A director based at the University of Sussex has made an Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded feature film inspired by the work of Jacques Derrida.

Joanna Callaghan, senior lecturer in film-making, embarked on postgraduate studies in philosophy and then worked in television before shifting to a full-time academic career in 2006.

Yet since 2003, she said, she has been ¡°making a series of shorts taking as their starting points philosophers and philosophical ideas: Descartes, Heidegger, Plato¡¯s allegory of the cave and the world of forms. They incorporate extracts from the work as dialogue or voice-over, but I always use narrative to embody the problems or ideas¡­I want to find a way to express academic ideas for a general audience.¡±

In 2011, Ms Callaghan secured a second AHRC grant for her ¡°Ontological Narratives¡± project and decided to focus on Derrida¡¯s 1980 book, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond. While the second half consists of essays on psychoanalysis, the first brings together a series of letters written by a married man to his married lover. Although their author is never identified as Derrida, some of his real-life friends and acquaintances make appearances.

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To develop a script parallel to this text, Ms Callaghan joined forces with Martin McQuillan, professor of literary theory and cultural analysis at Kingston University, with whom she had worked on I Melt the Glass with My Forehead, a polemical 50-minute documentary about the introduction of tuition fees and what we mean by a university.

The pair also conducted six hour-long interviews with scholars of Derrida, including some of the people mentioned in The Post Card.

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Love in the Post, which received its first private showing at London¡¯s Somerset House earlier this week, intersperses the stories of film-maker Joanna, University of Wessex academic Theo, his unfaithful wife Sophie and their friends with extracts from these interviews. In an early scene, we see Joanna at a ¡°speed-pitching¡± event in a pub, where her idea for ¡°a film inspired by French philosopher Jacques Derrida¡± is up against ¡°a transgender, cyborg, splatter horror with a Dadaist manifesto¡±.

Theo, an authority on Derrida, is struggling to come to terms with a merger between the literature and communications departments. He has strong views on the nature of love but finding some hidden letters sparks a crisis. Soon he is resorting to desperate measures to discover the truth, standing on a cliff edge and imagining his wife embracing another man. He begins to reflect on the nature of ¡°infidelity¡±, not only within marriage but as a central force in intellectual life; and at the Bodleian Library he delivers a lecture in which he argues that ¡°the whole history of philosophy [is] the history of a serial betrayal, of pupils who betray their masters¡±, from the time of Plato to Derrida himself.

Ms Callaghan hopes there is an ¡°overlap between the experience of seeing the film and reading Derrida¡¯s book¡±. She is organising screenings at festivals and academic events before a DVD release. The script, her reflections on film-making and philosophy, and the complete texts of the interviews will be published in book form by Rowman and Littlefield.

matthew.reisz@tsleducation.com