Theory & Event

A documentary on Jacques Derrida would seem to face the challenge of three competing aims: its own cinematic quality or integrity, the person or image of Derrida, and the force of his writing as represented by what he says before the camera. Safaa Fathy’s Derrida’s Elsewhere chooses to concentrate on the image and voice of its subject, somewhat at the expense of its own construction as cinematic object. Derrida has, as it were, been allowed to script this film. Thus there is a total absence of narrative or descriptive voice-over and an almost total absence of interlocution by Fathy or anyone else. Apart from Derrida himself, and Fathy’s readings of a couple of extracts from Derrida’s work, the only other voice heard is that of Jean-Luc Nancy. And apart from the image of Derrida himself (plus a few archival glimpses of his mother and son), “accidental” or “occasional” images of Fathy herself as well as friends, family and associates such as Hélène Cixious, Marguerite Derrida, and Hillis Miller (all of whom remain unidentified), Nancy is the only other actor the spectator sees. Fathy’s success therefore is twofold. In the first place it derives from the decors she uses to frame Derrida’s words — Algeria, Laguna Beach, Irvine, Toledo, Ris-Orangis, Rue d’Ulm, Boulevard Raspail — and from the autonomous shots taken of those decors, that sometimes intersperse or otherwise accompany what he is saying, causing his words to be haunted by images from elsewhere. Fathy creates from those filmic juxtapositions a type of aesthetic and conceptual superposition with the result that in spite of his overwhelming presence in front of the camera — speaking, strolling, posing, looking — the effect is finally that now we see him now we don’t, the effect of the disjunctions conveyed by the film’s title. In the second place, and perhaps more importantly, Fathy’s film succeeds thanks to certain thematic threads that, although they are of course woven by the coherence of Derrida’s discourse, are used to structure the film, and to tie “central” preoccupations such as writing to the seemingly diverse questions of circumcision and forgiveness.

Now the competing aims I just referred to may well exist in respect of any documentary, and indeed, the mode of a documentary in general involves “letting speak,” letting witnesses speak, allowing the images to tell the truth. But this question becomes all the more pertinent in the case of Derrida. This is so in the first place because, as his work shows, he has much to say, and however much he resists being ask to extemporize, once he feels comfortable enough he will inevitably begin to verbalize with as much insight and intelligence as when he writes. But in the second place, the very question of speaking as a witness is something that has preoccupied Derrida in his texts of the last ten to fifteen years. Safaa Fathy has been particularly sensitive to that question in making her film, and in making the choices of her film, reducing to a minimum her own interventions so as to produce an archival document that is neither biography, curriculum vitae, or even précis of an oeuvre, but first and foremost testimony.

In fact, because witnessing — as actual instance and as technology — so preoccupies Derrida, the effects of the film that could be called properly cinematic, that is to say whatever effects there are of the fact that this is a documentary film of Jacques Derrida, derive more from interventions he himself makes than from decisions related to its production. In this respect Fathy’s film exists somewhat in contrast to the other Derrida documentary, Kirby Dick and Amy Kofman’s Derrida (Jane Doe Films, 2002), yet even there Derrida cannot avoid making the fact of his being in front of the camera an explicit topic of discussion, as indeed he had already in the “filmed book” that is Echographies (Derrida and Stiegler 2002), and...