Derrida and the Cinematograph: Or the Culture That We Don’t Have

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. … 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. … 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.

—Jacques Derrida (2001)

I have watched all kinds of movies, but I would not be able to quote them. I haven’t forgotten anything of those movies, yet their memory has left no traces. Thus, from this memory, the memory of cinema, traces did not remain.

Through this aporetic rhetoric, Derrida confesses that when he remembers films, he retains a memory of the past, although the explicit traces of this past disappear. He confesses this by suggesting that cinema would be the privileged medium that enables memory not to leave traces. What is interesting in Derrida’s interview with Antoine de Baeque and Thierry Jousse in Cahiers du cinéma is not only his avowal concerning cinema—he doesn’t possess a mastery over the heritage of the cinematic culture but does enjoy an intense familiarity with dark movie theaters—but also the very singular role of the cinematic image within the deconstruction of visual arts.

Since the trace is one of the major figures of writing Derrida constantly uses in texts that discuss visual arts in general, such as painting, drawing, and photography, one should be surprised to learn that cinema, singularly, leaves no traces, whereas in deconstruction “the arts” are generally discussed in terms of the trace. The cinematic image, as Derrida elucidates in this interview, seems to entail a radical exteriority vis-à-vis this singular form of inscription. In other words, not only does the cinematic image not leave traces, not only does it not trace (as drawing and painting or photography do) but, according to Derrida, it appears to be deeply divergent from the writing model that he had proposed based on

a concept of trace or text that was not reducible to alphabetic writing, to writing on the page, to writing in a book. … I’ve said that everything is trace, that the world was trace, that experience was trace, that this gesture is trace, that voice is a writing, that voice is a system of traces, that there is nothing outside the text, and that in a certain sense nothing borders, from the exterior, this experience of the trace.¹

If “everything is trace,” if “the world [is] trace,” if “experience [is] trace,” how do we think through the absence of cinema’s traces? Does it mean that cinema doesn’t strictly belong to a type of scriptural model—that of the trace—and escapes from the borders of that which Derrida tells us is borderless, that is, the logic of writing? Within this generalized and archi-global logic of trace, where nothing borders and thus exceeds the text to an exterior, how is it that the cinematic image alone can be an exception to this law? How does one understand Derrida’s conception of cinema as a type of medium, a medium of the impermanence of images, one that he says produces “an emotion that is completely different from that of reading, which imprints a more present and active memory in me”?² “Books,” he admits, “didn’t do the same thing for me.”³

Instead of the backdrop of writing’s “active memory...