Derrida

The thinking crumpet's man

Serpico. Shaft. McQ. Derrida? Movie fans wandering in from the rain thinking that this film's blunt, surnamed title means a hard-boiled-detective story, are in for a surprise. It's not that Jacques Derrida isn't a detective of sorts – the "world's greatest living philosopher" and doyen of deconstruction has roughed up a fair few metaphysical heavyweights in his time – but why does a septuagenarian French philosophy professor attract such attention in the first place? It could be because the French have no problem in putting philosophers at the centre of their national culture. There's none of the "nobody likes a smartarse" mentality that the UK is so prone to. Saturday night French telly can take in a gameshow, a soft-porn flick and a heavy-duty panel discussion with hardly a shift in gear. Near the start of the film, there's a clip from a French TV programme where a presenter who looks like she should be snogging Jean-Paul Belmondo on the Paris Metro states of Derrida: "He's a thinker of lightning thoughts, whose work is like that of miners who work by exploding the beams supporting their shafts." Phew! Black coffee and French thinkers never go out of style.

But the big question has got to be why did Derrida agree to do it. Throughout the film he's at great pains to give away as little as possible. Almost his first statement to camera (or at least the first one that Dick and Kofman edit in) is: "Before responding ... I want to make a preliminary remark on the completely artificial character of this situation." Later Kofman asks Derrida and his wife how they met. "I'm not going to tell you everything," he says pointedly, only giving the barest of facts about their early encounters. His wife Marguerite, a psychoanalyst, is equally reticent. "I first saw him in the snow," she says. And says no more. Kofman is left to fill in these gaps with breathy readings from Derrida's own work which, coupled with the philosopher's own often gnomic aphorisms, sometimes give the film the feel of an Eighties perfume advert – at any moment you expect a woman to fling open a window, shouting "Egoist! Egoist! Egoist!"

The film's style often grates with pretension – as if Dick and Kofman had tried to make their own deconstructionist statement by shaky camera movement and the laboured device of having Derrida watch footage of himself watching footage of himself being interviewed. But his obvious – if wary – affection for his interrogator (Kofman is a former student of Derrida's) shows through and when he opens up on his experiences of anti-Semitism while a school student in Algeria you feel you are beginning to get at the formative experiences that made the man.

And all that trailing around also delivers some laugh-out-loud moments. There's the hapless interviewer who asks Derrida if he thinks that Seinfeld is deconstructionist. No matter that she realises the stupidity of her question almost as soon as she asks it. "Deconstruction, as I understand it," comes the response, "doesn't produce any sitcom." And the moment when you notice that as guest of honour at the opening of his own archive at the University of California, Derrida is wearing a name-tag with his own name on it. Or his assertion that he would like to read about other philosophers' sex lives (surely disingenuous, his intellectual spats with the sexed-up philosopher Michel Foucault are legendary).

But Kirby Dick gets the best question in, asking Derrida which philosopher he would like to have as his mother. His flummoxed, long-winded, almost embarrassed reply would take two more columns to reproduce in full here but boils down to something like "a strong woman, but not a philosopher, who might be my daughter." "Jacques mate," you want to shout, "if you're in an Ecole, stop digging!"