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Al-Ahram Weekly 17 - 23 February 2000 Issue No. 469 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 17 - 23 February 2000 Issue No. 469
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Features Focus Profile Travel Living Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters The impatience of fish
Safaa Fathi's film D'Ailleurs Derrida, was screened twice -- at the Supreme Cultural Council and the French Cultural Centre -- on the occasion of the French philosopher's visit to Cairo. The soundtrack features a lucid testimony, a long and articulate meditation by Jacques Derrida on his thoughts, intellectual anxieties and preoccupations.
At the beginning of the film, Derrida faces the camera asserting that because "writing is infinite" it compels a "practice of selection", expressing some ideas and suppressing others, pointing out that such practice is precisely what Fathi is about to do as he speaks in order for her to create a film. He also admits that he realises the "impossibility of classical autobiography" because it presupposes a degree of self-knowledge which, in his opinion, is impossible. "I write in search of an identity," the philosopher says, "if I find an identity, I will stop writing. If the moi existed, we wouldn't search for it."
Derrida, surrendering his physical being to the lens of the camera, fully aware that others, at different times and places, will be staring at his image in their own way, compares his feelings with the impatience of fish -- "a hellish experience" of "compulsive waiting" -- and wonders what the fish's experience of time could possibly be like. Do fish run out of patience?
To images of Algiers Derrida comments: "I'm reminded that I'm a product of colonialism, or post-colonialism, if you like. I was raised in Algeria. I had to learn that all places, especially places of worship, are subject to appropriation and re-appropriation; as if places were borrowed". The film shows a mosque converted into a synagogue, which he frequented as a child, and then reconverted back into a mosque after Algerian independence. "The same places of worship witness people of different religions praying to the same god."
Having left Algiers at the age of 30 to live in Europe he realised that: "[His] is the immigrant's, the itinerant's position, which is not a position for it is not in one place."
The feeling of loneliness is as pertinent as that of restlessness. Derrida believes that "language implies another side; the language of the other." He sees that there is a "promise", a "request", an "entreaty" in being at the other end when "the fisherman throws the line."
"A variable is present in the relation of one 'self' to another," he remarks, adding that "friendship contains a silent side," and that "condition for dialogue is having a distance, a separateness between one and the other. Once one speaks, one's self gets involved with the other's."
To exemplify 'repression', a persistent concern in his work, Derrida chooses the sexual repression of women: "In repression there is an attempt to silence the other and reduce diverse voices to one."
However, he foresees the return of what is refused and discarded. Until this time when the democratic space opens, he recommends that the plurality of voices within each of us should be released. "If I was despotic in myself, I would be so with others. Self analysis should help one to be democratic," he suggests.
To the image of a full university classroom, he notes that at 5.00pm every Wednesday for 30 years he has lectured in this place. We witness him during one such lecture, the focus being the concept of 'pardon' as he questions its theatricality, its hidings, its whereabouts, remarking that Hegel, Desmond Toto, Mandela and Clinton all knew about pardon and violating the oath.
He contemplates the significance of 'reconciliation' and 'war', which involves the common feelings of 'shock' and 'wound', the latter producing the "living wounded" -- the only ones who can survive the wound only, inevitably, to die -- and the problem of speaking to each other separately and to all at the same time.
After all, his philosophy is a "religion sans religion."
Another lecture documented in the film addresses Christianity's influence on all cultures, even Japanese and Indian.
"The Abrahamaic tradition dominates the formation of all culture," he comments, asserting that even disposing of Christianity is done in the name of Christianity. Jean-Luc Nancy, Derrida's closest friend for 30 years and the only individual allowed by the documentary to speak of Derrida -- and whose relationship with Derrida never involves discussing each others' work verbally, but involves reading each other -- writes a book titled Deconstruction of Christianity. "It is inevitable; Nietzsche's 'death of god' is a Christian idea. Also, forcing Christianity on the world through globalisation is self-deconstruction of Christianity," he concurs.
We go with Derrida to his attic, where he feels "loftiest", and where he keeps his books. There he reveals that he practices suppression of texts by throwing books up, down and to the side, while the camera shows us the walls and floor covered with endless piles of books. "The crisis of archives is that they live independent of me," he regrets. "I need things that don't need me."
Derrida elaborates on the transience of literary expression: "Trace is like circumcision. Writing of the body through rectum and erection occurs before talking. The self chooses to use words of denial. There are equivalents in all languages for this metaphoric circumcision. I point to this in all my writings on cryptology, scribing, writing, engraving, [but] I'll never write this book on circumcision. Because it's the navel of my dreams, the unconsciously repressed sign that is present all the time; I know that this project -- [of writing that book] -- is condemned to failure. The guilt has to remain legendary; the legend of my circumcision."
In this he relates to St. Augustin, in this "death without death."
In one final reflection on writing in the film, Derrida points out that it is related to resistance and that liberation is also building barriers and resistances in order to make crossing barriers possible. Therefore reading is "deciphering the self" and is "unconsciously calculating."
Still Derrida sometimes wonders: "Why write? There is an insolent assumption of the importance of what you write. Forgive me for presenting myself as important; for my insolence.
"Is it the structuralist reason? Being annoyed or disturbed by something? Therefore one writes, but this word is written for somebody who could be anybody. But I don't address anybody. There is no oneness of my readers. I am always violating an oath; I am an infidel, my writing is betrayal in this respect."
Hospitality is a recurrent theme in Derrida's work and one which had a prominent share in the Cairo discussions, especially in his lecture titled "Deconstruction: Its History and Origins in Egypt and the East" delivered at the French Cultural Centre. On hospitality and time Derrida remarks: "Each instant is infinite, not just a stage. One must choose. Decision and responsibility compel crossing the absolute desert... the remote possibility of finding a way in the desert... of finding the hospitality of Bedouins, an oasis or any welcoming culture. Law, borders, morality are each differently related to a hospitality that neither politics nor law can provide. Prison is the opposite of hospitality. I was arrested at 1.00 am; at 5.00 am thrown in a cell with a barbarian who taught me to wash walls. I found part of me repeating this scene, starting anew. There is pleasure in repetition, an anticipation."
In the course of Safaa Fathi's hour-long D'Ailleurs Derrida the viewer becomes increasingly grateful for the opportunity of rapprochement with Derrida that the film provides. The father of deconstruction is contextualised within a family, relating his experience with his dying mother; revealing to his viewers the cat cemetery in his garden; touring the synagogue of his childhood, pointing out the circumcision tools that so obsess him. For many watching Fathi's documentary perhaps proved more enlightening than hours of arid discussions.
In conclusion, Derrida says: "The tragedy in existence is not only existentialism but it is that the significance of what we live is only clear at the moment of death, when we realise in the last instant that the good memories are both invalid and spoilt. My desire is to relive everything, but repeat nothing."
Reported by Youssef Rakha, Injy El-Kashef, Mohamed El-Assyouti and Khaled Abdallah
