Ideal identities and impossible translations: drawing on writing and writing on drawing

In questioning what remains identical in the translation of images between writing and drawing, the chapter develops a theoretical argument for the necessary intervolution of concepts—visuality, legibility and verbality—that are commonly used to categorise and differentiate the two graphic practices. Jacques Derrida’s im/possible law of translation and his writing on identity are employed to interrogate critically semiotic assumption about the equivalences and relations between translated texts and pictures. The fluid movement of images through pictures and words is found to indicate a heterogeneous and self-different identity that is structured by a complicated entanglement of the usually oppositional notions of content and form. The chapter therefore shows the non-exclusivity of the verbal and the pictural, and the indivisibility of the practices of writing and picturing