Deconstructing an Identity

A question that has peaked my interest on a number of occasions (first in viewing Citizen Kane, and then through several other works that dealt with a similar subject) is that of how well we can truly understand the real man behind a public persona that the media (whether through film, television, or the press) presents to us. I would assume that Orson Welles would agree, through the story of Charles F. Kane, that such depictions can never truly capture the essence of a man in its entirety.
I recently watched filmmakers Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering Kofman’s documentary Derrida, a film which is the end result of the five years worth of footage they collected interviewing and accompanying Jacques Derrida, the late 20th. century French intellectual who, by his death last October had become one of the most highly praised and notoriously difficult philosophers of the 20th. Century. Having recently been exposed to several of his later works, I approached this film wondering what kind of insight a 90 minute film could possibly offer into a life devoted to complex philosophical inquiries that inherently defy easy summary.
Derrida is celebrated as the father of deconstruction, a method of critical inquiry that was centered on the belief that all writing was full of confusion and contradiction, “and that the author’s intent could not overcome the inherent contradictions of language itself, robbing texts – whether literature, history or philosophy – of truthfulness, absolute meaning and permanence. The concept was eventually applied to the whole gamut of arts and social sciences, including linguistics, anthropology, political science, even architecture.” Rather than attempting to undertake the futile effort of presenting a watered-down attempt at paraphrasing Derrida’s life and work, the film embraces its limitations, often poking fun at the filmmakers’ task by reminding us that their documentary can’t really do anything beyond supplying us with a fragment of momentary truth. Both they, and Jacque constantly remind us of the certain degree of superficiality that is present at all times during the filming process. He notes several times that he becomes a different person once the camera is on; they remind us with amusing moments in which the crew experiences various technical difficulties that repeatedly interrupt his efforts to properly explain anything in detail. Throughout the film, Derrida becomes a part of its deconstructionist subject’s purview by observing its shortcomings as both a form and a forum. “Generalities,” Jacque offers “are all the filmmaker can be concerned with.”