pay off debts accumulated while she was being treated for rabies at the Pasteur Institute a few months earlier. The full name of the girl, as well as the more or less exact circumstances of the whole incident, we learned quite recently - this was facilitated, among other things, by the diligent maintenance and storage of documentation by the Pasteur Institute in Paris. Interestingly, for the first time the correct version about the recipient of the "Van Gogh gift" was put forward in one of the newspaper publications in 1936, however, there the girl's name sounded "Rachel" with reference to the recording of the policeman Alphonse Robert, who arrived first on the scene at the brothel on Rue du Bou d'Arle on December twenty-fourth. They also found a small note dated December 26, 1888 in the Paris edition of Le petit journal, which quotes a telegram from a correspondent from Arles: "Last night, a certain artist from Holland named Vincent, after cutting off his ear with a blade, came to the door of a brothel and handed a piece of his ear wrapped in paper to a man who opened the door. "Take this, it may be useful," he said and left."^[11] "It might be useful"! A piece of flesh wrapped in blood-soaked paper.  It is known that Gabrielle's left hand was cauterized with a red-hot iron at the site of the dog bite (which was the source of rabies infection), so she left a large scar. Perhaps, in Van Gogh's clouded mind, a piece of his flesh could help restore the lost perfection of the epidermis fragment on Gabrielle's hand?  Perhaps this is also a form of restitution? A kind of restoration of the truth in the size of a piece of skin, only not on a pair of shoes, but on the girl's forearm. Gabrielle worked part-time as a cleaner at the Caf? de la Gare in Arles, of which Vincent was a regular. Three months before the loss of the ear, he even depicted it in his famous painting "Night Cafe", so they often saw each other in that strange year for both. For Berlatier, it began with a bite from a rabid dog (it happened on the eighth of January) and a trip to Paris for treatment, and for Van Gogh with a move from Paris to Arles. And if at the beginning of the year their paths were divergent, then at least since the summer they had seen each other quite often, at least often enough for Van Gogh to hand her his own ear wrapped in paper on Christmas Eve in order to keep the secret of his own discovery at least a little bit, as befits a good Christmas gift.  However, it is known that it was not so much about Gabrielle as about brother Theo: it was on December 23, 1888 that Vincent received a letter from his brother, in which he tells him about his upcoming wedding with Johanna Bonger, who finally answered "yes" to the marriage proposal. Van Gogh was stunned by this news, believing that Theo's wedding would destroy their close relationship. Perhaps, having learned about his brother's impending marriage, he presented Van Eyck's painting "The Wedding of Arnolfini's Features", and especially bare feet and shoes lying next to the figures. Pattens taken off his feet and left aside – he himself so often painted this image, which became his face, his self-portrait. After all, it's not for nothing that Van Gogh said that the two-horned high caps-hairstyles worn by the ladies of Arles who were modern to him seemed to have descended from the paintings of Jan Vai Eyck (it is in this headdress that Van Eyck's wife Margaret is depicted in the painting of 1439). There is a gap of almost four hundred and fifty years between Van Eyck and Van Gogh, but the ladies, nevertheless, continue to wear the same hairstyles, and a pair of shoes still stands aside, taken in front of the "holy land", a conversation about which is still waiting for us ahead. 

Of course, Van Gogh was not the only artist focused on shoes. In addition to the already named Van Eyck, Shapiro names another artist, an older contemporary of Van Gogh – Jean-Francois Millet, who had a habit of giving friends and admirers drawings of a pair of shoes as a sign of his attachment to peasant life. In 1864, the book "The Artist and the Peasant" was published, dedicated to Milla and containing a reproduction of one of these sketches.  Van Gogh repeatedly refers to this book in his letters, and the name of Millet himself appears more than two hundred times ^{[5, p. 35]}. Of course, some of the ideas of the Barbizon school and Millet, as one of its founders, were quite close to Van Gogh, especially with regard to the image of the peasant artist. Perhaps this is also why Heidegger had this kind of overlap.  Nevertheless, Shapiro adheres to the opposite point of view to Heidegger: these shoes, as he believes, belong to the artist himself. They are old and worn, but their peasant character is not at all obvious. At the exhibition of paintings by Vincent Van Gogh in Amsterdam, which Martin Heidegger visited in March 1930, there were two paintings depicting shoes: one of them depicted old worn shoes with laces, the other – three pairs of shoes, but, according to Shapiro, none of these pairs are similar, in fact, on peasant shoes. It is especially strange that Heidegger insists that this couple belongs to a peasant woman, and not to a peasant.    What is the reason for such confidence of the philosopher remains a mystery: Heidegger does not explain this "inoculation of the sex of shoes" in any way ^{[10, p. 51]}, and Shapiro does not pay any attention to this gender transformation of shoes. Perhaps this very choice of Heidegger, which seems to us completely arbitrary and unjustified, could serve as a starting point for extensive gender studies of his philosophy. In these peasant woman's shoes, Heidegger distinguishes a dusty country road, clods of earth into which a plow crashes, but most importantly: a quiet and silent concern for the safety of grain or, say, potatoes, if we appeal to another famous painting by Van Gogh. Of course, what makes this Van Gogh painting a work of art is not its representative capabilities at all, and Heidegger does not just give a description of a pair of peasant shoes. He is trying to do much more, or rather, something completely different: he seeks to open them to the truth.  But in the very attempt of this discovery, Heidegger only projects on Van Gogh's paintings, which he comments on, his own sensitivity, his own attachment to the earth: "From his acquaintance with Van Gogh's canvas, he extracted a heap of volatile associations with peasants and soil, associations not supported by the painting itself. They apparently grew up on the basis of his own views on society, in which the "primordial" and "proximity to the earth" are emphasized with pathos" ^{[5, p. 30]}.

Shapiro accuses Heidegger of having transferred his own desires and fantasies to Van Gogh's painting, thereby losing sight of "the artist's presence in the work" ^{[5, p. 31]}. Appealing to some biographical facts, Shapiro insists: these are not peasant shoes at all, but the shoes of Van Gogh himself – a completely urban dweller.   Francois Gozy, one of the artists Van Gogh met in Paris and whom Shapiro quotes, recalls how Vincent was looking for the right shoes for the painting: "At the flea market, he bought a pair of old, big, clumsy shoes —the shoes of some hard worker– but clean and newly polished. They were ordinary old shoes, there was nothing remarkable about them. One afternoon, when it was raining heavily, he put them on and went for a walk along the old city wall. And now, plastered with mud, they have become much more interesting" ^[12].

Meyer Shapiro notes that Van Gogh's shoes are turned towards us like the face of a person looking at us: "they seem to be looking at us, they seem so worn and wrinkled that we can talk about them as a plausible portrait..." [5 p. 31]. For Shapiro, these shoes do not just belong to the artist, they do not just fit him in size – "they are Vincent Van Gogh from head to toe" ^{[10, p. 59]}, the most accurate self-portrait of him that can be imagined at all. It is interesting that Shapiro quotes Knut Hamsun as an illustration, to whom Heidegger also addressed in his work "Introduction to Metaphysics", published in the same 1935 as "The Source of Artistic Creation". In Hamsun's novel "Hunger", the hero describes his shoes: "As if I had never seen my shoes, I begin to look closely at how they look, how they change with every movement of my foot, and what shape they have, how the skin has rubbed. And I find that wrinkles and whitish seams give them a peculiar expression, that they seem to have a face. A certain part of my being seemed to have passed into these shoes, something close to them breathed on me, as if it were my own breath" ^[13].

So, Van Gogh's shoes are like the face of the artist himself, looking at us from his self-portrait. Just as in Emmanuel Levinas, the face is the source of all meaning, where the word and the look merge into a single whole, where the otherness of the "Other" takes its source, and infinity finds its visible expression, in Shapiro, it is the picture with shoes that appears in such a metonymic image of Vincent's face. Van Gogh's shoes are his self–portrait, his canvas – that's what Shapiro insists on: "There is no more separation: shoes are no longer tied to Van Gogh, they are Vincent himself, inseparable from him. They do not even depict one of its parts, but all of its connected, compressed, focused on itself, around itself, next to itself, presence, parousia" ^{[10, p. 58]}.

Criticism of Jacques DerridaIn order to better understand Van Gogh's plan, to finally put the shoes in their place and accurately determine their dimension in the grid of truth, it is necessary to insert the picture that Heidegger is analyzing into the general series of the artist's "shoe" paintings.

That's why Shapiro turns to eight paintings by Van Gogh at once, as opposed to the incomplete two by Heidegger. For Shapiro, it is important to identify the seriality of the artist's works related to shoes – this, in his opinion, is the key to their correct perception. However, as Derrida explains, Shapiro makes a mistake: he separates Heidegger's lines dedicated directly to Van Gogh's painting from their philosophical context, from the very path of thought. That is, by returning seriality to Van Gogh, he eliminates it from Heidegger! Shapiro abruptly and sometimes rudely gets rid of philosophy, he stops its movement, cools its intensity in order to release the biography of the artist and his painting. Philosophy turns out to be taken out of brackets, or, rather, even thrown out of their framework, like a surplus or a worthless appendage, the empty chatter of a charlatan fooling his reader.

Derrida picks up the idea of the seriality of Van Gogh's paintings related to shoes, although she denotes the controversy of a number of points. For example, should we include only works that have the word "shoes" in their title and are synonymous with it? Or is it necessary to take into account all the shoes that he drew, including here and those that are on the feet of his characters? Of course, in the latter case, these works will be too much. Let's assume, therefore, that we limit ourselves only to paintings where shoes are the focus of the artist's attention, where they exist autonomously, without being tied to a specific owner. Heidegger, analyzing in detail the painting "Old Shoes with Laces" from 1886, also mentions another work by Van Gogh, which focuses on shoes – in total, only two works. Meyer Shapiro in 1968 already refers to 8 works, referring at the same time to the most complete at that time commented edition of Van Gogh's works, published in 1939 under the editorship of Jacob Bart de la Faye.  In 1970, after de la Faye's death, a new expanded edition was published, containing nine titles of works dedicated to shoes. As for Derrida, he refers to seven paintings, while ignoring the three mentioned by Shapiro and, on the contrary, adding two that he does not have. It is not by chance that we talk about this in such detail, because in everything that concerns series (works of art, in particular), any selection and, accordingly, any omissions or additions associated with it can play an essential role for understanding. Derrida himself emphasizes this, however, in a slightly different artistic context, using the example of the works of Gerard Titus–Carmel, referring to them in the third chapter of the book "Truth in Painting", entitled "Cartouche" ^[14].  

What do the three paintings mentioned by Shapiro, but excluded by Derrida, have in common? There are no shoelaces on all the works ignored by Derrida! True, as a kind of compensation, Derrida gives a separate list of nine Van Gogh paintings depicting traditional Dutch wooden shoes, but this list is given precisely to indicate their exclusion from the sphere of his attention. Derrida's entire argument is built on the weaving and interweaving of internal and external, and unlaced shoes contribute, like Ariadne's thread, to deciphering this problem. Of course, the dichotomy of internal and external is more clearly traced in the context of Kant's parergon problem ^[15], to which Derrida devotes the first chapter of the book "Truth in Painting" (we write more about this in the article "Deconstruction in the neighborhood of Art. The problem of painting in the philosophy of Jacques Derrida" ^[16]), but at the same time we find it as a through line in all the other chapters of this text, as well as in a number of other publications ^[17].

In almost all of Van Gogh's paintings depicting shoes, the laces seem unreasonably long, ornately twisted, they weave their own pattern and seem to be able to entwine your legs, like a vine rising to the knee, and not just randomly lying on the floor. Heidegger and Shapiro, however, neglect the fact that Van Gogh's paintings (at least those that Derrida retains in her series of seven analyzed works) are unleashed, abandoned, idle. Van Gogh's shoes are lame, mismatched and completely torn from the bodies of their owners. They do not belong to a peasant woman, as Heidegger wrote, nor to Van Gogh himself, as Shapiro insisted, nor to anyone at all. At the same time, they are walking, yes, yes, they are able to walk and do it in their own rhythm, even if they never reach their own goal. That is why they are persistently trying to assign all new roles, entering new owners each time. Van Gogh's shoes make us talk by untying the laces, they thereby untie our mouths and force us to ask more and more questions. Who owns this pair of old shoes? Is there someone who took them off their feet just a moment before? Did they habitually walk on dirty city paving stones? Or did they travel along peasant fields more often?

The shoes themselves will not answer anything, and there is no demand from the artist, but a couple of professors are in a hurry to take the floor at the noisy table of academic discourse. They persistently summon more and more ghosts to determine the right place for them: here is a tired peasant woman walking home with a heavy tread "sometimes in the evening" (Heidegger), and here is Vincent himself – an indefatigable urban artist walking on rough cobblestone pavement (Shapiro).  Van Gogh's paintings make ghosts come back, so that the artist, or rather his canvases, turn out to be a kind of medium, and now two venerable professors have gathered at a revolving table for spiritualistic seances and, holding hands, cause their ghosts to appear from dirty and worthless shoes. Each of his own. A woman and a man. A peasant woman and an artist. Ghosts roam Europe, wandering in search of shoes. They come back to us from who knows what worlds and, perhaps, against their own will. They begin to circle over a pair of shoes, insistently trying on this pair for themselves. But Derrida notes that this pair has already been appropriated by Heidegger and Shapiro, and that is why they offer it to others with such insistence.  All this is reminiscent of the experiments of the spontaneous generation of Van Helmont's life, when he proved that mice will appear from old sweaty underwear and a handful of grain or a slice of cheese in three weeks – give only time, peace and darkness, and now you have several strong adult mice squeaking on your hands. So in our case: just give a pair of old worn-out shoes to Professor Heidegger, and he will show you the birth of a peasant woman; entrust the same pair to Professor Shapiro, and he will return Van Gogh to you. You will see him with your own eyes, like a close friend, his red beard, a darting fiery look on the sharp, slightly haggard oval of his face, but most importantly, he is heading towards you, walking with the determined tread of a tireless walker with an easel on the edge, pulling him to the ground, but also opening the way to heaven. Here he is–Vincent! At the time of writing "Old Shoes with Laces" he is thirty-three years old, and he is still full of strength and hope, despite the hardships of his own poverty.     

Just as Hegel made fun of psychologists who believe that the absolute spirit is like a big bag capable of accommodating many valuable abilities: "Observant psychology ... should at least reach the point of amazement that in the spirit, as in a bag, so many and so heterogeneous in relation to each other ... abilities can be together" ^[18], in the same way Derrida, one of the voices of her polylogue, says that Heidegger's arguments about Van Gogh "always they seemed ridiculous and deplorable. ...we're not just disappointed, we're bursting with laughter. The voltage drop is too high. Step by step we follow the path laid by the "great thinker", he returns to the source of artistic creation and to the truth that permeates the entire history of the West, and suddenly, at a turn in one of the corridors, we meet with an excursion of schoolchildren or tourists" ^{[10, pp. 40-41]}. In fairness, it should be said that Derrida allows himself irony not only in relation to Heidegger, but also Shapiro: comparing Van Gogh's shoes with their own, he comes to the conclusion that the feet of two famous professors turn out to be an arena for a clash of ideology: we have two right-wing shoes of conservative NSDAP member Martin Heidegger and two left-wing shoes neo-Marxist Meyer Shapiro. But somehow both thinkers Van Gogh's shoes turn out to be exactly the same bag where you can hide the whole world. And now a peasant woman comes out of this bag with a whole bunch of gloomy children born in monstrous agony, followed by Vincent himself with an easel-tripod on his shoulder and a straw hat that crumbles before his eyes at the slightest breeze.

Heidegger seeks to bring the shoes back to earth, to put them back on the ground of the fundamental experience of the peasantry; Shapiro gives them to the urban dweller Vincent Van Gogh, but both Heidegger and Shapiro only fall into the abyss of their own illusions, both have a naive, subcritical approach. Both professors only project their own identity onto Van Gogh's painting and force them to tell their own truth at the same time, embedding it into the framework of academic discourse. Actually, this is how academic discourse works, whether philosophical or art criticism: it appropriates the object of study. Despite all the differences in positions, Heidegger and Shapiro agree on one thing: the shoes represented in Van Gogh's paintings are a pair. They are absolutely sure of this and do not even take into account the probability of the opposite. Derrida, on the contrary, wonders if these shoes have always gone toe-to-toe and are a pair to each other? Most likely this is not the case. Moreover, Van Gogh himself does not speak of them anywhere as a pair, unlike, for example, another work, which also depicts a pair of old, heavy, black shoes, one of which is soled to the viewer, and about which the artist himself indicated that they were paired. We can take these worn-out shoes for a metaphorical image of two brothers, Vincent and Theo, who are very similar to each other, but still quite rarely together. 

Rene Magritte and Giorgio de ChiricoIn the end, Shapiro commits the same abuse against Heidegger that Heidegger himself committed against Van Gogh: he separates Heidegger's lines dedicated to Van Gogh's painting from their metaphysical context, from the very path or series of thoughts that led to it.

Shapiro accuses Heidegger of leveling painting in his analysis, while Shapiro himself easily gets rid of philosophy, cooling its pressure and stopping movement. In both cases, painting is subordinated to the form of academic discourse: the discourse of philosophy or the discourse of art history.  In both cases, Derrida notes, the venerable professors neglect the fact that the shoes in Van Gogh's paintings are idle, abandoned and untied. They are completely mismatched, lame, torn from the bodies, as in some of Magritte's canvases. And the name of Magritte is not accidental at all for the second time declares itself to us: in the same 1935, when Martin Heidegger's "The Source of Artistic Creation" was published, Rene Magritte painted the picture "Red Model", on which we see shoe-shoes, that is, a bizarre surreal symbiosis of shoes and human foot, internal and external external. It is known that Magritte wrote at least three works of the same name, quite similar to each other and differing mostly only in the background (a wooden wall or masonry) and the general color scheme, but coinciding in the main thing – in front of us are feet literally growing out of shoes. These shoe-feet are unlaced, as in Van Gogh's paintings, but unlike him, Magritte's laces are neat and short, they are hardly enough to tie a diligent bow. And yet this lacing is necessary: she stitches an incision on the ankle, collecting fragments of skin that have gone in different directions, forming a kind of neat scar.

In fact, Magritte implements the same thing that Heidegger does in parallel with him in the "Source of Artistic Creation" – animates shoes, endowing them with anthropomorphic features, turning them into a living, albeit monstrous creature. Like Van Gogh, Magritte creates a series of paintings: for three versions of the "Red Model", in 1947 he painted another canvas, which is considered part of the series "Philosophy in the Boudoir", where the toes "grow out" of women's high-heeled shoes; and in "The Well of Truth" ("Le puits de v?rit?") he leaves the shoe and part of the leg up to the knee – then only emptiness. It is also worth noting that Magritte has only one shoe in this picture, there can be no question of any pair here. All these fragments of legs (fingers, foot, ankle), docked from the body, but fused with the external outlines of shoes, are a kind of legs-atavisms, devoid of function, and therefore have found their own independent life.

Magritte makes fun of Van Gogh's shoes while Heidegger and Shapiro take them more than seriously. Apparently, Van Gogh was not the only one who inspired Magritte's "shoe" series. We can find another source of his artistic creation in the works of the Italian artist Giorgio de Chirico, whose recurring motif of his early paintings was an empty glove. In 1922, a close friend of Magritte, Marcel Leconte, showed the then just beginning artist a reproduction of de Chirico's painting "The Song of Love" in 1914, where a large leather glove of fiery red color appears, pinned to the wall. According to Magritte's recollections, this work stunned him and moved him to tears, pushing him to his own artistic search. According to contemporaries, Heidegger was not actively involved in the artistic life of his time and was little interested in avant-garde trends in art, whether it was Italian futurism, German expressionism or international surrealism, the forerunner of which is considered de Chirico. Therefore, even if we assume that he saw de Chirico's "Love Song", it is difficult to imagine that this picture could move him to tears. Although Heidegger is only a year younger than de Chirico and just like him, he was greatly influenced by Nietzsche's philosophy. In 2014, a large monograph was published, for the first time considering in detail the stable connection of de Chirico's early painting (the author refers to the works created by the artist on the eve of the First World War and pays special attention to 1914) with the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche ^[19].  Friedrich Nietzsche's influence on modernist art and poetry was as extensive as it was profound. And no artist owed Nietzsche more than Giorgio de Chirico. In addition to Nietzsche's philosophy, de Chirico constantly drew images from ancient Greece, which undoubtedly brings him closer to Heidegger's circle of interests. It is known that the de Chirico family had Greek roots, he was born in Greek Volos and received an art education at the Higher Art School in Athens.  From 1906 to 1908, de Chirico lived in Munich, attending classes at the Art Academy there.  It was in Munich that his discovery of Nietzschean philosophy took place, along with the symbolist paintings of Klinger and Becklin. At the same time, in parallel, Heidegger discovers Nietzsche at the Freiburg Gymnasium, where he enters in the same 1906. At the same time, there is still no publication shedding light on this parallelism of Martin Heidegger's philosophy and Giorgio de Chirico's metaphysical painting.

However, we went to the side, turned off the path laid by Vincent. Or not, we are still there, because there is no doubt that Magritte's "Red Model" is a reminiscence of Van Gogh's shoes, passed through de Chirico's red gloves. Shoes, stripped feet and gloves removed from the hands, left fragments of the wardrobe – all this can play a primary role in the history of painting. It is not by chance that Shapiro draws "a parallel between the frequent drawing of shoes separated from the body and wardrobe items and the importance that Van Gogh attached to the shoe in conversation as a symbol of his eternal walking, the ideal of a wanderer's life, a constant change of scenery" ^{[5, p. 37]}.

Academic discourse and the appropriation of truth in paintingDespite all the differences in the positions of Heidegger and Shapiro, they turn out to be accomplices, mutually forming the identity of a previously restless pair of shoes.

Like princes in search of Cinderella, they are looking for a leg of the right size. The size of the truth, of course, and how could it be otherwise if two iconic professors, separated by either the ocean or the Holocaust, take up the case.

However, Derrida insists: shoes, that is, in our case, a pair of little-remarkable shoes, can serve to restore the truth, its restitution only if she had previously witnessed another contract. To support this reasoning, Derrida refers to passages from the Bible, in particular, the one where the Lord addresses Moses in front of a burning thorn bush (Burning Bush): "And the Lord said, do not come here; and take off your shoes from your feet, for the place where you stand is holy land" (Exodus 3:5). The call "take off your shoes from your feet" in the Hebrew language of the Old Testament (Tanakh) sounds even more radical: the word "take off" here would be more correctly translated by the word "throw off", "throw off", that is, we are talking about what needs to be discarded, what needs to be abandoned in the most decisive way. The same thing happened with Isaiah: "The LORD said to Isaiah the son of Amos, Go and take off the sackcloth from your loins and throw off your sandals from your feet. He did so: he walked naked and barefoot" (Isaiah 20:2). 

In the context of the history of painting, Derrida gives an example of the famous painting by Jan Van Eyck "Portrait of the Arnolfini Couple", created by the artist in Bruges in 1434. In the painting, you can notice two pairs of abandoned shoes: one pair of characteristic Dutch wooden patten shoes (most likely from the Old French "patte" - hoof or paw, which equally seems appropriate) with a simple leather strap in the lower left corner of the picture belongs to the groom; the other is a much more elegant pair, trimmed with red leather and a scattering of beads, obviously belonging to the bride, is slightly pushed under the bed, being located in the picture between the spouses. It is known that in the Middle Ages, the bride and groom took off their shoes as a sign of the sanctity of the marriage ceremony, which just obviously refers to the episode of the Tanakh just mentioned.

We see that the attitude to the sacred can be carried out through simple shoes, and the history of painting gives us a number of examples of such an embodiment. However, it is very easy to fall into a trap here and it, slamming shut, forms assignment, re-attribution, size adjustment, and with them the truth. This, according to Derrida, happened in the academic discourse of Heidegger and Shapiro – two great professors arguing in front of a Van Gogh painting. There is a "mirror speculation aimed at securing things. Speculation, serving and bringing together (here – a woman, there – a man) in a deadly duel, relentless and cruel, despite academic politeness, mutual respect of both people, the rules of honor and the presence of all kinds of witnesses on the battlefield. The chosen weapon – since it is necessary to press the parergon – is shoes" ^{[10, p. 53]}. There is a pair of shoes painted on canvas, and there are voices of scientists who claim to keep their word, and in the word the truth of this pair. They persistently try to breathe life into it, but the shoes, nevertheless, remain empty and anonymous – this is the conclusion Derrida comes to. Van Gogh's shoes are a completely devastating attempt to resurrect an absent subject. They are not at all a promise of long walking journeys, measured gait and symmetry of step, reliable and strong in its constancy. On the contrary, they are evidence of lameness – the lameness of academic discourse, equally philosophical and art criticism, at least in that part of it that claims to know the truth in painting and promises to reveal it to us.

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