Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering Kofman: 'Derrida' (2002)

Deconstructing Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering Kofman's Derrida (2002). 

In this documentary, we can see layers of Jackie Élie "Jacques" Derrida (1930-2004) over time - sometimes he looks refreshed and relaxed, at other times pensive and taciturn.

Overall, Derrida thinks through words and ideas carefully. 

At times in certain frames he looks like Norman Mailer, then Richard Burton, then Ralph Nader, then Peter Falk -- like a human kaleidoscope.

Derrida was born in Algeria. He was of Sephardic lineage with Jewish-Spanish origins dating back to before the 1492 and later expulsions of Jews and Muslims from Spain. As a boy, Derrida was expelled along with other Jewish students and teachers from "normal" Algerian schools, but he survived the Second World War. This background shaped his outlook as a philosopher. Increasingly, he became attuned to the power of words in discourse and their link to social action. 

In this desultory, entertaining documentary, Derrida speaks about biography, autobiography, history, texts, recording devices, archives, memory, reconstruction, deconstruction, mirrors.

He speaks of the "eye" of the spectator and audience: "between fiction and reality, a phantom eye." (Eg., Facebook)

Seeing his own portrait at one point, he quips: "It's uncanny. It's bizarre." (Iggy Pop expresses similar thoughts in "Success:" upon seeing someone wearing a t-shirt with his face on it approaching him, Iggy sings: "Here comes my face . . . It's plain bizarre . . .")

Derrida speaks of historical dots: "These are facts. Raw facts."

The Story of One's Life: facts vs. autobiography or a biography "in the mode of a story . . . I don't write a narrative. . . I'd love to tell stories, but I don't know how to tell them . . ."

Jackie and Marguerite Aucouturier Derrida, his spouse of many years, decline to say much about their relationship beyond the "raw facts." 

Upon being asked to speak of certain things, he replies, "You need to pose a question."

Of love: "Fidelity is threatened between the who and the what." Initially, one may be seduced by certain of a person's qualities, and later become disillusioned (or as a former brother-in-law once put it: "Love is blind; Marriage is an eye-opener). Or, one loves the "singularity" of another person beyond their most charming traits. 

During a visit to South Africa, after seeing Nelson Mandela's small jail cell when he'd been confined for eighteen years of his life, Derrida speaks of different types of forgiveness and reconciliation.

He delivers general observations and advice: "I am blind to myself . . . It's for others to see. To speak is not to see."

And to the intellectually lazy: "Do your homework and read."

On his archives: "urns in a graveyard . . . An archive is . . . a question for the future."

Of other philosohers: "I'd love to hear something about what they refuse to talk about."

On editing this film, to the directors: "Editing will be your signature, your autobiography."

Fun stuff for a Sagittarian. This post is in honor of Jeron Jackson, RIP. 

Today's Rune: The Self. 
  

Dreaming in French, Part III: Susan Sontag's Way

The main Susan Sontag (1933-2004) part of Alice Kaplan's Dreaming in French: The Paris Years of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, Susan Sontag, and Angela Davis (The University of Chicago Press, 2012) provides a substantial backdrop to her life, covers her intense 1957-1958 Parisian residency, then looks at her life and career afterwards, though not detailing much about her many years (1989-2004) with Annie Leibovitz, her last partner.

Because Kaplan was able to go through voluminous notebooks and other manuscripts, this thick middle section is sometimes dizzying to keep up with on a first read-though. One thing is certain: born in New York, having lost her father as a small child, and relocated to Arizona presumably due to her asthma, Sontag had a strong desire to escape her circumstances. Which she did -- inspired by French literature, among other things.

I was happily surprised to learn from Dreaming in French that another Francophile, my old buddy Wallace Fowlie (1908-1988), helped her clear a significant academic hurdle at the University of Chicago in praising and passing her junior paper on Djuna Barnes' 1936 novel Nightwood.  Fowlie was her fourth reader, brought in by her principal advisor, Kenneth Burke, to save the day.

It was also gratifying to read Kaplan's comparison of Susan Sontag's married, with child life to that of the Jeanne Moreau character in Louise Malle's Les Amants / The Lovers (1958). Beyond that even, everything being connected -- especially everything French -- it turns out that the screenplay for Les Amants was "written by the same Louise de Vilmorin whose blue salon at Verrières-le-Buisson had welcomed Jacqueline Bouvier in 1949" (pages 111-112).

After her 1957-1958 Paris residency, Sontag emerged as a leading proponent of French culture back in the USA, abetted by a durable friendship with poet-translator Richard Howard. "The two were leaders in the conversation that was bringing that thing called French Theory to the United States, made of equal parts Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, and Jacques Derrida" (page 127).

Which reminds me that I was lucky enough to hear Richard Howard give a reading in Chapel Hill, North Carolina at UNC, and bought a couple of his books then and there. Now, thanks to Alice Kaplan's alluring account, I wish I'd have met Susan Sontag, too.

Today's Rune: Signals.         

Catherine Belsey: Poststructuralism

Part of an excellent series published by Oxford University Press, Catherine Belsey's Poststucturalism: A Very Short Introduction (2002) provides a succinct grazing among the grasses of poststructuralism.

The philosophical ideas and theories Belsey discusses would probably seem less intimidating to more people if read or experienced through the scrim of science fiction, fantasy, mystery or poetry.

For example:

X. Our thoughts, beliefs and statements may not be our own.

Y. This is because the above (X.) are mediated through culture, including language, symbols and signs -- all things or processes we've learned about and absorbed since becoming conscious, having evolved or changed from infancy through adulthood, to wherever we're at now.

Z. We often feel (at) a loss because and after we have become acculturated, as if there is something we are missing. Is it lost innocence, simplicity, the womb, Eden, another identity?

Many of these ideas suffuse story-telling in books, journals, movies blogs, and more, sometimes subtly and sometimes directly.

I'll pull some small excerpts together for a sampling in a near-future post.

That said, stuff discussed includes: voice(s), ideas, texts and signs. Also grand narrative, deconstruction, differance, signifier-signified, culture, ideology, semiotics, structure, Other, trace and bourgeoisie.

Belsey also nibbles at or gingerly touches upon Humpty Dumpty, language, power, control, resistance, freedom, meaning, and more.

Included in the book are box pop-ups with extra little takes on:

Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913)
Julia Kristeva (b.1941)
Roland Barthes (1915-1980)
Louis Althusser (1918-1990)
Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009)
Michel Foucault (1926-1984)
Jacques Lacan (1901-1981)
Jacques Derrida (1930-2004))
Slavoj Žižek (1949)
Jean-François Lyotard (1924-1998)

This works -- as does, I suspect, the entire Very Short Introduction series -- as a primer, a refresher and an introduction to the topic at hand.

Today's Rune: Warrior.

All Gone to Look for America

Continuing Friday’s adventures, on Bastille Day we zipped up to Midland, Michigan, and met with two other friends outside of town, then proceeded to Mt. Pleasant and the Saginaw Chippewa Nation. We checked out the excellent new Ziibiwing Center for Anishinabe Culture and Lifeways, contemplated the Seven Prophecies/Seven Fires of the Diba Jimooyung, then on to the Soaring Eagle Casino (briefly), the Chippewa River, and grilled steaks. Next, on to see a Minor League baseball game at Midland’s new Dow Diamond ballpark along with 5,500 other people – the Great Lake Loons vs. Burlington Bees (from Burlington, Iowa). The Bees won in eleven innings. Very late last night we sat on a deck and looked in amazement at the shimmering Milky Way, flashing meteorites and orbiting satellites. I reluctantly passed on a Brazilian cigar – too close to a cigarette for now. Trying to be good, you know.

Today's Rune: Separation (Reversed).

Birthdays: Inigo Jones, Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, August Gottlieb Spangenberg, Thomas Bulfinch, Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini, Marie Tempest, Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin, Jean Rey, Rudolf Arnheim, Iris Murdoch, Jacques Derrida, Clive Cussler, Alex Karras, Jan-Michael Vincent, Linda Ronstadt, Arianna Huffington (b. Stassinopoulos), Johnny Thunders (b. John Anthony Genzale, Jr.), Alicia Bridges, Ian Curtis, Marky Ramone (b. Marc Steven Bell), Forest Whitaker, Danijela Martinović, Brigitte Nielsen, Diane Kruger.

Giga-waabamin naagaj!