This short, dense film tries to show us Derrida as man and philosopher. His philosophy made him one of the Twentieth century's pioneering thinkers who was disliked and reviled within his own philosophic community as much as he was respected. Revulsion is a place he knows because he is an Franco-Algerian Jew.
Using his philosophic tropes of sign, trace, mark, inclusion and exclusion, Derrida strives to make sense of his own circumcision and a broader circumcision that affects the body and/or mind in terms of wounds and scars. Wounds and scars are particular types of traces and marks that gather to themselves a desire for reconciliation, which is a meeting with an Other. They are also the family heritage and culture that is within us always. His fleshy circumcision is a psychic inheritance of being Jewish.
We follow him around his Algerian home, his Parisian flat, the lecture hall, the desert and by the sea. We hear about his mother's death, see him with cats and the sepulture he has created in his Algerian garden for the cats who die. We hear him muse on a painting (The Burial of Count Orgaz), talk about Lorca's 'Blood Wedding' and its connection to sexual repression. We meet his friend and colleague Jean-Luc Nancy, learn about Derrida's brief imprisonment and the friendship and respite from prison violence he found then. He drives, he has a piano and a print of Charlie Chaplin, he walks around museums with ancient artefacts and discusses the unconscious whilst the camera lingers on early instruments of operation, for circumcision. All of this current figure is in the context that he is old now and readying himself for death as he wonders if his view of his life and its meaning will be what he finds at the point of death.
With camera following him Derrida remarks that the film process is like writing a text; in the process of making a mark there is a movement of inclusion that excludes too. This process of exclusion is the very betrayal at the heart of writing; it is the price paid for using language, being able to make marks.
The film maker uses the environment to enhance Derrida. An attempt to lessen the exclusion although decisive choices are implicit. Derrida begins discussing sexual repression of women and we see an old tree whose trunk has been bifurcated and from which two thick branches that jut in different directions. Derrida discusses the fantasy of identity and we see him walking through well tended grounds reflected in a large, immaculate glass window. Derrida discusses secrecy and a large wooden door with metal detail appears on our screen. It is so subtle and so clever and a constant reminder of subject and context.
As to the film's title: "Elsewhere, even when near by, is always beyond a certain limit. But within yourself there is elsewhere
Elsewhere, here. If it were elsewhere, it wouldn't be an elsewhere." (Derrida) The illusion is of a me who is nowhere to be found, who is ever elsewhere. It is an affront to our Abrahamic discourse that believes identity is present when in fact we are absent the moment we make a trace or mark.
"What is tragic about existence
is that the meaning of what we are living
is only determined at the last moment
the moment of death".
Love him or loathe him, or fall betwixt, here was a man concerned most profoundly with the process of life. This film is worth more than one viewing to appreciate how the film maker portrays Derrida's abstractions. Trying to capture the thoughts in images. It is a folly of humankind to try and capture, to make present. It is a need that does not need us. It is desire and it is love. It was no surprise to learn that the film maker is an Egyptian poet.
