In one of his few feature film appearances, Jacques Derrida plays himself. It was Ken McMullen’s coup to include the French philosopher in his strangely magic realist feature Ghost Dance in 1982. Derrida, rising to world fame by then, also visibly enjoys appearing in the role of the charismatic, handsome front man of poststructuralism. During a scene staged to resemble an office hour, the film’s protagonists, a young woman, asks him whether he believes in ghosts. Derrida, by then known for his meandering inquiries into all things spectral, faces the camera as his well-groomed self from behind his office desk at the École Normale Supérieure. In the midst of the ensuing, rather one-sided discussion about apparitions, the office phone suddenly rings. Unclear whether due to script or improvisation, Derrida interrupts his ongoing monologue and picks up the phone. Apparently hearing an unknown voice on the other end of the line, Derrida exclaims to his baffled guest, triumphantly: «Voilà, le téléphone, c’est le fantôme !»

This scene is memorable not for its unabashed display of the top-down pedagogy of deconstruction, even though in hindsight it very well demonstrates how the high theory style of teaching successfully ran on long monologues of often obscure exegeses that culminated in seemingly sudden eye-openers. Rather, McMullen’s télé-fantôme is memorable for its inability to deconstruct the personality cult that had emerged around Derrida and other thinkers by the early 1980s. What they achieved at times in their writing, a performative fracturing of the self and its voice, is out of reach for them in person and on film. Even their students of later generations, who tried to portrait these scholars with more elaborate documentaries, cannot detach their teachings from their charisma, as is very well demonstrated by the attempts of Amy Ziering Kofman (Derrida, 2002), Astra Taylor (Žižek!, 2005), and others.

A Story Can’t Be about Two People

In another genre-bending film made just a few years earlier, we encounter a German film maker that shared Derrida’s curiosity about signification and media as well as McMullen’s interest in bringing theory to cinema. In the opening scene of his often overlooked masterpiece Between Two Wars from 1978, Harun Farocki performs a strange unity of theorist and director, without really explaining either character or why we need both. Like Derrida, Farocki appears as a thinker at his desk but unlike the famous scholar, he is only seen from behind, at work bent over the table, organizing scraps of paper and notes, while his voice-over has him think out loud about how to conceive of the film we are about to see.

Admittedly, here is a self-staging over which Farocki had likely a bit more control than Derrida in Ghost Dance (though it’s perfectly clear that the star philosopher made sure to only play what suited his brand). The apparent identity between director and theorist is practically expected by the viewer of Farocki’s film: The director Farocki and the «character» at the desk, who looks like Farocki and speaks about the film as its director, must be one and the same person. But instead of Derrida’s self-aware charisma and self-confident performance, Farocki does not even dare facing us. Instead of a captivating soliloquy, Farocki’s brittle voice-over and the desktop diagram of jottings confront us with a set of questions and with a multi-faced figure «Farocki», who cannot decide which way to go with the film, which «I» to disguise himself as.

It comes as no surprise that the media scholar and Farocki expert Nora Alter chose this very scene from Between Two Wars as one of the focal points of her copious and comprehensive new book on Farocki’s Forms of Intelligence. «These first few minutes», Alter writes, «foreshadow the active role Farocki as auteur plays in the film. His voice and commentary guide the viewer and provide narrative coherence. His physical presence as a filmmaker at different intervals in the production anchors the disembodied voice-over and self-reflexively stresses the difficulty of making a film and the extensive labor filmmaking involves. Farocki, here cast as the character ‹Farocki the filmmaker›, introduces the problem of representing the self. As he looks at his reflection in a mirror, he observes, ‹A story can’t be about two people; a story can’t be about two worlds; a story can’t be about two classes since two is the totality›.»

This multitude of simultaneously visible facets is hard to convey in writing, and so Alter is right to flag Between Two Wars as one of Farocki’s «most ambitious» films. Farocki’s introduction of «the problem of representing the self», as Alter notes almost as an aside, is not only warranted by the cascading of narratives, images, ideas, and words that make Between Two Wars a study of German Fascism, capitalism, industrial production, and the narratability of love. It is also warranted by Farocki’s own ambition to think of the film as a form of intelligence, to continue the work of critical theory in the same vein as Adorno, Benjamin, and Brecht, while absorbing new ideas from Arendt, Anders, Foucault, Flusser, and Kittler. Unlike the poststructuralists, however, Farocki never meant to lose his image in the specters of self-representation.