I liked Derrida. I was surprised. It could have been the fact that the documentarians that made the movie were about as cheesy as you can get (voice over? seriously?) and that Derrida openly snarked at them (which is pretty much what I would have done). But hearing him talk about his theory conversationally rather than in a more dense, formalized paper really helped me grasp and appreciate what he was saying. I'd like to be able to watch the film again, because there were so many bits that I wrote down that sparked "I should write my blog on that" thoughts, but it was hard to keep up with the subtitles and write stuff down, and my French only goes so far...
My favorite part of his discussion, though, was the point "do not naturalize what is not natural." Though in reference to him answering predetermined questions "naturally" but in front of a camera, in a controlled environment, the idea really has been making me think a lot. Human nature is a topic that has been inexplicably forced upon me over and over again this year; I can't seem to shake it no matter how hard I try. I wonder if I understand the basics of it, even a little? It seems to me that nothing in life is easy enough to package up into a neat little box and call it human nature. If humans can't seem to agree on what common threads we all share, do we share any at all? Are we naturalizing certain behaviors without knowing it? Is human nature an ISA-based idea that pushes certain "unacceptable" behaviors outside social norms? Or is nothing natural?
I liked that the film tried to capture the mundane activities of his life, the making lunch, the haircuts, the casual pipe-smoking stroll down the street. What else can anyone really expect from an old man? No one would expect him to be livin la vida loca, academic credentials or not. We all have anecdotal lives on the outside, even the best and the brightest. It made me think of the reality tv that exists today, and how it, by definition, cannot be reality. We can't edit our lives to display only the dumb things we say (poor Jessica Simpson) or the Real World (can there really be that many catfights in one day in actual reality?). I love the photos of Angelina Jolie strolling out of grocery stores or Cameron Diaz playing frisbee...STARS, THEY'RE JUST LIKE US!! That we expect otherwise from celebrities (or academic superstars) is hilarious, because we all need haircuts and lunch.
In any case, I respect Derrida's resistance to the structure of the interview process- he said what he thought answered the question and that was that. This wasn't an exam for Derrida, he didn't have to give details. He realized that people wanted something from him and he was only going to give them what he felt was enough, especially considering his past as a person who avoided public displays of himself previously. There's nothing wrong with being left wanting more out of Derrida, he does not belong to us to begin with.
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Human nature is not easy. And I think that's mostly because cultural evolution has taken over where biological evolution has pretty much ended. There are still universal biological traits, which is the basis of human nature...but because culture is so vast and so complex, it's difficult to pin-point universal traits other than those that evolved biologically.
which makes me wonder why people even try...does it actually matter?
It seems to me that we share many of our general biological traits with any number of animals. But one thing that separates us from other animals, however controverial this may be, is our apparent ability to acknowledge our own consciousness (the use of human language). Whether this acknowledgement separates us from the essense of who we are is another matter entirely. But my guess is that Lacan will help us to work through this problem. It might be fun to think about human nature (at least in terms of Freud) through our old friend, L'enfant Terrible de la psychanalyse. Lacan destroys notions of the Cartesian subject and argues that the subject can only be constituted through language. Of course, because language itself is constituted by an endless chain of signifiers, we are never what we think we are. In fact, the "Real" us exists somewhere outside of the mediation of language, a scary place in which we will never reside.
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