Insister of Jacques Derrida by Kamuf Peggy; Cixous Helene; Kamuf Peggy

Author:Kamuf, Peggy; Cixous, Helene; Kamuf, Peggy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Chapter 10

Stunned: Derrida on Film

First, let me list a few facts about the film we are going to watch.1 D'ailleurs, Derrida had its premier showing in Spring 2000 on the Franco-German public television station, Arte, which co-produced it. It was written and directed by Safaa Fathy, an Egyptian filmmaker, playwright, and poet who has long lived in Paris where she also studied for her doctorate in English. It has since been screened many times at film festivals, in commercial theaters, and at numerous conferences such as this one, very often in the presence of the film's director and/or its subject, Jacques Derrida. The film was shot in 1999 at various locations, very few of which are identified in the film itself.

These settings are often used as evocative visual backdrops for the forgrounded figure of Derrida, who is heard and often shown speaking throughout the film's sixty-eight minutes. The only other figure who speaks on camera is Derrida's friend, the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy. Occasionally one hears Fathy's faint voice off-camera posing a question, making a comment, or reading a passage, and once Marguerite Derrida is heard to speak, but otherwise it is Derrida's voice that fills the sound-track, sharing it only with haunting airs of Arabo-Andalusian music or sounds of wind, birds, ocean, and sea.

The Mediterranean sea, along the coast of Algeria, at the port of Algiers, and on the southern coast of Spain, the Pacific ocean, seen from Laguna Beach in Southern California, are the most insistent visual presences alongside Derrida's. The film's editing tends to blend these coasts into a same shoreline along which advance and recede repeating crests of waves. Of these three coastal locations, two are strongly tied to Derrida's individual biography: on the one hand, his native city of Algiers, many images of which flash by intercut throughout the film, including sequences shot in and around Derrida's family home in El Biar, a suburb of Algiers; and, on the other hand or the other coast, the shore of Southern California near the campus of UC Irvine and not far from the ruined Spanish mission at San Juan Capistrano, where like a migrating bird or a soaring pelican Derrida returned every spring for seventeen years to continue in English the seminar begun each year in Paris, in French. (The film records him teaching in both places, in both languages.) From all of the sequences shot in Algeria, Derrida is absent, the camera going from one site of memory to another accompanied only by his dislocated voice, which almost never identifies synchronically the images as they accumulate and are rapidly intercut: the waterfront in Algiers, with its arcades beneath which his father, René Derrida, worked, the Great Synagogue, which formerly had been a mosque and after Algeria's independence in 1962 was again converted back into a mosque, the Jardin d'Essai, Algiers’ large botanical park, the cemetery in which small above-ground tombs recall the deaths of Derrida's two infant brothers, the narrow alleys of the Casbah, the Arab quarter

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