Derrida: Textually Onscreen

Neither fiction, nor documentary or biography, the film D’ailleurs, Derrida by Safaa Fathy is a cinematographic exploration of the philosopher Jacques Derrida and of his environment. It is at once a philosophic seminar, an interview and an experiment in cinematographic deconstruction. Accompanied by the book Tourner les mots, the film is deeply undercut in its cinematographic nature by the textual content of the essays by Fathy and Derrida contained therein. The book problematises and, to a degree, calls the film into question, seeking to reframe it in purely textual terms. It is a question of what lies between the “actor” and the “author”, between the performativity of the text and the film and in the dialogue between Fathy and Derrida as it traverses both the film and the text. In this inter-artwork, everything plays on the words which animate the transfer between the paper and the screen. In the light of this exchange, let us consider the effect of the cinematographic and the textual play.