The first biography I ever wrote was of Amelia Earhart. I was in second grade and struggling to get good grades. My parents probably wrote it for me. I remember talking about her life with my parents though, writing down the simple facts of her life on a piece of paper with my Dad and then coloring a picture of her which was then neatly mounted on blue construction paper for aesthetic purposes. I remember Amelia Earhart wanted to be the first woman to fly solo around the world but tragically disappeared somewhere over the Pacific Ocean never to be seen again. After scouring 250,000 square miles of ocean the United States government called off the search and that was the end of it. The facts, pictures, and pieces of her life were assembled and recorded so that her image could be fixed in the history books. Biographies seemed so simple. Copy some facts from a book and summarize the events of the person's life and that was all. Years later I remembered my first biography experience and quickly looked Amelia Earhart up on the internet. I realized that I did not know the whole story, in fact I had no idea who this person was. The biographers seemed to all present her in the exact same way. Her image seemed so fixed and stabilized even though no one new what had happened to her and quite possibly who she really was. The image of the pretty young woman in the close fitting aviation hat was somehow destroyed.
The same fate could have easily become of Jacques Derrida. After his death simple facts and events would have been recorded with some images of him and that would have been the end of it. However this was most definitely not so and the film 'Derrida' highlights Derrida's thoughts on biography itself and the implications of capturing one's image. In terms of how Derrida is depicted though images, I would say that he is depicted in a very postmodern way. His various images accompanied by a voice reading selections of his theories highlights a decentralized view of Derrida which fittingly mirrors his thoughts in his 'Structure, Sign, and Play'. The producers of the film show Derrida in many different forms, the aging husband at home calmly making toast as well as the academic superstar traversing the world, camera crew scrambling close behind to capture every muttering of genius. There is one point in the film in which Derrida is walking down the street slightly hunched over, pipe hanging from the corner of his mouth as he occasionally looks about seemingly paranoid of the possible oncoming attack of a camera. At this point the narrator reads off facts of Derrida's life. However these facts as not given in any sort of order signifying a break with the traditional genre form of biography. One is left wondering about the truth of these facts and how having only known these random facts would leave one very far from having a better understanding of Derrida. This disunity also seems to suggest a disregard of linear narrative. This disregard of linear narrative seems to suggest that there is no one image of Derrida. Derrida himself remarks that biographers fix and stabilize a person for centuries and that the true biographer is one who does not know the whole story.
The various images of Derrida seem to wallow in their fragmentation and decentralization which Derrida himself would highly approve of. There is no one image of Derrida because there is no one truth, or one fixed and stabilized center.

Attempting Structuralism

One of the many new thoughts I have stumbled upon after intensively laboring through our Structuralism readings is that speaking of literature and ideology as two separate concepts which are interrelated is unnecessary. For a time I had been lost in confusion thinking that literature was something outside of ideology. Then I took a deep breath and realized that literature is an ideology and that it has many intricate relations to social power...
The way in which I try to understand Structuralism is that eventually some theorists strove for a more scientific or disciplined way in which to form an objective system in order to prove that literature formed a system that works by certain objective laws, and that these laws are how all literary works are structured. This idea that literature forms a system moves one away from the interpretation of the individual literary work and causes one to attempt to understand the larger abstract structures that contain them.
Saussure sought to prove that language is only a system of pure values and that ideas and sound are the two elements involved in its functioning. Saussure made the famous statement that, " In language there are only differences without positive terms." I began to understand this statement after reading that signs function through their relative position to one another, not through an essential value. Saussure spoke of differences in terms of sound and phonic differences and how those differences are what make it possible to distinguish one word from all the others. Saussure also speaks of how language had no ideas or sounds before the existence of the linguistic system and that the only differences have been those created by the system. He further discusses that a linguistic system is a series of differences of sound and ideas in order to make sense out of the vague and nebulous existence life would be without language. This is such an important thought because it helps us decode how meanings of words are maintained and we can see words as relational because no word can be defined in isolation from other words. It is this model of a system that gives Structuralists belief in the existence of larger structures.