Jacques Derrida has pretty much emerged as the most influential philosopher of the late 20th century, and it is likely that his shadow (and that of deconstruction, the interpretive strategy he invented) will loom large over the 21st. So it is refreshing, especially for those who have struggled through his dense tomes, to see a documentary that demystifies —Â indeed domesticates — the man.
Derrida was made by Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering Kofman. The latter was one of Derrida’s students, and spent 25 years on this documentary. It collates old and new footage of the great man, with interviews and “day in the life” stuff, as well as recording excursions such as his recent visit to South Africa. It occasionally interrupts all that with bits of what Paris looks like if you’re driving through it in a car, with Kofman in voice-over, reading from a Derrida text in a reverential tone. Luckily, she has chosen excerpts that have a poetic feel and an aphoristic quality. Thank God we didn’t get a paragraph or two from Of Grammatology.
What is most extraordinary is the way Derrida emerges as so modest, so ordinary, so downright likeable, while still able to think photogenically. There he is, having breakfast, or having his famous bouffant white mane trimmed. He admits that if he doesn’t have to go out on any particular day he doesn’t bother to get dressed.
It is both fascinating and endearing to see how he and his wife (Marguerite, a psychoanalyst) hesitate to reveal much about how they met — a passage then repeated with Derrida watching it on a TV and commenting, and, later, Derrida watching himself watching the passage on TV. He says disarmingly that he had forgotten all about that interview. In deconstruction, this is called a lacuna.
Dick and Kofman are trying to be Derridean, but all they get is a mise en abyme, luckily rescued by the man himself. In a very Derridean and also extremely obvious way, he notes that what’s most interesting is what he and Marguerite didn’t say to Kofman. What is most amazing to the viewer, here and elsewhere in the movie, is that Derrida didn’t deconstruct her.
In fact, given the simplistic sycophancy of the approach to Derrida, it’s thanks to his intelligence and charm that it all works. He speaks at one point of “hospitable narcissism”, and that’s what he displays here. He can demonstrate deconstruction in two minutes by remarking on the artificiality of TV interviews. He makes some ambiguous remarks about the anecdotal value of a philosopher’s life story, but, short of Michel Foucault’s secret sex home-movies, this is the most interesting documentary on a philosopher one is likely to see any time soon.