Who Was Jacques Derrida?: An Intellectual Biography

(Greg DeLong) #1

ing toast, listening to the radio, walking down New York streets
trailed by the movie’s leather-jacketed directors, and sitting at
home with his wife. After a lecture at Northwestern University,
eager students surround him and ask him about the connec-
tions between his work and the kabbalah. One hapless young
woman says to Derrida, “I read one of your novels over the
summer.” We then see Derrida giving a lecture in Paris, with
Marguerite and Hélène Cixous sitting side by side in the audi-
ence, while he explains with some fumbling the presence of the
film crew next to him.
In front of Kirby Dick’s handheld camera, Derrida im-
provises monologues, usually rambling reflections on subjects
like eyes, hands, and the other. While Derrida sits at dinner, a
voice-over delivers a statement about “the economy of a much
more welcoming and hospitable narcissism, one that is much
more open to the experience of the other as other.” A reporter
asks him about Seinfeldas an example of deconstruction,
much to his bewilderment.
The movie ends with Derrida’s stunned reticence when
Kofman asks him, first, if he would consider being psychoana-
lyzed (“No, I absolutely exclude this”) and then if there have
been any “traumatic breaks” in his life. Derrida answers,
“There have been, yes,” and then—in response to Kofman’s un-
spoken invitation to discuss these traumas—“Again, no I won’t
be able to, uh, no, no. No.” The voice-over repeats a Derrida
passage on “the unconditional right to secrecy.”
At another point in the movie, Kofman asks Derrida to
talk about love. Derrida’s response is “love or death?” to which
she sensibly answers, “Love, not death. We’ve heard enough
about death.”
Derridapremiered at the Film Forum in New York on
October 23 , 2002. After the screening, Derrida and the two


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