Right of inspection
By: Jacques Derrida ; photographs by Marie-Françoise Plissart ; translated by David Wills.
Contributors: Derrida, Jacques.
Publisher: Monacelli Press
Published: 1998
Place of publication: New York, N.Y
Language: eng
Number of pages: 144
Subjects: Plissart, Marie-Françoise; Photography, Artistic; Photography -- Philosophy
Description: "You will never know, nor will you, all the stories I kept telling myself as I looked at these images." With these words Jacques Derrida opens his reading of Marie-Francoise Plissart's hundred-page photo-novel. Originally published in France in 1985, this tour de force of word and image is available in English for the first time. Plissart's visual narrative unfolds in photographs, and photographs of photographs, in a kind of silent cinematography.

Derrida's polylogue explores gender, photographic genre, time, language, and the interpretative act of seeing. The text and the photographs, each with its own structure and syntax, together illuminate what is at stake in the "right of inspection."