Suffered tonight through Derrida: The Movie (not to be confused with Spaceballs: The Toilet Paper), confirming my suspicion that Jacques Derrida is patently overrated.

He had some ideas, to be sure, such as differance, the process whereby changes appear in language and are afterwards ascribed a meaning. Thus, "dawg" and "dang" might once have meant the same thing (or, say, "biatch" and "bizatch"), but because they are different their meanings diverge. A smart idea, which presaged the current vogue for the "meme" meme and the evolutionary view of language and culture.

But in this film, we see the seedier side: he seems to like the idea of "being a philosopher" and plays to that part by making ad hoc divisions in everyday concepts--echoing things that you too have mused about when you were deathly bored, in line at the DMV, but he gives them an all-new verbosity. The interviewer asks a blithely general question, such as, "What do you have to say about love?" It only takes a little prodding and he'll string some words together. On love, he says that "the obvious question is between the 'who' and the 'what' of love." Brilliant. Go on. "Do you love a person as a singularity, or do you love some property or attribute of them?" He rephrases this distinction two or three times and we cut to another scene. No need to argue or even conjecture one way or the other, or for that matter to delve in: to have asked the question seems to be enough. I'm reminded of the party scene in Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle where one of the gents says, "Mrs. P., why don't you give us one of your... things?" Meaning, make up a poem, which she does, perfectly scanned and rhymed and completely devoid of insight.

The film uses some clever techniques, for example we see D. refusing to answer a question about his life, then we see him watching that clip, then later him watching that clip of him watching himself. This for a man who vouches, "The eyes fascinate me because they do not age. And you can never see yourself in the act of looking; even though there's a mirror right here!"

In another segment, shots of the trivia of his life (buttering/margarining his toast in the morning) are intercut with a talk about how biography is not admitted into traditional philosophy. He never gets so far as to claim that it should or shouldn't be admitted, of course—that would be giving the game away, one imagines. For Derrida to make a claim would be like Uma Thurman leaving the bathroom door unlocked and letting someone see her with her trousers down: it would ruin the mystique. The impresion I get is of someone who likes to speak with the air of philosophy, but dispensing with the whole idea of arguing for or against some claim. It's a kind of parlor game for him—like making up sensuous haiku in the Heian court to impress your mate-to-be.

The overriding effect of the film was in the drabness of Derrida's lifestyle. Watching the movie was like reading something on newsprint, in the sense that you're constantly staring at the same nauseating, low-contrast texture while concentrating fiercely on some hackneyed (you think) words. Derrida walks down the street (again and again), he speaks at a folding table with a microphone. He gets his coat from the closet and fumbles with the door. He butters his toast. Essentially nothing of significance, nor of color, occurs in his life. He extemporizes philosophical(ish) thoughts, slowly, clumsily, without any sense of purpose or need. I wonder, what passion, what energy, fuels this man? What does he live for? Margarine?

In my view: The wetness of the night trumps sophistry every time.