Blindness as Resistance: An Intertextual Dialogue Between Diderot and Bellatin

This essay offers an intertextual reading of Letter on the Blind for the Use of Those Who See (1749) by Denis Diderot and Carta sobre los ciegos para uso de los que ven (2017) by Mario Bellatin. Beyond their nominal coincidence, both texts engage with blindness—both physical and symbolic—as an epistemic figure and as a device to question dominant forms of knowledge and representation, though from radically different contexts. While Diderot subverts dogmatic rationalism through an empiricist epistemology grounded in sensory perception, Bellatin radicalizes this gesture, turning writing into a closed, fragmentary practice with no guarantee of readability. The essay also explores the formal implications of both works: the letter as a space of tension between interiority and exposure, and narrative as a mode of resistance—against rational dogma in Diderot, and institutional confinement in Bellatin. Finally, it examines their shared notion of an aesthetic of instantaneity, in which the artistic experience is not represented but rather enacted in the present moment of contact between text and reader.

Duke Scholars

Author Diana Torres Silva Romance Studies