Anyone who sees Derrida, the fairly recent documentary "biography" of Jacques Derrida, is in for an essay on the difference (with or without an a) between voyeurism and homage, the clear and the opaque, and the pretentious and the sublime. Layered and edited to take full advantage of how film can mirror, copy, track, trace and inscribe, the image, the voice, the eyes, the gaze, this particular film shows the nearly-impossible: a person thinking. Or appearing to think.Derrida, as the self who is playing his Other, his image onscreen, is strikingly photogenic - a handsome, tanned, white-haired older man who is like a combination of Einstein and Sartre - sartorial yet slightly eccentric. This is a coincidence the film enjoys - he could have been ugly, and his thought might be the same - but the fact the camera "loves" him allows him to question what love, and cameras, are for.
The film constantly implies division, and doubling - sometimes "Jacqui" is a doddering old man puttering about his dowdy kitchen in Paris, other times he is in California, speaking perfect English, quipping like Wilde, and dressed in startlingly fashionable suits, charming the pants off (it would seem) brilliant young philosophers. Sometimes, too, he speaks movingly of fidelity and love - then refuses to speak about how he first met, or thought of, his wife (a moving, strange moment) - and then again, admits that, should he be able to see a film about Heidegger or Hegel, he would want to know more about their sex life - because they spoke as asexuals. Because Derrida has not been asexual in his writing, he does not feel required to answer such questions for this film.
Knowing that Derrida is, now, sadly, dead "in reality", the film bears some melancholy weight - the weight of a vessel bearing a load for which it was not built; or rather, the exuberant hero-worship that clearly informs the makers, and lifts the film up into play while also lessening its critical functions, seems deflated by this loss. It also redoubles our fascination with the secrets, and the public iconography, it attempts to inscribe - so, a sequence where Derrida handsomely walks a Paris street, smoking a pipe, is deeply impressive, and shallow, all at once.
Derrida is invited to make several impromptu (improvised) essays - on the eyes, on hands, on identity, on biography, on love - that are both simple, and profound. Anyone who has avoided reading Derrida, assuming him to be a nihilist, over-difficult, or irrelevant, will find a different man, one engaged with moral and socio-political issues (such as anti-Semitism, forgiveness in South Africa) and able to use lyrically intense, but often very clear, language. When he confesses he cannot tell a story well, we are unsure - his hesitant, yet-firm, soliloquies are at least fables - fables of consciousness at play.
Watching Derrida allows several intriguing thoughts to emerge: the difference between poetry and philosophy (where there is one) is based on the tension between the life of the philosopher, as revealed and the thinking "itself". How much of the language in a poem - for example - is about thinking about the how and what of words - and how much is about the poet herself?
Derrida contrasts the relationship between Narcissus and Echo. He relates how Echo, even only by using the repeated words (or ends of words) of Narcissus, was able to poignantly inflect the echoed language with traces of desire. Writing poetry needs to be the place between Narcissus and Echo.
Comments
I always thought when they, the deconstructionists, talked about how much fun they were having, it had to be other places than in their writing.