Cinema and Its Ghosts: An Interview with Jacques Derrida

Interview conducted July 10, 1998 and November 6, 2000 in Paris. Transcribed and formatted by Stephane Delorme.When a philosopher admits to a fascination with cinema, is it just chance that his thought leads him to encounter the ghosts haunting dark theaters?- Cahiers du cinemaIt is not obvious that ajournai such as Cahiers du anemawould interview Jacques Derrida. Above all because, for a long time, Derrida seemed to be interested only in the phenomenon of writing, in its trace, in speech, in the voice. And then came several books: Memoirs of the Blind, around an exhibition at the Louvre, Echographies of Television, a conversation about that mass medium with Bernard Stiegler that affirmed a new interest in the image. And then too, a film, Derrida's Elsewhere, directed by Safaa Fathy, and a book Tourner les mots, cowritten with the film's director, which finally tackled the experience of cinema. That's all we needed to go and ask some questions of a philosopher who, even though he admits he's not a cinephile, nevertheless has truly been thinking about the cinematographic apparatus, projection, and the ghosts that every normally constituted viewer feels an irresistible urge to encounter. Derrida's discourse, which resonates in the following interview, is thus that of neither a specialist nor a professor speaking from the height of commanding knowledge, but very simply that of a man who thinks and who goes back to the ontology of cinema while shedding new light on it.Cahiers du cinema: How did cinema enter your life?Derrida: Very early. In Algiers, when I was ten or twelve years old, at the end of the war then right after the war. It was a vital way of getting out. I lived in a suburb of the city, El Biar. To go to the movies was an emancipation, getting away from the family. I remember well the names of all the movie houses in Algiers, I can see them still: The Vox, The Cameo, The Noon-Midnight, The Olympia . . . No doubt I went to the movies without being very selective. I saw everything, the French films made during the Occupation, and especially the American films that returned after 1942. I would be totally incapable of listing the titles of the films, but I remember the sort of films I saw. A Tom Sawyer for example, certain scenes of which came back to me recently: a cave where Tom is closed up with a little girl. A sexual emotion: I saw that a twelve-year-old boy could caress a little girl. I was about the same age. Of course a large part of one's sensual and erotic education comes from movies. You learn what a kiss is at the movies, before learning it in life. I remember that adolescent erotic thrill. I would be totally incapable of citing anything else. I have a passion for the cinema; it's a kind of hypnotic fascination, I could remain for hours and hours in a theater, even to watch mediocre things. But I have not the least memory for cinema. It's a culture that leaves no trace in me. It's virtually recorded, I've forgotten nothing, I also have notebooks where I keep reminders of the titles of films from which I don't remember a single image. I am not at all a cinephile in the classical sense of the term. Instead I'm a pathological case. During periods when I go to the movies a lot, particularly when I'm abroad in the United States where I spend my time in movie theaters, a constant repression erases the memory of these images that nonetheless fascinate me. In 1949, I arrived in Paris, for advanced preparatory school, and the rhythm continued, several shows a day sometimes, in the countless movie theaters of the Latin Quarter, especially the Champo.Cahiers du cinema: What is for you the first effect of film in the state of childhood? You mentioned the erotic dimension, which is certainly essential in the apprenticeship of images. But is it a relation to gestures, a relation to time, the body, space?Derrida: If it wasn't the names of films, or the stories, or the actors that made an impression on something in me, it was surely another form of emotion that has its source in projection, in the very mechanism of projection. …