Film-Philosophy
Journal | Salon | Portal (ISSN 1466-4615)
Vol. 7 No. 3, January 2003
David Roden
Derrida Framed
_Derrida_
(2002) Directed by Amy Ziering
Kofman and Kirby Dick UK Premiere: 31 January
2003 http://www.derridathemovie.com Where philosophy is
treated in film, or on television, it is generally through
images of the philosopher speaking before the camera -- as
in Channel 4's now sadly defunct _Voices_, or through the
genre of biography. Amy Ziering Kofman and Kirby Dick's
film, _Derrida_, is certainly no exception to this rule,
juxtaposing readings from Derrida's published work, and
footage of conference addresses and interviews, with a
forensic sweep over the minutiae of his daily life: his
taste in jackets, his Parisian house, his cat, his studious
silence on personal matters. Like most philosophical
documentaries, then, _Derrida_ employs the conventions of
biography, auto-biography, and, in this case, Reality TV, as
a frame for its philosophical content. It is distinctive, though,
in the way in which the directors and their subject exploit
these conventions. In an interview that exemplifies their
approach rather nicely, Derrida is asked by Kofman to
comment upon the origins of the idea of deconstruction. He
responds by calling attention to the 'artificiality' of the
interview, to 'our surrounding technical conditions'. This,
he suggests, is already a response to her question: 'One of
the gestures of deconstruction is not to naturalise what
isn't natural -- not to assume that what is conditioned by
history, institutions, or society is natural'. Much of the
film refers directly to its own artificiality -- for
example, by having a camera operator placed in the visible
corner of a room during an interview, or having a response
to an earnest question about negative theology reduced to
aural spaghetti as a sound technician adjusts a mike in
Derrida's lapel. _Derrida_ thus suggests playfully that it
is as much *about* the framing/framed relation as about the
quotidian existence of a French philosophy
professor. Derrida has frequently
explored the devices by which literary or philosophical
works call attention to their institutional or technical
conditions of possibility. In a reading of Kant's _Analytic
of the Beautiful_, he questions the logic by which *parerga*
(picture frames, draperies on statues, or the discourse of
philosophical aesthetics itself) are treated as mere
adjuncts to the intellectual or aesthetic works they are
designed to enhance. [1] It would be significant if
the biographical content of _Derrida_ could be shown to
function as a parergon -- rather than a mere ornament or
pretext for the film's existence -- since, as is made clear
near the opening credits, the very idea of a consequential
relation between a thinker's life and work is foreclosed in
traditional philosophical exegesis. This question is
broached in a remarkably direct way, with footage of Derrida
addressing a conference in New York on the subject of
philosophy and biography. The relation between a philosophy
and the 'empirical life' of its author, he remarks, is
traditionally excluded from serious philosophical
consideration. Thus, for Heidegger, the pertinent details of
Aristotle's life are encapsulated in a single sentence: ''He
was born, he thought, and he died.' The rest is anecdote'.
The New York sequence is intercut with a beguiling
succession of cinematic 'anecdotes' (a pan over the waters
of the Seine, an urban landscape of Parisian underpasses and
railway termini), while, over Ryuichi Sakamoto's shimmering
electronic score, we hear Derrida speaking of two,
incommensurable conceptions of the future: the predictable
future, and the *a-venir*, the messianic future, the time of
the Other. A talking head on a video monitor assures us that
no list of great modern philosophers would be complete
without the name 'Jacques Derrida'. Derrida is then seen
discussing parking arrangements with the film crew before
driving off to an appointment at a hair salon. Can we read these images
as substantiating, in some way, a revisionary claim about
the status of biography or autobiography? On one level the
film programmes the way in which the question can be
articulated. Derrida concludes his address to the biography
conference with the claim that the excision of biography is
constitutive of philosophy itself. 'Classical philosophers',
he claims, regard auto-biography as 'indecent', because the
philosopher should not 'speak of himself as an empirical
being'. Philosophy 'just is' this politeness. This statement
is accompanied by a citation from 'Otobiographies', to the
effect that there is a kind of productive border working
between the conceptual and the biographical, rather than a
line of demarcation [2] -- a claim that naturally
prompts the question of whether this is at work, now, even
as we watch a hairdresser's clippers gliding over the
emblematic *bouffant*. This is, arguably, the
most significant problem addressed in the film. Derrida is
not claiming that the 'subject' of traditional autobiography
should or can be installed within the philosophical 'system'
produced by the subject. What is at stake, as he has
suggested elsewhere, is a reconception of what counts as
life and how the events of a life relate to the archives in
which they are recorded. If we consider a life to consist of
a series of singular, unrepeatable events -- i.e. 'He was
born, he thought, and he died.' -- each with a determinate
meaning fixed at the time that it occurs, then there is
simply no reason to depart from the standard model. The
events in the life of the author become relevant only if his
text refers to them in some way. However, Derrida does not
view events or 'temporality' in such terms. Much of Derrida's most
theoretically fruitful work can be thought of as an
investigation into the relation between the production of
meaning and its conditions of possibility. [3]
Meaning is produced in finite, datable acts. Yet it is
constituted by structures that necessarily transcend these
physical events or impressions. As Saussure, Wittgenstein,
Putnam, and Davidson have also argued, what a signifying
state means depends upon its relations with other
significant elements. [4] What I say, think,
believe, or experience depends not only upon what I do, or
is in my head at that point in time, but on how the marks
that express my thoughts are repeated (or as Derrida says,
'iterated') at other times or places, by other speakers, in
'other heads'. Iterability has been seen,
by some, as undermining the very possibility of the subject
as this is sometimes conceived in modern tradition of
epistemology or ethical theory. As Davidson has also
recognised, one version of the subject 'just is' the
mythical place in which thoughts, experiences, or actions
are 'contained', bearing their intrinsic meanings regardless
of what happens in the subject's environment. [5]
According to Derrida, actions or signifying states derive
sense from their repeatability in other contexts. Hence, the
sense and intentions ascribable to an utterance or action
depend, in principle, upon what takes place after it. Where
the world allows our habits of interpretation to be
relatively stable, this future-contingency leaves things (as
Wittgensteinians say) much as they are. According to
Derrida, however, there are events or gestures whose meaning
is future-contingent in principle because they refer to a
future whose character is hidden both from the agent and
from any possible addressee. Thus, in the Foreword to _Ecce
Homo_, Nietzsche writes that to confront humanity 'with the
heaviest demand that has ever been made on it' he must state
who he is, but that the exigencies of this task make this
impossible. [6] This identity cannot be understood
by his contemporaries; those who are unequal to what is
being asked of them. [7] For Derrida, this
apparently contentless autobiographical act allows the
articulation of a philosophical project predicated on the
impossibility of self-identification by placing the life of
the writer in the hands of an 'impossible'
addressee. Can we view the anecdotal
material of _Derrida_ as having a similar autobiographical
function? One isolated sequence shows Derrida in his kitchen
removing some aubergines from a bowl, pouring olive oil and
pepper upon them, placing the bowl back into his fridge,
while a radio newscast informs us of Israel's assassination
of a Hezbollah leader. Strictly speaking, it tells us
nothing. Zilch about Derrida's view of Middle-East politics,
for example. It appears to be an insignificant event in the
life of a man who just happens to be a philosopher. But if
Derrida is right about iterability, this seemingly trivial
set of occurrences cannot be dismissed in this way, because
significance accrues to the way in which an event is
repeated. If there is any analogy to be drawn here with
Nietzsche's act of dissimulation, it can only be because
these and similar images have nothing to tell us -- beyond
the fact that Derrida is a physical being who needs to eat,
who listens to his radio, etc. Through the industrial medium
of cinema these images can be copied, edited, and
circulated, transferred to DVD or downloaded to the hard
drive of computers. Given this practical iterability, they
could come to mean in ways that no one presently
anticipates. Perhaps, as Derrida suggests at a different
point in the film, they harbor a secret that can only be
understood by another -- or the Other; perhaps this is a
secret that only God or the Messiah could
unravel. These incidents could also
be seen to 'exemplify' something about the way the character
of lived experience -- the 'now' -- depends upon the manner
in which it is recorded. Derrida writes in _Archive Fever_
(a work that is twice quoted in the film): 'The archive has
always been a pledge and like every pledge, a token of the
future. To put it more trivially: what is no longer archived
in the same way is no longer lived in the same way.'
[8] However, it is far from clear whether Derrida's
description of the openness of the present to repetition is
philosophically satisfactory. The distinction between the
predictable future and the messianic time of the Other that
opens the film, for example, seems at once to invest the
future with too much contingency and too little. The future
*is* predictable to a considerable degree. It is alien or
'other' because of contingent limitations upon our knowledge
or the adequacy of our concepts. One can accept, then, much
of what Derrida says about the link between repetition and
meaning without having to express this in the inflated
language of radical alterity or messianism. This is, I have to admit,
as much a philosophical disagreement with the rhetoric of
Derrida's later work as an objection to Kofman and Dick's
film. Derrida is an amiable and witty conversationalist and
much in the film -- particularly Derrida's recollection of
his experience of anti-Semitism in Algeria, and his
description of a conversation with his mother following her
stroke -- is poignant and moving. I enjoyed _Derrida_, but
find myself unable to agree with its approach. It ultimately
patronises its subject by refusing to engage with Derrida's
work at a philosophical level. There is only one point where
he is seen to be seriously challenged by an interlocutor.
This is during a lecture on the nature of forgiveness in
South Africa. It is arguably the film's philosophical high
point, for it gives Derrida the opportunity to clarify the
relation between a difficult conceptual claim concerning the
impossibility of 'true forgiveness' and the need, in the
context of South Africa and elsewhere, for a kind of
therapeutic political practice. Otherwise, the film tends to
replicate the worst excesses of Derrida's philosophical
'friends' and 'enemies' by ignoring the problems thrown up
by his work and their wider philosophical implications.
Maybe Derrida can, as the opening sequence suggests, be
slotted into some linear sequence of great modern
philosophers; but even so, there is no reason to think that
many of his claims are not wrong, confused, or, at the very
least, in need of drastic revision. This film does not give
us any sense of there being a philosophical debate around
his work, let alone a history of antagonism towards
deconstructive theory. Its obvious sensitivity to the
constructed or mediated nature of the image -- the
problematics of framing, etc. -- is ultimately no substitute
for philosophical discussion and analysis. For all its
formal ingenuity and charm, it is still insufficiently
philosophical and thus does its subject a considerable
disservice. University
of the West of England,
Bristol Footnotes 1. Jacques Derrida,
'Parergon', in _The Truth in Painting_, trans. Geoff
Bennington and Ian McLeod (London: University of Chicago
Press, 1987), pp. 15-148. 2. Derrida,
'Otobiographies', in _The Ear of the Other_ (Lincoln and
London: University of Nebraska Press, 1985), p.
5. 3. See Derrida, _Edmund
Husserl's 'Origin of Geometry': An Introduction_
[1962], trans. J. P. Leavey (New York: Harvester
Press, 1978); and 'Limited Inc. a b c', trans. Samuel Weber,
in Gerald Graff, ed., _Limited Inc._ (Evanston Ill.:
Northwestern University Press, 1988). 4. See, for example,
Hilary Putnam, 'The Meaning of 'Meaning'', in _Mind,
Language and Reality_, Philosophical Papers, Vol. II
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), pp. 215-271.
In his famous Twin Earth thought experiment Putnam also
emphasises that the world or environment of the thinker
contributes to the content of their thoughts. Nothing in
Derrida is incompatible with this so-called 'externalist'
position. Frank Farrell provides an absolutely indispensable
discussion of the affinities between Putnam, Davidson,
Dennett, and continental thinkers like Derrida in his
_Subjectivity, Realism and Postmodernism: The Recovery of
the World in Recent Philosophy_ (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1996). 5. See Donald Davidson,
'The Myth of the Subjective', in Michael Krausz, ed.,
_Interpretation and Confrontation_ (Notre Dame, Indiana:
University
of Notre Dame Press,
1987), pp. 159-171. 6. Nietzsche, _Ecce Homo:
How One Becomes What One Is_ [1888], trans. R. J.
Hollingdale (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1979), p.
33. 7. Ibid., p.8. 8. Derrida,
_Archive
Fever: A Freudian
Impression_,
trans. Eric Prenowitz (London: University of Chicago Press,
1995), p. 18. Copyright ©
Film-Philosophy 2003 David Roden, 'Derrida
Framed', _Film-Philosophy_, vol. 7 no. 3, January 2003
<http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol7-2003/n3roden>. David Roden is co-editor
with Christopher Norris of _Jacques
Derrida: Modern Masters of Social
Thought_ (London:
Sage, 2002), a major four-volume thematically organized
review of the key secondary literature on Derrida's writing.
It provides a systematic overview of the core conceptual
vocabulary informing deconstruction, identifying published
works that most clearly and significantly discuss Derrida's
thought. Join the _Film-Philosophy_
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