Derrida Film

In the ambitious documentary film Derrida, Jacques Derrida is interviewed and followed by a camera crew, chronicling his day-to-day life. Amy Zierring Kofman and Kirby Dick go through rigorous interviews with Derrida attempting to uncover information from his personal life and his world-renowned philosophy. They depict a man of great sophistication, with silvery locks of grandeur, an off-beat persona, and, above all, a man with remarkable vision. Throughout the interview process, Derrida makes it close to impossible to obtain a direct answer from him. According to Derrida, being filmed by a camera crew and being asked inane questions is unnatural. One cannot “…naturalize what isn’t natural.” Referring to cameras, these “archiving machines” make his entire interview a false personification of who he is. “Everything is false, almost everything…I’m not really like this.” In a scene, Derrida and his wife Margarite are asked how they came to have met. Derrida only answers the question with a series of facts, dates, the where and the how, but either one do not share the personal feelings of their meeting. Again, it would be a kind of artificial description. The telling of their story would be inadequate to portray in front of a camera crew.
Continuously, there is a struggle between the interviewer and the interviewee. Amy asks Derrida what he thinks love could be. A bit irritated by this question, Derrida tells her he cannot possibly answer such a question without “reciting clichés.” Eventually, he gives an answer to the question. Love is narcissistic. Is love a love of someone or something? Is it a love of the person entirely, or is it the love of the person’s certain attributes. One may be in love with another for their great intelligence or their beauty or their talent. If someone loses the qualities you came to fall in love with in the first place, this is the death of love or lack of fidelity. Hegel says that eyes are a manifestation of the soul, revealing your true self to the Other. All through the interview process, Derrida seeks to deconstruct it, delving deep into the center and destabilizing the asked question. Not only does he do this toward the interview questions, but also to himself. Almost each scene reveals a different Derrida. Sometimes he is tidy, sometimes he is unkempt. Other times he is speaking in French, and other times in English. He may be giving a lecture at a university or a semi-lecture in his own kitchen. As the viewer, it is difficult for us to distinguish which Derrida is the real and natural Derrida. That is a matter of interpretation I guess, and perhaps that is Derrida’s reason for going through this interview.