Jacques Derrida

Abstract

Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) was born in Algiers and educated at the École Normale Supérieure and Harvard University. He held appointments teaching philosophy at the Sorbonne and École Normale Supérieure in Paris. In the United States he was a visiting Professor at Johns Hopkins University, Yale University, New York University, Stony Brook University, and The New School for Social Research. He was Professor of Humanities at the University of California at Irvine. Derrida was director of studies at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. With François Châtelet and others he co- founded the Collège International de Philosophie (CIPH) in 1983 Derrida’s extensive publications include Writing and Diff erence (1967; English trans. 1978), Of Grammatology (1967; English trans. 1976), Speech and Phenomena (1967; English trans. 1973), Glas (1974; English trans. 1986), The Truth in Painting (1978; English trans. 1987), Right of Inspection (1985; English trans. 1998), Spectres of Marx (1993; English trans. 1994) and Archive Fever (1995; English trans. 1996). He is co-author of Echographies of Television (1996; English trans. 2002). Derrida And The (Spectral) Scene Of Cinema. Derrida's scene of cinema is haunted, its every nook and cranny host to a pandemonium of phantoms, ghosts, shadows and spectres whose ethereal proliferation and enigmatic traces plot the space–time coordinates of not only the cinematic spectacle but its very “apparatus” as a repeated rerun of the (non-)living (non-)dead. Declaring the “cinematic experience” to partake, in its every aspect, of “spectrality”, film in its very materiality, as projected on the screen, to be a “phantom”, the screen itself to have a “structure of disappearing apparition” and the cinematic image a structure that is “through and through spectral”, Derrida gestures towards a thought of cinema that is obviously irreducible to “crude phantasmagoria” or a thematic focus on the “representation of phantomality”, as with horror films and their cortege of ghouls, vampires and the resurrected.