” He was born, he thought, he died.” That, Heidegger once contended, is all we need to know about any great philosopher. What matters is on the page, in the work: the rest is simply anecdote or speculation. Jacques Derrida, the 72-year-old French philosopher and “father of deconstruction”, agrees. “Somebody who reads a text by a philosopher – even a tiny paragraph – and interprets it in a rigorous, inventive and powerfully deciphering fashion is more of a biographer than one who knows the whole story,” he recently declared in a lecture at New York University. Not that they stop Dick and Kofman from delving into their subject’s domestic life, poring over the details of his upbringing, and even rifling through his bookshelves, where, much to their surprise, they find a copy of Anne Rice’s Interview With a Vampire.

(Derrida looks just the slightest bit bashful as he explains that this was one of many books given to him when he was lecturing on “Vampirism and Eating the Other”. And, no, he hasn’t read it.)The documentary provides a potted CV of Derrida while also showing us snapshots of the famous thinker off duty: To sum up “the life” in brief: Jacques Derrida was born in 1930 to a Sephardic Jewish family in what was then French Algeria. He was expelled from school when he was 10 years old because he was “Jewish” and the Vichy authorities were kowtowing to the Nazis, doing their dirty work for them. (This, Dick and Kofman speculate, was the defining event of his childhood. His distrust of authority and his ferocious vigilance against anti-Semitism, however covert, stem from the early trauma.) He wrote his first novel at the age of 15. As an adolescent, he dreamed of being a professional soccer player. He had the chance to become a movie star when offered a role in a Marguerite Duras film, but turned it down.

He has published over 45 books and is probably the most famous philosopher living today.So far, so banal. We see Derrida buttering his toast as his wife Marguerite unloads the dishwasher We hear his brother Ren?arvelling at his brilliance (“We were not an intellectual family. Not at all,” he states in disbelief.) We see Derrida eating crisps and drinking champagne. Marguerite talks about her first meeting with him, one snowy day long ago. We see him fiddling with his pen on the desk while he makes a telephone call and watching a TV monitor showing footage from the documentary of him watching a TV monitor… What the film doesn’t reveal is just why he agreed to participate in such a project, or why Dick and Kofman wanted to make it.Kofman (who had the idea for the film in 1994) claims she just wanted to capture a philosopher she reveres on camera.