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It is like a ruin that does not come after the work but remains produced, always already from the origin, by the advent and structure of the work. In the beginning, at the origin, there was ruin. At the origin comes ruin; ruin comes to the origin, it is what first comes and happens to the origin, in the beginning. With no promise of restoration. This dimension of the ruinous simulacrum has never threatened—quite to the contrary—the emergence of a work. It's just that one must know [savoir], and so one just has to see (it) [voir ca]—i.e., that the performative fiction that engages the spectator in the signature of the work is given to be seen only through the blindness that it produces as its truth. As if glimpsed through a blind.
—Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind:
The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins