Following Derrida, Winnipeg, October 2006
Five Faces
of Derrida
This panel focuses on aspects of
Kirby Dick and Amy K. Ziering’s 2002 film Derrida,
and its implications for our posthumous reading and following of
Derrida. The
panel will feature three short presentations, each accompanied by a
clip from
the film. The three papers in the first part of the panel offer
different takes
on the relationship between bios and graphein
in the case of Derrida and his
oeuvre. These papers represent three faces of Derrida; the film
constitutes a
fourth, in itself many-facetted Derridean face; and as the fifth
element of
this presentation, we aim to create another text to represent the final
face,
in the form of a round table, where the conversation is initiated by
five sets
of questions posed by the convener and answered by the five of us: the
presenters, the convener himself, and a spectral Derridean presence.
It seems peculiar that a film about the one
person who has been so
emphatically opposed to the metaphysics of presence, is so dependent on
this
very thing. The film wavers awkwardly between the desire to celebrate
the myth
of Derrida, following him when a new Derrida archive is inaugurated,
and yet
also wanting to deflate the very same myth. In the end, what we see on
the
screen is not really Derrida, neither as academic outlaw, nor as family
person.
This paper will focus on the peculiar impossibility of showing Derrida,
using
the tools of film studies to situate the film as documentary and
biography and
showing how the film never succeeds, nor possibly could succeed, in
capturing
the signifier behind the many representations it delivers of ‘Derrida’.
Søren Hattesen Balle: On Derrida’s
Difficulty, or How to Appreciate
Derrida as a Late Romantic
Derrida’s writings are notorious for their
difficulty. Philosophers as
well as literary critics have, for instance, found it hard to determine
which
genre Derrida’s texts belong to. Does Derrida write philosophy or
literature?
And Derrida is also difficult in the sense that reading him is often
considered
to be almost impossible. Yet, if his readers have difficulties with his
writings, it seems that Derrida has his own difficulties as well. The
film Derrida
is a very good example of that. A number of times during the film
Derrida is
asked to tell about crucial events in his life such as how he and his
wife
first fell in love, personal traumas, and the death of his mother.
Without
exception he refuses to answer and wards off the questions by remarking
that
these things as ‘too difficult’, ‘too complex’ or ‘impossible’ to talk
about.
This short paper deals with Derrida’s ambivalence towards biographical
narrative in Derrida, suggesting that it represents perhaps one
of his
least recognized personae – that of the late, maybe even the last
Romantic in
Derrida is preoccupied with transmission.
Inspired by the transmitting
philosopher persona we witness in the film Derrida,
this paper picks up the phone and attempts to transmit back to Derrida
what this
preoccupation is all about. My starting point is the particular framing
of acts
of communication performed by/in the film. What media such as the
telephone or
the fax machine point to, at least as we have them represented in the
Derrida
film, is that they act as framing devices. I would suggest that one of
the
messages being transmitted even while transmission is cut is that
Derrida’s
thought becomes a matter of existential close-ups which dictate between
interruptions: ‘I frame therefore I am.
Bent Sørensen: A Dialogue on Derrida/Derrida
’The cluster
of 5 dialogue themes
consists of “Framing” (What are the repercussions of the insistent
meta-dimension to the film and to much of Derrida’s writing?),
“Transmission”
(What is the role of the signature in transmission, and what does the
signature
sign?), “Faces” (Have we confused faces with masks, have we seen any of
Derrida’s faces in the movie, have we touched (upon) any of them in our
papers?), “L’amour ou
La mort?” (Is
love worthy of the philosopher’s attention, and if not, why should the
literary
critic bother to do the philosopher’s dirty work?) and
“Archives” (Must we write
differently about Derrida now that
his archive has found its final resting place, or should we focus even
more
upon the belated supplemental portions of Derrida’s bios and graphein? How do
we do so without undue reverence and sentimentality?).