Amy Ziering Kofman’s and Kirby Dick’s Derrida documentary is actually not bad, by which I mean that it is at least somewhat illuminating, and that the things about it that annoyed me are the same things that annoy me about Derrida himself.
Rather than trying to explain Derrida’s philosophy, or to tell his story (to the extent that he has one), the filmmakers are content to humanize him, and that is fine. So we see Derrida in everyday life, eating his breakfast and putting on his jacket and getting his hair cut, and we also hear him explain that this is not a “true” representation of his everyday life, because that life is itself changed by the presence of the camera.
The film shows rather well, I think, that Derrida has never been about making destructive arguments, or chopping logic for its own sake, but that his thought has always been about contingency and mortality; about the fragility and yet inescapability of the self; about how the basic experience of life involves being confronted with an Other — that is to say, with that which is not oneself and cannot be assimilated to oneself; about responsibility and forgiveness; about how the present relates to the past and to the future. Many of the great philosophical subjects, in short. And there is a certain wisdom in the careful and heavily qualified things Derrida says about all these subjects, in his simultaneous desire for clarity and meaning, and unwillingness to simplify and generalize.
The film also shows, and shares, Derrida’s extreme narrowness about these subjects. His main limitation as a philosopher, I think, is that he forever remains too narrowly just a philosopher, too much a part of the great Western tradition to ever venture outside it. He is never willing to open the windows and let in some fresh air.
When asked, for instance, whether he finds elements of deconstruction in Seinfeld, his response is categorical and uncomprehending: “deconstruction is not a sitcom,” he says. He is not horrified by the comparison, the way an older sort of high-culture snob would have been; but he is absolutely unable to grasp how it is possible that anyone would choose to watch an episode of Seinfeld in preference to reading a page of Heidegger.
Again, when the interviewer asks Derrida what he wishes he could ask one of the great philosophers of the past, Derrida rather charmingly replies that he’ d like to be able to ask Heidegger or Hegel about his sex life. He then spars coyly with the interviewer over the issue of whether or not he’d reveal anything about his own sex life (he encourages her to ask him, but says that he wouldn’t answer). But Derrida somewhat spoils the effect of all this when he says that, of course, he’s not thinking of “a porno of Hegel or Heidegger,” but rather something more dignified: that they admit that they cannot totally separate their thought from their private lives.
Me, I’d much rather witness the grotesque spectacle of Heidegger and Hannah Arendt fucking than read another essay by either of them.
Derrida
Amy Ziering Kofman’s and Kirby Dick’s Derrida documentary is actually not bad, by which I mean that it is at least somewhat illuminating, and that the things about it that annoyed me are the same things that annoy me about Derrida himself.
Rather than trying to explain Derrida’s philosophy, or to tell his story (to the extent that he has one), the filmmakers are content to humanize him, and that is fine. So we see Derrida in everyday life, eating his breakfast and putting on his jacket and getting his hair cut, and we also hear him explain that this is not a “true” representation of his everyday life, because that life is itself changed by the presence of the camera.
The film shows rather well, I think, that Derrida has never been about making destructive arguments, or chopping logic for its own sake, but that his thought has always been about contingency and mortality; about the fragility and yet inescapability of the self; about how the basic experience of life involves being confronted with an Other — that is to say, with that which is not oneself and cannot be assimilated to oneself; about responsibility and forgiveness; about how the present relates to the past and to the future. Many of the great philosophical subjects, in short. And there is a certain wisdom in the careful and heavily qualified things Derrida says about all these subjects, in his simultaneous desire for clarity and meaning, and unwillingness to simplify and generalize.
The film also shows, and shares, Derrida’s extreme narrowness about these subjects. His main limitation as a philosopher, I think, is that he forever remains too narrowly just a philosopher, too much a part of the great Western tradition to ever venture outside it. He is never willing to open the windows and let in some fresh air.
When asked, for instance, whether he finds elements of deconstruction in Seinfeld, his response is categorical and uncomprehending: “deconstruction is not a sitcom,” he says. He is not horrified by the comparison, the way an older sort of high-culture snob would have been; but he is absolutely unable to grasp how it is possible that anyone would choose to watch an episode of Seinfeld in preference to reading a page of Heidegger.
Again, when the interviewer asks Derrida what he wishes he could ask one of the great philosophers of the past, Derrida rather charmingly replies that he’ d like to be able to ask Heidegger or Hegel about his sex life. He then spars coyly with the interviewer over the issue of whether or not he’d reveal anything about his own sex life (he encourages her to ask him, but says that he wouldn’t answer). But Derrida somewhat spoils the effect of all this when he says that, of course, he’s not thinking of “a porno of Hegel or Heidegger,” but rather something more dignified: that they admit that they cannot totally separate their thought from their private lives.
Me, I’d much rather witness the grotesque spectacle of Heidegger and Hannah Arendt fucking than read another essay by either of them.