[-empyre-] Violence - Colonialism - Derrida - Algeria and Beyond

[Robert Summers]

May you expand on this: "... Derrida as colonialists are in many ways
"silent" about as their attentions are turned not to the situation,
the terrains,  but to the text, the book -- that spiritual instrument
existing outside  of the "local" cultures ..."

First, I would have to disagree that a book, a text is "that spiritual
instrument existing outside  of the 'local' cultures" -- I would
assume you are not "Derridean" given there is "nothing outside of the
text;" the text is not created in a vacuum -- thus, disconnected from
the so-called real or "the "local' cultures."  Why enforce this
modernist binary: life and text?

Second, Derrida has in fact written a lot on violence, colonialism,
oppression, etc.  One example, he went to South Africa and during and
after apartheid, he spoke out on oppression, racism, genocide,
colonialism, etc., and has discussed the Algerian situation (and how
it horribly disrupted his youth, which influenced his thinking) at
length.  Not only does this get discussed in texts but also in the
films _Derrida_ and in _Derrida's Elswhere_ (see below for info on the
latter).  Also, Helene Cixous has written about these situations,
political violences, and systematic oppression, with and about
Derrida, and what you claim Derrdia is "silent," and Helene not only
discusses these in her texts, which are, I would argue envois to JD,
but also her own plight with violence do to racism, xenophobia, and
ethnic purity and cleansing: she is Algerian and Jewish.

Info: An exploration of the man and his ideas, DERRIDA'S ELSEWHERE
investigates the parallels between the personal life and the life work
of arguably the most important philosopher of the 20th Century,
Jacques Derrida.

We follow Derrida around his home, office, in the classroom and on his
travels as he speaks of the suffering, the challenges and the
questions that have conditioned his thought since his childhood in
Algeria.

The film is woven around readings from Derrida's book Circumfession,
evoking a number of seemingly disparate themes including hospitality,
religion, sexuality and the place of the subject in philosophy.
Derrida shows us the common thread he perceives running though them:
responsibility. Incorporating related imagery, DERRIDA'S ELSEWHERE
uses footage of the places Derrida knew in his childhood and
adolescence in Algeria, photos of his life there, super-8 footage from
the 1960's and 70's, and images from Spain.

The transitory nature of Place is a concept that has occupied Derrida
from youth. He evokes the experience of de-colonization to illustrate
his ideas. At the synagogue where his father would bring him as a
child, it is clear from the design that it was first an Islamic
mosque. It is a mosque again, reconfigured in the wake of
de-colonialism.

Colonialism and Post-Colonialism figure heavily in Derrida's work. His
concept of displacement, of feeling like an immigrant without papers,
has its roots in his childhood in Algeria. Influential too are
Derrida's Spanish Jewish roots. Through his obsession with the story
of Marrand, a 14th Century Jew who practiced his religion in secret,
we learn of Derrida's sympathy for secrecy, for the unrevealed. After
all, according to Derrida, the absence of Secrecy is a totalitarian
society.

Filmmaker Safaa Fathy's stated goal is to show the links between
Derrida's life and his work. In discussions, he describes his mother
and childhood in the same manner as he does ideas, somewhere between
affect and concept, at a boundary where a work becomes biography and
biography gives birth to a work. DERRIDA'S ELSEWHERE takes us into his
worlds - that of his work in Paris and that of his familial and
spiritual roots in Algeria and the Spain of Lorca and El Greco. We
begin to see how places allow words to appear, producing images that
let us catch a glimpse of what's beyond.

"Profoundly autobiographical... a film that preserves on one level the
coherence and cogency of Derrida's work, highlighting it against a
vivid series of autobiographical backdrops... 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. While
following Derrida, both his body and the logic of his words, fills the
screen with images, of desert, of ruins, and of the ocean, that appear
as something like the aporetic hauntings of those words, something
perhaps of their excised unconscious, something that functions within
the perspective of a pardon and a healing." - Theory & Event



Robert Summers, PhD/ABD
Lecturer
Art History and Visual Culture
Otis College of Art and Design
e: rsummers at otis.edu
w: http://ospace.otis.edu/robtsum/Welcome