So I just wrote a presentation for my Derrida class, which anyone who knows me, knows this class has overtaken my life, has five times as much work as any of my other classes, all the kids are taking it, etc. And so I went over the same information several times: I read it. I re-read it. I wrote down what I had underline. I made an outline from that. Then I wrote a paper from that. And then I went down and wrote a summary of it in my notebook for safe-keeping. And so then I read my presentation to make sure it was under the time limit. It made no sense!!! But I had literally JUST written it.
Have you guys seen the Fugitive? The movie with Harrison Ford. (I should say, Proust's sixth volume of A la recherche... "La Fugitive" was disastroustly translated into English as "The Sweet Cheat Gone," and I really really really really really wish that the Harrison Ford/ Tommy Lee Jones film were called "The Sweet Cheat Gone"). Anyways, when I saw this movie when I was 10, I was obsessed with the TV show, which I had seen every day at 2pm when I was in bed with mono. Now, this is a great action film, probably the equal of that other 1990s juggernaut "Terminator 2: Judgment Day", and definitely better than "Time Cop", a film starring Jean Claude Van Damme which tried to combine the two (cops, time travel) with a sprinking of nudity (this is all I remember, except that someone MELTED when they ran into their time-double.) So, "Terminator 2" and "The Fugitive" were both massively difficult to understand, "Terminator 2" in an existential way, where how can you get rid of the future if you need someone to be sent back to the past to make sure that events turn out the same way, but you have gotten rid of the possibility of being able to send them back? Also: did ROBOTS invent time-travel? I think this is the claim of the film, but why would robots want to time-travel?
"The Fugitive" was impenetrable on a more "who did what and when?" level, because the one-armed man's motive was based on a covering-up of something that somehow necessitated murdering Harrison Ford's wife, but to my 5th grade mind it made sense only for like FIVE SECONDS when I somehow got all the elements in my head, thought "a-ha!" and then instantly collapsed back into a muddle when I tried to reorganize it.
This is what my Derrida paper reads like. I understood it while I was writing it, but reading it ten minutes later, (and let's be fair, it's 2 am and I'm sick), it reads like it was written in Martian. I know that I what I wrote is "true", but I'm not sure it makes any more sense than the impenetrable Derrida piece. Which is to say, next time you bash theory, or if you think my paper is boring, just remember: it's exactly like Terminator 2. That's just how exciting it is.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
i rewatched 'the fugitive' on a recent cable binge. eminently watchable, good stuff.
Ben, don't fret.
Derrida himself said: "My own experience of writing leads me to think that one does not always write with a desire to be understood--that there is a paradoxical desire not to be
understood. It's not simple, but there is a certain 'I hope that not everyone understands everything about this text' because if such a transparency of intelligibility were ensured it would destroy the text, it would show that the text has no future, that it does not overflow the present, that it is consumed immediately."
I ended up trashing what I had written because it "controlled" the text too much, and wrote something entirely new in the hour before class, that asked "what is at stake here?" instead of "what is he saying?"
Post a Comment