In 1991, veteran documentarians Chris Hegedus and D.A. Pennebaker hooked up with the long-shot presidential campaign of Arkansas' governor, Bill Clinton. Over the course of ten tumultuous months, the filmmakers followed the then-unknown James Carville and George Stephanopoulos (now media stars both) as they guided their charismatic, ambitious and sometimes feckless candidate through the Scylla of Clinton's hardball political opponents and the Charybdis of his own unfettered personality. The resulting film, The War Room, provides an invaluable, unblinking, fly-on-the-wall examination of how a strange brew of democratic ideals, Machiavellian strategizing and media spin propelled an improbable but brilliant political animal to the White House.

Thirty years earlier, in the midst of an unpopular war and a presidential campaign notorious for mud slinging and dirty tricks, a fiction film about a scion of a political family and his quest for a seat in the U.S. Senate was released into an electoral environment almost as toxic as our own. Even against this backdrop, The Candidate, with its tale of moral compromise, abandoned ideals and win-at-any-cost ethics, was deemed by many as cynical and bleak. But its tagline, "Nothing matters more than winning," seems more relevant - and prescient - than ever.

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No contemporary philosopher has been more closely aligned with the theory and practice of architecture than Jacques Derrida, who died Friday, October 8th. Such luminaries as Peter Eisenman, Zaha Hadid and Bernard Tschumi have been linked to Deconstructivism, Derrida's philosophy, which seeks to peel the social, cultural and historical assumptions from an artifact, be it a text or a building, and reveal its essential enigma -- confused, confusing and devoid of inherent meaning.
  
Interviewed by the Italian architectural journal Domus ("Architecture Where Desire May Live," vol. 671, 1986, p. 20), Derrida conflates architectural "de-construction" with philosophy, citing its "spatiality, thinking in terms of a path, of the opening up of a way which - without knowing where it will lead to - inscribes its traces."

Derrida was nothing if not divisive. In an appraisal that appeared in The New York Times a few days after Derrida's death, Edward Rothstein called him "a kind of prophet for counter-Western thought" whose writing was "a dizzying undermining of presuppositions" that challenged tradition and orthodoxy. "Take any received opinion, aesthetic judgment, historical analysis or cultural activity, find its hidden premises, its unacknowledged preferences, its knots and feints, and its authority is undone." But Rothstein also noted that Derrida "could often become mannered and puerile, endlessly turning rebellion on itself."

Is Deconstructivism a portal into a profound understanding of an endlessly refracted reality that is more than the sum of its perceptions, or a hopeless unraveling of those cultural achievements that lend meaning and purpose to life? Perhaps Derrida should have the last word. In his Domus interview (p. 24), he discusses the destruction of the Biblical tower of Babel and the diversity of languages that ensued:

The fact that this intervention in architecture ... represents the failure or the limitation imposed on a universal language says something about the impossibility of mastering the diversity of languages, about the impossibility of there being a universal translation. This also means that the construction of architecture will always remain labyrinthine. The issue is not to give up one point of view for the sake of another, which would be the only one and absolute, but to see a diversity of possible points of view.

If the tower had been completed there would be no architecture. Only the incompletion of the tower makes it possible for architecture as well as the multitude of languages to have a history.

Books by Derrida in the Cooper Union Library

Chora L works
Jacques Derrida and Peter Eisenman
edited by Jeffrey Kipnis and Thomas Leeser
Closed Stack NA737.E33 A2 1997

Of grammatology
Jacques Derrida
translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
P105 .D5313 1976
  
Positions
Jacques Derrida
translated and annotated by Alan Bass
B2430.D484 D4713
  
Dissemination
Jacques Derrida
translated, with an introduction and additional notes, by Barbara Johnson
AC25 .D45513
  
Margins of philosophy
Jacques Derrida
translated, with notes, by Alan Bass
B53 .D4613 1982
  
The truth in painting
Jacques Derrida
translated by Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod
BH39 .D45 1987

The post card : from Socrates to Freud and beyond
Jacques Derrida
translated, with an introduction and additional notes, by Alan Bass.
B2430.D483 C3713 1987
  
Writing and difference
Jacques Derrida
translated, with an introd. and additional notes by Alan Bass
B2430.D482 E5 1978
  
Archive fever : a Freudian impression
Jacques Derrida
translated by Eric Prenowitz
BD181.7 .D4713 1996
  
Body of prayer : written words, voices
David Shapiro, Michal Govrin, Jacques Derrida
Kim Shkapich, editor
Based on talk by David Shapiro, Michal Govrin, and Jacques Derrida recorded October 14, 1998, Chanin School of Architecture of the Cooper Union.
BL560 .S53 2001
  
The secret art of Antonin Artaud
Jacques Derrida and Paule Thévenin
translated by Mary Ann Caws
NC248.A72 T4713 1998
  
Deconstruction in a nutshell : a conversation with Jacques Derrida
edited with a commentary by John D. Caputo
B809.6 .D46 1997
  
Jacques Derrida
Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida
translated by Geoffrey Bennington
B2430.D4484 B4613 1999
  
La case vide - La Villette
Bernard Tschumi
with essays by Jacques Derrida and Anthony Vidler
Closed Stack NA6930 .T77 1986

"There might be five documentaries no American should be able to finish public school without seeing, and Hearts and Minds belongs on the docket ... But for a few particulars, Davis's film seems as much a prosecution of the present as it is of the recent past; only the names and geographies have been changed."

“... we must be ready to fight in Viet-Nam, but the ultimate victory will depend upon the hearts and minds of the people who actually live out there.”

Apocalypse Now
Francis Ford Coppola, 1979
catalogue # DVD 005
  
In the Year of the Pig
Emile de Antonio, 1968
catalogue # VHS 309
  
Little Dieter Needs to Fly
Werner Herzog, 1998
catalogue # DVD 086
  
Full Metal Jacket
Stanley Kubrick, 1987
catalogue # DVD 079
  
Platoon
Oliver Stone, 1987
catalogue # VHS 114