Netflix Review: Derrida

Yes, indeed, there's a documentary on the late lamented "father of deconstruction," Jacques Derrida. Now it's only fair warning to say that I enjoy Derrida's work and was relatively distraught on the day he died. I was even more disturbed by the poor quality of obituaries that ran in the US following his death. But in the US, to be a philosopher is to be a punchline.

The documentary by Amy Kofman and Kirby Dick, titled simply Derrida, is amazing because he refuses to accept the convention of the documentary or even of the camera. He constantly reminds the filmmakers that the presence of the camera is unnatural and changes the behavior of the subject -- and he uses that great catchphrase of his, "always already," in reference to this fact.

At one point he asks how long they've been filming; he says at first "two hours" then immediately changes that answer to "25 years," and points out to the filmmaker that in the end she will edit it down to one hour and it will be what she feels is important and will therefore in a sense be a biography of her and not of him.

On the IMDB site, the reviewer utterly misses the point of the attention paid to everyday life -- Derrida is shown buttering bread as his wife empties the dishwasher -- and the inclusion of inept interviews, including the Australian journalist who tries to get Derrida to talk about Seinfeld, but Derrida has no idea what Seinfeld is. Or the moment at which Derrida tells the filmmaker he will not tell stories but only the facts of how he met his wife. In many ways these exchanges remind me of Bob Dylan's treatment of reporters in Scorsese's No Direction Home and D.A. Pennebaker's Don't Look Back: Dylan also refuses to accept the role of the reporter as natural and turns their questions straight back at them.

Derrida understands that even before the camera begins rolling -- and long before the future audience buys a ticket to see the documentary of his life -- perceptions on the proper name "Jacques Derrida" always already shape the reception of the film. For that reason he challenges the documentary genre -- essentially placing it under erasure -- even as he agrees to make the film. It's deconstruction in action. Incidentally, he gives a beautiful description of deconstruction in the film. I will quote the entire exchange.

Amy Kofman: You're very well known in the States for deconstruction. Can you talk a little bit about the origin of that idea?

Derrida: Before responding to this question I want to make a preliminary remark on the completely artificial nature of this situation. I don't know who's going to be watching this, but I want to underline rather than efface our surrounding technical conditions, and not feign a "naturality" which doesn't exist.

I've already in a way started to respond to your question about deconstruction, because one of the gestures of deconstruction is to not naturalize what isn't natural -- to not assume that what is conditioned by history, institutions, or society is natural.

It's a beautiful statement because it gets to the heart of what confounds so many critics about deconstruction: deconstructive practice begins by challenging the foundations upon which we build our questions. And since for Derrida the practice of deconstruction begins within the object that is deconstructed -- that is, the object already contains the tools for its own unraveling -- he turns the documentary project -- and Kofman and Dick of course are partners in this pursuit (in fact at times you wonder if they aren't simply deconstructing Derrida) -- into an example of deconstructive practice.

Because he refuses to treat the film crew as a natural component to his life -- because he constantly reminds them and by extension the viewers that he is not acting as he would if the cameras were absent -- he and the filmmakers have created a Derridean text that revels in its resistance to the genre's constraints. However, since they've essentially created a cinematic illustration of Derrida's philosophical concerns, it's much more enjoyable if you are familiar with some of those concerns and understand why it is that he deliberately undermines the filmmaker's efforts to produce straight commentary, and the filmmakers in turn work with that impulse and use it a documentary that exposes the framework of its own making while at the same time gets at a certain truth of its subject.