Documenting a Deconstructionist

As every Columbia student who has finished Contemporary Civilization knows, the history of philosophy reaches a point where much of the writing (or shall we say discourse) becomes impenetrable. I place the marker in the 18th century with Kant, but there are perhaps earlier milestones that our Core overlooks. Germany continued to dominate this non-lucrative field throughout the 19th century, but the French cornered the market in incomprehensible philosophy in the 20th century, especially after the breakthrough of post-structuralism and deconstruction in the late-1960s, spearheaded by one Jacques Derrida. Now institutionalized but far, far from understood, the septuagenarian professor-philosopher is the subject of the film Derrida, co-directed by documentarian Kirby Dick and academic Amy Ziering Kofman, now playing at Film Forum.

Why make a biography of a philosopher? As Derrida himself says in the film, all you can say about a philosopher is that, "He was born, he thought, he died. That is all." Though punctuated with spoken excerpts from Derrida's works, the filmmakers scarcely even attempt to begin explaining deconstruction; instead, Derrida may be the first vanity project about a man who intensely dislikes being photographed.

Shot over the span of several years, Derrida (italicized and unitalicized) is nothing if not self-conscious of the artifice of documentary. One camera records another recording; microphones penetrate the frame. "Is this what you call cinema vérité?" asks Derrida during one of the film's more formal grill sessions, adding that the entire interview is false, a construction. The film's pretense of deconstructing itself does not in fact go very far, or perhaps goes too far: after showing us a scene of Derrida watching footage of himself that we have seen earlier, the filmmakers later provide us with a scene of Derrida watching the footage of himself watching the footage of himself.

Derrida is a rascally yet genial subject, lucid in a way which should surprise those familiar only with his written work. Kofman, a former student of Derrida's at Yale, asks questions off-screen in a French whose American accent is less charming than Jean Seberg's in Breathless. Not quite an academic E! True Hollywood Story, the documentary is still at heart a celebrity insider special. We are spared many of the juicy details, however, including what Derrida himself would most like to know about his favorite philosophers: the inside scoop on their sex lives. (He declines to offer the goods himself.)

Completely ignored in the film is the thorny, sad history of Derrida's heritage in academia, not only among his acolytes but also among those who merely use him in their footnotes. Does Derrida's vast output, totaling over 40 books, have any real, meaningful content? Having tackled only excerpts of his neutron-star-dense Of Grammatology (whose French is improved in Columbian Gayatri Spivak's English translation), my tentative answer is yes, but with massive reservations. The problem with Derrida's writing and the whole academic theoretic discipline is that concepts, if any, are buried deep, deep within the minefield of horrendously unreadable, horrendously structured writing.

As was brilliantly and terrifyingly parodied by physicist Alan Sokal several years ago, there is a dangerous scholasticism at work in much of this postmodernist and poststructuralist discourse. Every author and his pet jargon, from the somewhat more substantial Derrida to the total nonsensemonger Jacques Lacan, is evoked as equally valid, which leads to such disgusting smears of ink like this passage by Homi K. Bhabha of Harvard: "The supplementary strategy interrupts the successive seriality of the narrative of plurals and pluralism by radically changing their mode of articulation. In the metaphor of the national community as the 'many as one,' the one is now both the tendency to totalize the social in a homogenous empty time, and the repetition of that minus the origin, the less-than-one that intervenes with metonymic, iterative temporality." (The essay, titled "DissemiNation" thanks Derrida specifically for his "wit and wisdom.")

There is an element of masochism in writing such non-sentences in non-language; appropriately, co-director Kirby Dick previously made Sick: The Life and Death of Supermasochist Bob Flanagan, whose climactic scene was Flanagan's driving of a nail into his own penis. However, there is narcissism at work in much academic theory as well, which David Foster Wallace noted presciently in a recent Harper's essay: "The obscurity and pretension of Academic English can be attributed in part to a disruption in the delicate rhetorical balance between language as a vector of meaning and language as a vector of the writer's own resume."

However, the best commentary on academic theory is provided in the Film Forum's men's bathroom. A sticker attached to a stall door begins promisingly enough: "Tired of the Situationists? Derobe Debord! Derride Derrida! Fuck Foucault!" Unfortunately, the missive ends by advocating the far more questionable Gilles Deleuze. However, another line has been scrawled in the margins, referring to the gruesome fate met by the godfather of academic theory, though himself a great writer: "Roland Barthes gets hit by a milk truck!"