Art is Messianicity: Radical Illustration in the Face of God — Romeo Castellucci and Antonello da Messina

Messianicity is not. Art is. Derrida, however, was not into pictures; his relationship with art remained in the quasi-transcendental mode of frames. Romeo Castellucci's use of a painting by Antonello da Messina exposes the Derridean non-messianism through art's power to illustrate – a mode abandoned by Derrida in the Heidegger-Schapiro debate on Van Gogh. In Castellucci, on the contrary, art illustrates what ‘messianicity’ is unable to illustrate and thus is bound to deny even in the negative.