The Man That Is Derrida...

After watching the movie on Derrida, I had many mixed feelings towards it.  I like the premise of the movie, but the movie was definitely something I wouldn't have picked o my own to watch. I think the movie has aspects of being a mainstream movie, but for the most part I see it as being an elitist film.  Thinking of friends and family, I don't think any of them would choose to go to a movie about Derrida the theorist, let alone even understand what he is talking about. With that said I think the movie was an interesting one. 

I think that the film is ironic in the sense of capturing Derrida's image, because in reality they are not capturing the real Derrida.  He even states that if the camera crews were not there, than he would still be in his pajamas, instead of being fully dressed.  I also think that it is funny because the film crew is trying to find out who the real Derrida is, but he will not open up to them, because he says that there is no need to focus on him as a philosopher, and instead to just examine his theories. I think that there is not much known about philosophers in general because they don't want their image to be attached to a theory, to the point where an audience is more worried about what they look like or who they are, instead of what they are saying. If that is the case, I can see how the real Derrida was not present in the movie. The film crews do a good job with the situation at hand, since they were not going to get a lot of personal information about Derrida out of him. I think the funny thing of this "biography" is that it is almost an autobiography, because the film crew isn't getting much out of him, and he is dictating what will be included about his life, so in the sense he is writing the script to this movie himself.

I think that Derrida is seen by the audience as a pensive man who enjoys what he is writing about and the theories he studies. We also see a lighter side of Derrida, where he jokes and fools around. I think the two are conflicting in most people's minds because they  assume that a theorist or philosopher tend to be more serious, but this is showing that there is just not one depicted image of how a theorist acts. 

During the interview process Derrida does not fully complete questions the way that the interviewer would like him to do. From the audience's perspective it seems like he is dodging questions. The interviewer wants Derrida to rant about a specific topic and he says that he cannot do that, that it is too broad of a topic to talk about. There is definitely a disconnect between the interviewer and Derrida since he does not give all the information that the woman wants to hear. Due to this I almost was getting aggravated at the interviews because I just wanted the questions to be answered, and have one answer for them. Maybe it is my "American" way of answering and asking questions, but towards the end it began to get a little frustrating. 

Language and the Sign....

"signs function not through their intrinsic value, but through their relative position"

Over the past week I felt as though I understood what Structuralism was, and that I could convey that message to other people. Once we started reviewing Post-Structuralism in contrast to that, I was starting to doubt myself.  Saussure seemed pretty easy to follow since this was my second attempt in a class to learn about Structuralism, granted the first attempt was a simplified one. We learned about three key ideas and the one that most stuck out for me was the quote ...

"signs function not through their intrinsic value, but through their relative position"

Saussure is saying that signs (which contain both the signifier and the signified), are not recognized or understood on their own, they work through the understanding of the context that it is in. For example, the word house is only understood, when put in context with the words, shack, mansion, hut, palace, etc.

I understand this statement as being that all words don't have an essential meaning. The only way to understand the meaning of a word is to know where it stands in context to other words. Essentially the meanings of things are only known by someone when they are put into relation to other words that are similar but have different meanings. For example, I know what a rocking chair is because I know what a stool, a couch, a lounge chair, is. 

The reading for this week I feel as though complicated the idea of what I believe structuralism to be, all the key ideas include, Post-Structuralism puts that on its head. I think the idea, that meanings of things are different  and that is stable in Structuralism, and in Post-Structuralism it says that meaning is destabilized threw me for a loop.