… At the moment when the self-portraitist fends off the temptations of sight and calls for this conversion from the light to the light, from the outward realm to the realm within, it is a theory of the blind that unfolds.
–Jacques Derrida, Memoires of the Blind (117)

Derridathemovie profoundly plays with the slippery issues of light, of enlightenment, of lightness, of cinematic spot-lighting. And it plays with the occlusion of en-lightenment, the dynamics of seeing and not seeing, saying and not saying, of the ‘telling’ of and by Derrida. The layers and laminations of which the film is comprised slip across, under, and around one another in a textual and semiotic dance of light, at once coy and confrontive, uneasy and familiar, blinding us with insight and with lack of light.
…
Losing sight does not mean losing eyes: indeed ‘only then does [one] begin to think the eyes’ (128), to ‘see between and catch a glimpse of the difference,’ to ‘look after it in memory – and this is the veil of tears – until finally, and from or with the ‘same eyes,’ the tears see’ (128; my emphasis). In the same way that the hand draws blindly, the eye sees blindly, the fate of the archive and the archival. That is, to see anew requires a transmuted relationship to the archive and to textuality itself. Derrida has worked toward and through this transmutation in all his cross-genre work. The insights of deconstruction are indeed abocular, out of the eye. In approaching Derrida – and in reflecting on itself as a filmic archive, an enigma, a conundrum, an appropriately insoluble puzzle of seeing and saying and of drawing the blind rather than as a portrait for which one might sit and which one might capture, Derridathemovie’s great success is that it has the in-sight to understand that to draw Derrida, to draw the blind on and of Derrida, to catch a glimpse of the différance, one must always begin to re-think the eyes. read whole