Better understanding of Derrida

Having watched the biography on Derrida it gave me much more insight into him as a person and I believe made me better understand,"Structure Sign and Play". The whole time Derrida was being filmed he was very conscious of the cameras and was pointing the fact out they were there following him every chance that he got. I do not think the irony of following around Derrida and making a documentary film on him was last on the directors. Just the way they went about posing questions to Derrida or the places they followed him to showed that. I really enjoyed it when they would have the woman's voice saying a quote from one of Derrida's writ ting while he was doing such average mundane things as getting a haircut or buttering his toast. That brought it all back and showed that they understood somewhat what they were actually doing.

I think Derrida's image helps to understand more about his writing because you can actually put a face to what he says, it at least made it more interesting to me. Derrida's hair made a big impression on me throughout the movie as well. When I looked at him I found myself mostly looking at his hair all crazy and white. It just seemed to fit his thoughts and writing that are so deep and hard to grasp it fit for him to have this almost mad scientist type hair. I came away from watching the film feeling as if Derrida was a pretty funny guy. When they were in his library at his home and was asked if he had read all of the books he had. His response that no he had only read three or four but he read those three or four really well was really funny to me. Then in the movie when he mentioned that your eyes never change no matter what made me look more deeply at his eyes and they are just great. He has a very charming look to him and it seemed very uncomplicated, not like his ideas at all.

Being followed and interviewed as much as Derrida was must not of been the easiest thing but he was not going easy on the interviewers which I thought was rather appropriate of him. There was a big disconnect between what the interviewer wanted from the answer and what Derrida was willing to give them, or maybe that is exactly how they planed it. This point was especially clear when Derrida was sitting with his wife and they were asking about how they met and Derrida would only give facts. He would not show anything deep that had to do with feelings or had any real meaning behind it just trivial things like the year they met and where they were. Having Derrida refer to the film process as very American really cleared some things up for me. Americans always want to know more just to expand on a topic, its not really asking any specific question they just want to know more. I found it interesting when I thought about it and that it was very American to do that, that its not really gone about that way in other cultures. So when Derrida was asked to just expand on love he couldn't just talking about it and thinking about it I don't think anyone truly can its silly.

Sassure and Structuralism

"Signs function not through their intrinsic value but through their relative position."


Saussure having said that really seems to me to be making the point that it all depends on what surrounds the big picture. Signs function in all of this not by some deep value that might have but by their positioning and place in reference to other things. I am not exactly sure if that makes sense to anyone who actually know what they are talking about but that is the main idea I think I was able to derive from that. I really think that this quote does an excellent job at summarizing the jumbled ideas I took away after reading this. That everything with language and in a text is all relational. A single word cannot have a true value unless it is able to be compared to other things. For words to have value Saussure talks about that they need both a "dissimilar thing that can be exchanged", and a," similar thing that can be compared with the thing of which value can be determined". Explaining in those two steps help me understand and think about it all more. It put his ideas in a more accessible to me and put them into a real sense for me.