Lisa Foran

Derrida, the Subject

and the Other
Surviving, Translating, and the Impossible
Lisa Foran
Philosophical Studies
Newcastle University, UK

ISBN 978-1-137-57757-3 ISBN 978-1-137-57758-0 (eBook)

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-57758-0

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 Derrida and Translation

Introduction
In this chapter I do three things. First of all, I explore Derrida’s translation
of a particular word and in so doing I reveal the (im)possible position of
the translator. This (im)possibility is key to my claim that the subject/
other relation is best understood as sur-viving translating, a claim I will
return to in the next chapter. Second, I go on to examine the relationship
between translation, political power, and the construction of identity.
As I demonstrate, power is deployed through language and translation,
a situation particularly evident in post-colonial states. Furthermore, the
question of the ‘law of translation’ or the ‘debt of translation’ is a con-
stant concern for Derrida; a law that is intimately linked with the rela-
tion between the subject and the other. Finally, I show how the subject/
other relation is complicated by Derrida through the impossibility of an
absolute border. I do this through an examination of the origins of trans-
lation in the figure of the Babel narrative. Under the rubric of this myth,
I explore Derrida’s interrogation of the proper name and multilingualism.
In both cases I show the inherently divided nature of both names and

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 159

L. Foran, Derrida, the Subject and the Other,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-57758-0_5
160 Derrida, the Subject and the Other

languages and the manner in which their ‘identity’ emerges only through
differentiation with multiple others.

The Trial of the Untranslatable

In his 1998 text ‘What is a “Relevant” Translation?’1 Derrida submits
translation to what he terms ‘the trial of the untranslatable.’ This ‘trial’
relates to the title of the essay and specifically to the word ‘relevant’ [rel-
evante]. As Derrida himself notes, his interest has always been directed to
‘the so-called undecidable words;’ words which resist a full or complete
translation into one other word.2 Blanchot’s L’arrêt de mort, for exam-
ple, which can mean ‘death sentence’, ‘suspension of death’, or, under
Blanchot’s neologism of arrête; ‘death ridge’.3 Equally, in his commentary
on Benjamin, Derrida plays with the word ‘Babel’ and notes that the
word as a proper name means ‘City of God’, while as a common noun
means ‘confusion’.4 A similar situation takes place with pharmakon or the
name/noun Pierre/pierre. These homophonic and/or homonymic words
reveal something not only about translation but about philosophy itself.
Insofar as philosophy seeks an identifiable, stable, and thus essentially
transferable truth or meaning; it rests on the presumption of translat-
ability. That is, ‘the transfer of a meaning or a truth from one language to
another without any essential harm being done.’5 Homophonic and hom-
onymic words in their resistance to translation reveal this presumption
to be impossible. ‘Relevant’ is another such word, which allows Derrida
a playful performance of the necessity and impossibility of translation.
As Lawrence Venuti points out, throughout this particular essay
Derrida deliberately spells this word both in its ‘French’ form as relevante
and in its ‘English’ form ‘relevant’ in order to highlight that this word not
only possesses an undecidable meaning; but is in fact in an undecidable
language.6 For it is unclear whether this is a French word that has become
English or an English word in the process of ‘Frenchification’.7 Coming
from Latin through various linguistic paths it operates on the borders
of language. It is a word which has no linguistic home so to speak and
as such is untranslatable.8 The issue becomes even more complicated in
Derrida’s hands given that relevante has been ‘indispensable’ to him in
 Derrida and Translation 161

the translation of many words coming from and into many languages.
Most notably as his proposed translation of Hegel’s Aufheben; a heritage
which thus inflects relevante with a certain philosophical sense. In the end
Derrida describes his title as ‘untranslatable’ while at the same time claim-
ing: ‘I don’t believe that anything can ever be untranslatable—or, moreover,
translatable.’9
To justify such a claim Derrida appeals to what he terms the condition
of a certain economy which relates the translatable to the untranslatable.
Economy, οἰκονομία [oikonomia] as the νόμος [nomos] or law which
relates to the οἰκος [oikos] or home, signifies two things for Derrida.
Firstly property; as in what is proper to itself, what is proper for a transla-
tion to bring ‘home’ or to appropriate. And secondly; quantity, how many
words a translation would bring home to itself in this appropriate man-
ner. A ‘relevant’ translation then, would be one whose economy responds
to these two senses of the word, one whose economy would be the most
appropriating and the most calculably appropriate.10 Derrida contends
that translation has become governed by literality; that the measure of
translation has become the word. The philosophy of translation, as it is
understood in its contemporary form, ‘aspires to be a philosophy of the
word, a linguistics or ethics of the word. At the beginning of translation
is the word.’11 This has certainly not always been the case; Cicero, St.
Jerome and Luther freed translation from this ideal and called forth a
translation of sense rather than word. Nonetheless, in its contemporary
form, translation calls upon a strict economy of the word:

[W]henever several words occur in one or the same acoustic or graphic

form, whenever a homophonic or homonymic effect occurs, translation in the
strict, traditional, and dominant sense of the term encounters an insur-
mountable limit—and the beginning of its end, the figure of its ruin (but
perhaps a translation is devoted to ruin; ruin is perhaps its vocation and a
destiny that it accepts from the very outset).12

The Merchant of Venice as the Task of the Translator

This economy of the word is put to the test with the word ‘relevant’ as it
occurs in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice. The play itself deals endlessly
162 Derrida, the Subject and the Other

in the economy of translation: The translation of a pound of flesh to a

supposed monetary equivalent, Portia’s translation into a male lawyer,
and the translation of Shylock to Christianity. The play revolves around
the law and the law of translation; of what is most calculably appropriate
to the law. ‘At every moment, translation is as necessary as it is impossible.
[…] As if the subject of this play were, in short, the task of the translator,
his impossible task, his duty, his debt, as inflexible as it is unpayable.’13
It is this notion of translation as impossible (the untranslatable) and yet
at the same time necessary (translatable) that I want to focus on here.
Derrida must show in this ‘trial’ of the untranslatable that his translation
evidences the fact that translation is a supplement, a sur-vival, a neither/
nor and an either/or. In other words, in this translation of Shakespeare’s
play Derrida must show what he means by stating that nothing is trans-
latable and nothing is untranslatable at the same time.
Derrida offers four reasons for choosing this text in particular as the
stage for his ‘trial of translation’. The first is that the play is driven by an
oath or a promise; like translation, it centres on a promise which can-
not be kept. Second the play, like translation, revolves around economic
conditions.14 Third, at the heart of the play, like the heart of any transla-
tion, is an incalculable equivalence or impossible correspondence, here
between flesh and money. And finally because of the relation between the
translation and conversion; the destruction of the body of the text to save
its sense (or its soul) and the conversion of Jew to Christian:

This impossible translation, this conversion (and all translation is a conver-

sion: vertere, transvertere, convertere, as Cicero said) between the original,
literal flesh and the monetary sign is not unrelated to the Jew Shylock’s
forced conversion to Christianity, since the traditional figure of the Jew is
often and conventionally situated on the side of the body and the letter
(from bodily circumcision or Pharisaism, from ritual compliance to literal
exteriority), whereas St. Paul the Christian is on the side of the spirit or
sense, of interiority, of spiritual circumcision. This relation of the letter to
the spirit, of the body of literalness to the ideal interiority of sense is also
the site of the passage of translation, of this conversion that is called
translation. As if the business of translation were first of all an Abrahamic
matter between the Jew, the Christian, and the Muslim. And the relève, like
 Derrida and Translation 163

the relevance I am prepared to discuss with you, will be precisely what hap-
pens to the flesh of the text, the body, the spoken body and the translated
body—when the letter is mourned to save the sense.15

While Shylock is offered three times the amount of money he is owed

in place of a pound of Antonio’s flesh, he refuses this substitution. The
basis of this refusal is his oath to God, for the contract he made with
Antonio was sworn not only amongst men but also, and more impor-
tantly, to God. This oath, made in the language of men, can yet not be
undone by the language of men; a bond in language has become stronger
than language itself. This leads Derrida to assert that in the act of swear-
ing there is a type of transcendence since it leads man in language to the
beyond of language; towards the divine law. ‘The oath passes through lan-
guage, but it passes beyond human language. This would be the truth of
translation.’16 Translation, as a promise, passes through language while at
the same time transgressing the borders of language each time it reaches
its limit—in the untranslatable.
Once Shylock refuses to accept the translation of the pound of flesh
into three times its supposed monetary value, and once Antonio recog-
nizes the bond, Portia passes her verdict: ‘Then the Jew must be merciful.’
For Derrida these words sign an entire history between the Jew and the
Christian as a history of translation. For on the one hand it is a case, a
trial, of a particular Christian (Antonio) and a particular Jew (Shylock);
yet on the other hand, it mirrors the case, the history and the trial of
Christian power and the Jew in general.17 In this history it is the Christian
who asks for forgiveness and the Jew who must forgive. Of course, this is
according to a Christian history and understanding of what forgiveness
is. A Christian ruse under which is hidden an economic, theological and
political play of power. The power to forgive can come only from the one
in power.18 As we will see, Portia’s speech on mercy, designed to convert
Shylock and translate the bond, is not genuine but a hoax. The Christian
state offers Shylock an ultimatum—forgive the bond or lose everything.
It offers him the power to forgive the debt. Only the State can offer
Shylock this power to forgive and thus break the law of his contract. Yet
in giving this power to forgive the State is also attempting to impose for-
giveness and as such is in fact taking away Shylock’s freedom to choose.
164 Derrida, the Subject and the Other

In this vein it reflects the European relation with the Jew, based on the
principle of economic power. As Simon Critchley and Tom McCarthy
point out, the Merchant of Venice reflects the Christian, one might say
Hegelian, claim that ‘mercy is the truth of justice, just as the New Law is
the fulfilment of the Old Law and Christianity is the truth of Judaism.’19
Shylock, in response to this command to be merciful, asks ‘On what
compulsion must I?’ To which Portia responds with the speech on mercy.
Mercy here is described in terms similar to Shylock’s understanding of the
oath. Mercy is beyond human, a taste of the divine; like the oath it passes
through language but also beyond it, beyond the law. In this paean to
mercy, mercy as forgiveness becomes like prayer offering a double bene-
diction; to the one who asks and the one who receives. ‘The essence of
prayer has to do with forgiveness, not with power and law.’20 Forgiveness,
like prayer, has its essence and its provenance in the divinity of the divine,
the eminence of the Most High. In terms of Derrida’s ‘trial’ of translation
and the untranslatable the crucial moment is Portia’s speech on mercy.
This Derrida cites in English and translates in two parts, with the final
part of his analysis offering his own translation of Shakespeare.
The first movement of the speech is as follows: ‘The quality of mercy is
not strain’d,/It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven/Upon the place
beneath: it is twice blest,/It blesseth him that gives, and him that takes’21
In this way then, mercy is free; it cannot be commanded or ordered (an
ironic point given that Portia has just demanded it from Shylock). Mercy
is beyond decision, foreign to the law and to economic calculation; it is
like a gift. Like the rain, it is uncontrollable and like the rain it comes
from above. A movement which, in descending from the Most High to
the below, hints at its hierarchical nature for Derrida. Finally, mercy is a
mutual exchange, a translation between giving and taking.22 The second
movement of the speech describes the relation between mercy and power:

‘Tis the mightiest in the mightiest, it becomes

The throned monarch better than his crown.
His sceptre shoes the force of temporal power,
The attribute to awe and majesty,
Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings:
But mercy is above this sceptred sway,
 Derrida and Translation 165

It is enthroned in the hearts of kings,

It is an attribute to God himself;
And earthly power doth then show likest God’s
When mercy seasons justice.23

For Derrida this reveals forgiveness or mercy as the almightiness of

the Almighty, it is the very essence of power, of omnipotence, and also
beyond them both. The question this raises is that of the superlative; if
mercy is more divine than the divine, more monarchical than the mon-
arch or mightier than the mightiest; it must belong to a different order
than might. Mercy must belong to order of ‘the impossible that is more
than impossible and therefore possible.’24 This understanding of the most
impossible as possible is discussed at length by Derrida in Sauf le nom,
and will form one of the principal focuses of the next chapter. However,
in terms of my current interest here in the untranslatable as the limit of
the translatable, this ‘order’ of the impossible is important. As Derrida
notes, through his reading of the Christian mystic Angelus Silesius,
God (and indeed in a different way death) would belong to the order
of the most impossible. What is more than impossible would be beyond
the impossible; that is, of a different order than the impossible in general
and therefore possible. Derrida claims that the possible is transformed
or ‘mutated’ at the limit of the impossible, at the more than impossible.
In this way ‘there is no longer any possible contradiction between pos-
sible and impossible since they belong to two heterogeneous orders.’.25
To rephrase this in terms of translation, translatability might be under-
stood as having undergone a ‘mutation’ at the limit of un-translatability,
so that both terms now belong to a different order. The question of the
untranslatable and translatable as being both possible and impossible
at the same time is therefore reconfigured so that Derrida’s claim that
‘nothing is translatable; nothing is untranslatable’ is to be understood as
‘something is translatable and something is untranslatable’. In this way
the translation of any text will fall into an ‘economy of in-betweenness;’
being on the one hand the successful ‘carrying across’ of meaning, while
on the other hand and at the same time failing to ‘carry across’ a meaning.
The challenge of course, with Derrida’s thinking here is to think of this as
success and failure at the same time. It is not the case that Derrida argues
166 Derrida, the Subject and the Other

for a ‘relative’ translatability or a ‘relative’ untranslatability but rather the

two at once. As Davis points out, a ‘relative translatability’ and ‘relative
untranslatability’—or similarly, a ‘relative good’ and a ‘relative evil’—
simply does not work for Derrida. Such a thinking would merely ‘leave
the conceptual poles, as well as their assumptions and problems, intact.’26
Derrida notes that what is at play in this speech on mercy, and in
particular in this section, is the relation between the power to pardon,
the letter of the flesh and spirituality. What is ‘divine’ here, what is ‘lik-
est God’s’ is the power to forgive interiorized in the power of the state;
in the heart of the monarch. It is a power that is not reflected in earthly
attributes—the sceptre or the crown—rather being a God-like invisible
power. ‘This like, this analogy or resemblance, supports a logic or analogic
of the theologico-political translation, of the translation of the theologi-
cal into political.’27 Mercy is what inflects the political with the theologi-
cal permitting a certain translation of one into the other.

The Untranslatable Translation

The French translation of Portia’s speech by Hugo, renders ‘seasons’ (in

‘when mercy seasons justice’) as tempère. While Derrida does not see this
as an ‘incorrect’ translation, he wishes to replace it with the word relève.
This translation will not pay off all its debts, it in fact will not answer to the
name ‘translation’ if we think of translation merely as the unproblematic
transfer of a pure signified from one signifier to another. Derrida’s transla-
tion will rather be a transformation that supplements what is lacking in
the word ‘seasons’ by substituting it with relève. For his choice of word
Derrida offers three justifications—culinary, elevatory, and dialectical.
The word relève responds to the culinary sense of ‘seasons’. As Derrida
notes un plat relevé means a ‘seasoned dish’; a dish which has been made
better and whose taste has been heightened. It is this sense of ‘seasons’
that Portia appeals to when she speaks of mercy. The addition of mercy
to justice means justice keeps its taste, keeps more of its taste and is thus
changed without being changed, converted without being converted—
justice is improved and exalted.28 Derrida’s second justification for his
‘untranslatable translation’ is that relever expresses the notion of eleva-
 Derrida and Translation 167

tion. Mercy elevates justice to a higher realm, towards the Most High;
mercy, in spiritualizing justice, offers it its own transcendence. ‘Mercy
sublimates justice.’29 In this sense Derrida’s third justification is an expan-
sion of this second notion of relève as ‘sublimation’; a word most often
(problematically) encountered in a Hegelian context.
Derrida notes that the noun relève and the verb relever are the words
he used to translate the Hegelian terms Aufheben and Aufhebung.30 These
German terms were hailed by Hegel himself as reflecting ‘the specula-
tive risk of the German language’ and as such are often cited as being
untranslatable.31 They tie too with the notion of economy. Derrida
argues that the deconstruction of metaphysics requires the move from a
speculative and restricted philosophical economy to a general economy.32
‘Restricted philosophical economy’ would be that of the traditional
understanding of philosophy which leaves no remainder, no unknown
outside of its own closed system. In contradistinction to this, decon-
struction’s ‘general economy’ would allow for the remainder as remain-
der—an always possible outside that would remain unknown. This was
already indicated in Derrida’s reading of Husserl where he called for ‘an
unheard-of question that opens neither upon knowledge nor upon some
non-knowledge which is a knowledge to come’ in response to which we
must answer ‘we no longer know.’33 This also parallels Derrida’s concerns
regarding translation. Against an understanding of translation that car-
ries across a self-identical signified from one signifier to another and
without remainder; Derrida seeks a translation which embraces its neces-
sary loss as constitutive. In terms of the Aufhebung; the Hegelian notion
leaves nothing outside, even after traversing differences it, like so many
philosophical concepts, seeks to escape the effect of différance. Derrida’s
French translation of the term questions this ‘operation without remain-
der’, as translator Alan Bass stresses:

Derrida’s playful translation of aufhebt (third person singular of Aufheben)

keeps the hebt (lève, lifts), but changes the auf- (up) to a re- […] the stress
is on the effect of substitution and difference, of repetition, that is inscribed
in aufhebt. Further, the auf- is related to negation-and-preservation in a
higher sphere; the re- questions the metaphysics of negation, the theology
implicit in dialectical negation as a raising up.34
168 Derrida, the Subject and the Other

Thus in translating ‘seasons’ with relève Derrida offers a ‘philosophical

meaning’ to the discourse on justice seasoned with mercy. The movement
of Aufhebung, argues Derrida, is a process of establishing relevance; a justi-
fied and appropriate relation between terms. It would thus, in this instance,
relate mercy to justice as a coherent elevation. The movement in Hegel is
always one of interiorization and spiritualization, reflecting in this transla-
tion the relation of spirit and flesh, of Christian and Jew. All of which is not,
as Derrida notes, unrelated to a certain European post-Lutheran under-
standing of translation.35 For Hegel, furthermore, mercy is a critical stage
in the movement towards absolute knowledge as the truth of the Christian
religion. Hegel’s Aufhebung is a type of translation into absolute knowledge
of the Christian narrative of the resurrection. All of which leads Derrida to
claim: ‘Mercy is a relève, it is in its essence an Aufhebung. It is a translation
as well.’36 Mercy, like Aufhebung, elevates and preserves justice at a higher
level. At the same time it negates justice as the law, in that it exceeds the law.
In this sense it mirrors Benjamin’s understanding of translation as that in
which ‘the original rises into a higher and purer linguistic air.’37 Mercy most
resembles the divine when it elevates, preserves and negates the law (justice)
and as such ‘is a sort of human translation of divinity.’.38
Do these justifications suffice for Derrida’s translation? As noted, it is
perhaps not really a translation in the strictest sense but ‘rather one of
those other things in tr., a transaction, transformation, travail, travel—and
a treasure trove [trouvaille].’39 The word relève is involved in a transaction
with ‘seasons’; it substitutes it—relieves [relève] it of its duty—in exchange
for transforming it. It is travail or work, in that it sets to work not only
a multiplicity of meanings but also a multiplicity of languages; French,
German and English, and because of this richness it is a semantic treasure
trove. More importantly for Derrida, it demonstrates that ‘every transla-
tion should be relevant by vocation.’40 Here we find the answer to the title
of Derrida’s essay ‘What is a “Relevant” Translation?’, that is, ‘what should
a translation be?’ A translation should be relevant; which would mean
that a translation should answer to the call of the original (‘by vocation’)
to elevate it, preserve it, negate it, interrupt it, transform it, and put it
to work. In this way it would guarantee the original’s sur-vival in all the
senses outlined in the previous chapter: prolonged life and life after death.
As Derrida phrases it:
 Derrida and Translation 169

Isn’t this what a translation does? Doesn’t it guarantee these two survivals
by losing the flesh during a process of conversion [change]? By elevating the
signifier to its meaning or value, all the while preserving the mournful and
debt-laden memory of the singular body, the first body, the unique body
that the translation thus elevates, preserves, and negates [relève]? Since it is
a question of a travail—indeed, as we noted, a travail of the negative—this
relevance is a travail of mourning, […] the price of a translation, is always
what is called meaning, that is, value, preservation, truth as preservation
(Wahrheit, bewahren) or the value of meaning, namely, what, in being freed
from the body, is elevated above it, interiorizes it, spiritualizes it, preserves
it in memory. A faithful and mournful memory.41

In terms of the ‘trial of the untranslatable’, how does Derrida’s ‘defi-

nition’ of translation above account for his claim that nothing is ever
translatable or untranslatable? ‘Seasons’ is untranslatable if we think the
translatable as that without loss, remainder or mourning. It is endlessly
translatable if we reconsider the very idea of translation as transforma-
tion, negation and elevation.

Language of Power and Language

of the Other
Throughout his writings on the question and problematic of translation,
Derrida seeks to question the ‘ordinary’ or ‘a certain’ concept of translation.
This would be tied to, indeed part of, an ‘ordinary’ or ‘a certain’ concept
of reading. These traditional understandings of reading and translation
(and ultimately philosophy) presuppose the possibility of a pure meaning
which might be dissociated from its form or body of a written signifier.42
This was a question already operative in Derrida’s interpretation of Husserl.
However, for Derrida, the indissociability of signifier and signified is not
itself what ‘arrests’ the movement of translation; it is rather the condition
of economy, oikonomia. The limit to translation is always an external limit.
This necessarily concerns the following in a web of interrelated terms:
home/away, Ent-fernung, same/other, contract or promise, calculability,
exchange value and many more. All of which leaves us with the following
170 Derrida, the Subject and the Other

questions: how does a translation fulfil its debt to the other—the ‘original’?
How does it bring this text ‘home’ without violating it? What is the nature
of the alliance between these texts? How is one text so ‘committed’ to the
other and in what language exactly is it committed? Here I attempt to
answer some of these questions, initially through an examination of the
relation between language and political power; and then, in a related vein,
through the relation between language and power more generally—that is,
the place of language in the subject/other relation.

Language and Institutional Power

René Descartes’ Discours de la méthode [Discourse on Method ] of 1637 had

of course a profound impact on philosophy for many centuries to come.
Derrida’s commentary on this text is notable in that it examines the con-
stitution of the legal and philosophical subject through the imposition
of a language, and hence the imposition of translation.43 Descartes’ deci-
sion to write the Discours in French indicates on the one hand ‘the clear
event of a rupture’ in that it is written in a ‘natural language’ and not in
Latin; the traditional language of the scholar and the law. On the other
hand, however, for Derrida it also indicates the continuity of a histori-
cal process.44 In writing in French, Descartes was also conforming to the
demand of the king to create not only a national French literature, but
also a national French philosophy. In 1539, under the decree of Villers-
Cotterêts, French became the official language of the law, although it
would take almost a century for the first philosophical text to emerge
in this national/natural language (in 1637). ‘One century from law to
philosophy [du droit à la philosophie], one might say.’45 The shift from
Latin to French developed gradually over time, constantly inflected by
the relationship between the political and the theological; between the
national power and the power of the Catholic Church. As Derrida notes,
the language of the Church was Latin and it was through this ‘theo-
logical’ language that the Church consolidated its empire much in the
same way as the Roman Empire before it. The Reformation debates raged
around the issue of translation and gave birth to many of the prevailing
understandings of translation theory that still hold sway today.
 Derrida and Translation 171

The imposition of French as the language of the law was designed,

according to the decree of Villers-Cotterêts, to ensure a certain trans-
parency to the law, to make the law ‘clear and distinct’ to the subjects
of the king. Rather than having to rely on those (very few) who spoke
the language of the School or the Church (Latin), subjects would now
be free to read the law in the French ‘mother tongue’. Neither can this
urge towards intelligibility be separated from the project of philosophy;
not only the philosophy of Descartes but all philosophy from Plato to
Husserl via Kant:

This concern comes up against, in fact it merges with, the properly philo-
sophical or scientific project: to reduce the ambiguity of language. The
value of clarity and distinctness in the understanding of words, in grasping
significations, will at the same time be a juridical, administrative, police
(and therefore political), and philosophical value. […] the legal text would
still have to be read or comprehended through a linguistic medium puri-
fied of all ambiguity, through a language that is not divisible or does not
dissipate into misunderstanding.46

At first glance this would seem to be an emancipatory moment for

French subjects, freeing them from the violent constraint of the Latin
language by allowing them to read the law themselves, without having to
rely on those who spoke Latin. The king, in wishing to make them bet-
ter subjects, both to the law and to himself; returns them to their ‘own’
mother tongue: ‘as if they were being given back to their mother in order
better to be subjugated to the father.’47 However, a certain violence is
hidden in this move of the French authorities: the abolition of the pro-
vincial languages. For many subjects at that time French was as paternal,
as legal and as unknown as Latin. In order to plead for the right to speak
their own language translation became necessary. As Derrida notes, one
must speak the language of power which means one must translate; one
must learn and appropriate the language of the other. Once this hap-
pens the language of the other has become one’s own and the very fact of
translation proves the king, the other, was right to impose it on you. ‘By
speaking to him [the king] in his language you acknowledge his law and
authority; you prove him right; you countersign the act that proves him
right over you.’48
172 Derrida, the Subject and the Other

This is not, argues Derrida, some kind of master/slave dialectic of lan-

guages, but rather a paradigmatic event. This is precisely what happened
to representatives from Provence who wished to pass their judgements at
home in their own language. They went to court to plead for this right,
but were told that the king would hear them only in French. Hence,
they learned French to ask to not have to learn French, proving, for the
king, that learning French was not such a difficult thing to do and that
therefore his decree should be enforced.49 This situation is not merely
one of a non-linguistic force acting through language; but is rather the
very situation of language as power: ‘this relationship of language, must
already, as such, be the power relationship of spacing, a body of writing
to clear a path.’50
Though beyond the scope and investigative question of this work, it is
worth noting the particularly interesting case of linguistic oppression as it
took place in Ireland. The varying degrees of linguistic tyranny which saw
the gradual erosion of the Irish language and the adaptation of English
as a ‘mother’ tongue for the majority of citizens leads to a strange situ-
ation, both politically and culturally. One need only think of the fact
that the Irish Constitution of 1937 was written in English (language of
power/language of the other) yet paradoxically names Irish not only as
the nation’s first language, but indeed the language of reference in cases
of legal dispute. In other words, the Irish Constitution written in English
subverts its own authority by reference to an Irish text, as if that text were
an original when in fact the Irish language text is itself already a transla-
tion.51 In cultural terms, as poet and novelist Seamus Deane has noted,
Irish remains a foreign language which yet, as the ‘native’ language, haunts
Irish artists. While most of Ireland’s famous authors write in English—
Wilde, Yeats, Joyce, Beckett—theirs is a distinctively Hiberno-English.52
Joyce’s Ulysses or Finnegan’s Wake could not be described as ‘English nov-
els’; they remain inhabited by that spectre of a wiped out tongue, the
rhythm of a lost language that came to be translated into English. Ireland
remains a country of ‘translated identities’ where people do not speak
their ‘own’ language, and yet have made the language of power their own
in an inimitable way. Of course, the nature of a translated identity, of liv-
ing in a language that is not quite one’s own, leads to an imagining of an
‘original’ identity; a mythic Ireland lost in the past that in all likelihood
 Derrida and Translation 173

never in fact existed. Declan Kiberd argues that this was precisely what
was at play in the Anglo-Irish literary movement, in particular under the
penmanship of Yeats. The lost ‘original’ Ireland was not being remembered
by the new poets who wrote in the language of the colonizer; rather it was
being invented as translated.53
To return to the Discours, Descartes’ relationship to language is some-
what paradoxical, and this is tied to the fact he is being pulled in two dif-
ferent directions. On the one hand, Descartes believes in natural reason
which is universal and meta-linguistic. On the other hand, he is writing
in a ‘natural language’ which is national, native and historically contin-
gent. While he writes in a language accessible to everyone ‘even women’
(if reason is universal it knows no gender),54 this choice is not quite as
altruistic as it may at first seem and has more than a little to do with an
economic concern. His bookseller warns him that books in Latin don’t
sell as well as books in French.55 In addition to which, French was fast
becoming the language of diplomacy, status and sophistication—by writ-
ing in French Descartes makes himself known to many European courts,
expanding his readership. On top of which Descartes’ choice of language
authorizes the French law and the urge expressed by Henri II to ‘lead out
[acconduire]’ the philosophies of the Greeks and Romans towards the
French ‘border regions [marches]’.56 A certain economic ruse thus hides
behind Descartes’ apparent magnanimity.
As Derrida points out, it would seem that Descartes has always two
readerships in mind, two discourses and two languages: the public
(including the ‘feeble minded’ and women); and the learned men of the
university trained in the ways of the School.57 For the one he writes in
French and for the other in Latin. This is further evidenced by the fact
that the so-called original of the Discours de la méthode in French is in fact,
argues Derrida, already a translation of a former Latin version. Derrida
makes this claim on the basis of two points; firstly, the translation of the
Discours from French to Latin loses the justificatory claims found in the
‘original’ French text. Secondly, the Discours, looks itself suspiciously like
a translation of the much earlier Regulae ad Directionem Ingenii (Rules for
the Direction of the Mind) of 1628.58
The Discours refers to its own language explicitly a number of times
where Descartes says ‘[a]nd if I write in French, which is the language of
174 Derrida, the Subject and the Other

my country, rather than in Latin which is that of my teachers…’59 In the

translations of this sentence into other ‘living’ European languages (such as
German or English) the text remains the same. That is to say, it highlights
the fact that the reader is reading a translation; it presents itself as a transla-
tion from French. This is not the case with the translation into the ‘dead’
language of Latin. In the standard Adam and Tannery edition the omission
of this sentence (‘If I write in French…’) is explained by saying that there
was no cause to translate it: ‘il n’y avait pas lieu de le traduire en effet.’.60
Why was there ‘no cause’ to translate this phrase into Latin but clearly
cause enough to translate it into other languages? For Derrida this is due
to the fact that Latin had a special status at the time of writing. Latin was
the ‘language of origin’ for all philosophical texts, the Latin translation
therefore does not refer to itself as a translation, does not refer back to an
original because it itself is the ‘original’. Descartes, in writing in French,
was only making a pretence of beginning with the ‘vulgar tongue’ and
there was hence cause (il y avait lieu) to quickly return to the normative,
legal, language of origin. ‘The Latin version is thus nothing more than a
restitution.’61 Rather than being a ‘leading out’ to the border regions of
French, it is a leading back to the original language of Latin. Descartes
displays a strange conformity to a double authority—the State and the
School. The relation between the State and language mirrors the relation
between the University and language:

What this institution [the University] cannot bear, is for anyone to tamper
with language, meaning both the national language and, paradoxically, an
ideal of translatability that neutralizes this national language. Nationalism
and universalism. What this institution cannot bear is a transformation
that leaves intact neither of these two complementary poles. It can bear
more readily the most apparently revolutionary ideological sorts of ‘con-
tent’, if only that content does not touch the borders of language and of all
the juridico-political contracts that it guarantees. It is this ‘intolerable’
something that concerns me here. It is related in an essential way to that
which, as it is written above, brings out the limits of the concept of transla-
tion on which the university is built […]62

There are a number of points to be explored here. First that the

University is built upon a recognition of the national language; it is
 Derrida and Translation 175

through this language that it grants degrees, performs examinations,

employs its teachers and so on. The language of the State is the language
of the University. At the same time however, there is an urge towards an
effacement of language in that what must be recognized are ‘clear and
distinct’ ideas which can easily be separated from their form, that is, the
very language that they are written in. Second, that it is the presumption
of translatability which guarantees a number of juridical and political
contracts. And finally, that the university is built upon this ‘concept’ of
translation. For Derrida all reading is already a translating, yet he seeks
to subvert the traditional understandings of both of these practices by
problematizing the idea of reading or translating as ‘making accessible
a meaning that can be transmitted as such.’63 This is the concept upon
which the university is built, namely, that meanings can be dissociated
from their forms and transmitted freely.
The issue of a content dissociable from its form upon which a ‘certain
concept’ of reading and writing is built, and hence upon which a ‘certain
concept’ of philosophy and the university is built, is most notable with
the paradoxical issue of copyright law. As Derrida makes obvious in his
own works, all texts refer to other texts beyond their own borders; they
are inflected by other works and other authors. Not only are Derrida’s
works always readings of other authors, they also consistently reference
many further texts either by other authors or by Derrida himself. In this
way Derrida explicitly marks that which he sees as implicitly taking place
in all texts. In his commentary on Benjamin’s ‘Task of the Translator’,
Derrida criticizes Benjamin for maintaining the original/translation dis-
tinction not least because it reflects the presupposition of unity in the
original. It is this presupposition that is at play in copyright law which
‘collapses at the slightest challenge to a strict boundary between the origi-
nal and the version, indeed to the identity or integrity of the original.’.64
On the issue of copyright law in France, Derrida notes that what is
protected under this law is originality of expression rather than content
or ideas, which are considered universal.65 A novelist’s work, for example,
is protected in its form, in its mode of expression; whereas a novelist’s
schema for a story falls outside the remit of copyright. Paradoxically, this
same law would therefore have to protect a translation, for surely what
a translation does is to reformulate the ‘original’ in a different mode of
176 Derrida, the Subject and the Other

expression. However, translations are considered as ‘derived creations’.

This is particularly interesting when one considers the issue of royalties,
the economic return for those who undertake the task of the translator.
One case in point of particular interest is Argentine author Jorge Louis
Borges. During his lifetime Borges worked closely with his English lan-
guage translator, Norman Thomas di Giovanni, to create what Borges
himself initially termed English ‘versions’ of his work. So highly did he
esteem the task of the translator that royalties from these translations
were split evenly between author and translator. This economic agree-
ment was swiftly called to a halt by the Borges literary estate after his
death so that the estate could take all royalties from newly commissioned
translations.66
Under copyright law a translation of a translation is considered a deri-
vation from the original work and not from the translation. Desbois in
particular notes that if a translator takes different passages from various
translations and brings them together in a different way, this will still be
considered a translation derived from the original and not from the trans-
lations.67 Throughout, the language of copyright law deals extensively
with the notion of the translator as ‘indebted’ to the original, as ‘respon-
sible’ for the original. As Derrida notes: ‘The recurrence of the word ‘task’
is remarkable enough in any case, for all the significations that it weaves
into a network, and there is always the same evaluative interpretation:
duty, debt, tax, levy, toll, inheritance and estate tax, nobiliary obligation,
but labor midway to creation, infinite task, essential incompletion, as if
the presumed creator of the original were not—he too—indebted, taxed,
obligated by another text, and a priori translating.’68

The Language of the Other

The paradoxical situation of the representatives from Provence who had

to demand the right to speak their own language in the language of the
other, is in fact the situation of every subject in relation to any language.
I want to go back here to the Blanchot récit, L’arrêt de mort and in par-
ticular the second narrative. Here the narrator has a relationship with
Nathalie who speaks a Slavic language. The narrator speaks in this Slavic
 Derrida and Translation 177

language and Nathalie speaks in the narrator’s language, French. In other

words, both characters speak to each other in the language of the other.
This speaking in the language of the other creates a strange situation
where characters feel themselves to be somehow at a remove from the lan-
guage and therefore less committed to what is said in that language, for
it is not their own. At the same time, the strangeness of the words seems
to make them more true. This situation of being-in-translation creates a
proximity of distance, an Entfernung, which both commits the speaker
and absolves them. Blanchot phrases it thus:

If it is true that a language seems so much truer and more expressive when
we know it less, if words need a certain ignorance to keep their power of
revelation, such a paradox is hardly likely to surprise us since translators
never stop experiencing it and since it represents one of the main obstacles
and main resources of all translation.69

In the récit the narrator notes that in speaking the language of the
other, he and Nathalie found a sense of irresponsibility in the words they
used. Yet at the same time, in being othered to themselves in this linguis-
tic role play there was also a sense of being more themselves. As if the free-
dom of being in the language of the other allowed them the revelation of
another kind of truth. As Derrida notes, ‘I make the contract and exempt
myself from it. All at once. I am “irresponsible” and absolutely committed
in the establishment of the language of the other.’70 On the one hand one
may say what one likes because it is not one’s own language. Yet, at the
same time there is a sense of escaping a watchful eye, of no longer being
under the surveillance of what is appropriate in one’s home; and therefore
of being free to tell the truth.71 However, this language of the other as
the language of truth, is never just the language of the other. Instead it is
‘invented’ at every moment. I must, to a certain extent, ‘make it up’, for
I do not know all the rules, I do not know all the words and so I invent;
I bend it, I make it my own through this fictional relation. If I speak in
a foreign tongue I attempt to make it my own and to allow myself to be
made of it; ‘I adapt and adopt [(m’)approprie] the language.’72 In other
words, when I speak in a foreign language I attempt to expropriate myself
from my ‘own’ language into the language of the other. At the same time
178 Derrida, the Subject and the Other

I attempt to appropriate the foreign language into myself, to bring it

home ‘and translation is always an attempt at appropriation that aims to
transport home.’73
In the récit, there is an air-raid where everyone must rush to an under-
ground refuge. In the surge of that rush the narrator, despite having always
thought of himself as having an aversion to marriage, asks Nathalie to
marry him. Before she can respond she is swept away by the crowd. What
is most interesting is that the narrator proposes in his ‘own’ language,
French. Yet this language—home language, mother tongue, language of
one’s own—has also now become foreign to him: ‘It seems to me that I was
driven by something wild, a truth so violent that I suddenly broke down
all the frail supports of that language and began speaking French, using
insane words.’74 Derrida draws out three arguments from this. First, that
the use of the language of the other, the fiction of the foreign language, is
designed to create a distance between Nathalie and the narrator. By using
a so-called foreign language the narrator remains both at a distance from
and yet committed to Nathalie: ‘Pas d ’Ent-fernung’ in Derrida’s terms.
On the one hand, this French-German phrase could be understood as a
‘step of de-severance’. In Heideggerian terms, de-severance is the man-
ner in which the distance between Dasein and something it is moving
towards is made meaningful and in some sense overcome. The way in
which Dasein can make something far away ‘be’ closer to itself through
understanding. So that pas d ’Ent-fernung as ‘step of de-severance’ would
be the manner in which Nathalie and the narrator overcome the separa-
tion between them and commit themselves to each other, by using the
other’s language. Yet pas is also ‘not’ so that the phrase can also mean ‘not
de-severance’; the distance between Nathalie and the narrator can never
be overcome or converted into a proximity. It is this paradoxical double
bind that makes their relationship possible. When this pas d ’Ent-fernung
as ‘the fiction of a foreign language’ breaks down and the narrator returns
to French, a madness (‘insane words’) takes hold.75
Second, Derrida notes, the narrator does not return to his own lan-
guage, the re-appropriation does not take place. Instead he finds himself
a foreigner at home; speaking words that are not his. The experience of
speaking in the Slavic tongue and in so doing using words he would
not use in French, has ‘othered’ him to himself and to his apparently
 Derrida and Translation 179

‘own’ tongue. The ‘insane’ words he uses, words he would never have used
before, are, argues Derrida, untranslatable for him. They are at the same
time absolutely familiar yet absolutely foreign.76
Third and finally, Derrida highlights the strange arrêt of the promise of
the marriage contract; the interruption of the promise of an alliance. By
speaking in French as a foreign language the narrator causes the arrêt of
the promise which ‘comes about and is immediately forbidden. It is the
double-bind structure of this event: its “madness”.’77 Only the language of
the other can commit the narrator. It is only by expropriating himself that
he can give himself over to a promise to be-for-the-other. Nonetheless, he
can also only be committed by a language he understands, that is in some
way his own. Yet this, argues Derrida, is not unique to this fictional nar-
rator speaking between two languages: it is the situation of every speaker
and every language. As Derrida notes here, taking on the voice of the
narrator from the Blanchot récit:

My crime is that I proposed marriage to her in a language that could com-

mit me only if it was the other’s, thus only if I did not understand it as
mine and if it thus did not commit me, if even as it bound me, was binding
upon me, it set me free. But this is always the case, always ‘normal’: a lan-
guage can never be appropriated; it is mine only as the language of the
other, and vice versa.78

‘My’ language is ‘mine’ because it was given to me from the other and
because I use it to address the other. Equally the ‘language of the other’
is only of the other to the extent that it is mine. Though it is noted here
in a text from 1979, this understanding of language as the language of
the other becomes the central motif in a much later Derrida text, namely
Monolingualism of the Other from 1996.79 The central axiom around
which this text revolves is ‘I have only one language, yet it is not mine.’.80
‘I am monolingual. My monolingualism dwells, and I call it my dwell-
ing; it feels like one to me, and I remain in it and inhabit it. It inhabits
me.’81 Derrida first explicates this claim in relation to his own history
with the French language, which is also his own history with the French
state. It is important to note that in asserting his monolingualism, that is,
that he speaks only one language which is not his; Derrida is not asserting
180 Derrida, the Subject and the Other

that he only speaks a foreign language. French is not a foreign language

to Derrida, it is his only language; the language which he inhabits and
is inhabited by. By virtue of the French language all other languages in
which he reads, writes and speaks are foreign. Nonetheless, this language,
which Derrida has made his own and which has made him who he is, is
hardly his alone. Each person speaks a ‘version’ of a so-called language,
an idiom of sorts that reflects numerous historical and political traces.
However, the distinction between ‘idiom’ and ‘a language’ cannot be rig-
orously maintained, the borders between them are blurred.82
Derrida’s own experience revolves around his status as a Franco-
Maghrebian Jew. Born in Algeria to a Jewish family, Derrida was brought
up speaking French and attending the French state lycée. This state insti-
tution promoted not only the French language but also French culture, to
such an extent that the languages and cultures of Derrida’s ‘home’ (Algeria)
were considered alien and other. The politics of state-enforced translation
was used as a means of control; as a means of deciding who was ‘in’ the
French state (so often referred to as the ‘interior’) and who was outside it.
While studying Arabic was an option at this state institution—‘Arabic, an
optional foreign language in Algeria!’83—such study was not encouraged.
In this way the lycée made Arabic and those who spoke Arabic as their
‘mother’ tongue, foreigners in their home country, alienated from struc-
tures of power and self-determination. As Derrida scornfully notes, those
he remembers taking up this option in the lycée appeared to do so for ‘for
technical and professional reasons’ that is, to be better ‘obeyed by their
agricultural workers.’84 The other language of Derrida’s ‘home’ was Berber,
a language not even considered a ‘foreign’ language worth offering by the
state.85 All in all the policy of the state—here encountered by Derrida
through the state institution of the lycée—was designed to marginalize
and exclude those who were not in power. By teaching only in the French
language, by offering Arabic as a ‘foreign’ language, and by repressing the
option of the Berber language completely; the lycée produced a deliberate
colonial marginalization of those languages. ‘Their weakening [extenua-
tion] was calculated by a colonial policy that pretended to treat Algeria as
a group of three French departments.’86
This politics of enforced translation was made even more problem-
atic with the retraction of the 1870 Crémieux Decree under the Vichy
 Derrida and Translation 181

government. As Derrida points out, the language one speaks is tied not
only to place but often more importantly to questions of citizenship. As
a Franco-Maghrebian Jew Derrida was born as a French citizen; or rather
this European citizenship was enforced upon him though he was born in
Algeria.87 The withdrawal of French citizenship however, was not an act
forced upon the French government by the German occupation, Derrida
claims it rather ‘was the deed of the French alone.’88 Derrida highlights
that he gained, lost, and gained again his French citizenship. This strange
situation produces what he terms a ‘disorder of identity.’89 Derrida belongs
to French, yet his position, his place in France—the State—has remained
ambiguous and unstable. On the one hand the French language has been
his ‘host’, welcomed him to it and adopted him. On the other hand, as
the ‘guest’ of this language Derrida describes himself also as its ‘hostage’;
for he had no choice in it being ‘his’ language. Furthermore, in speaking
French he becomes both the perpetrator of a European colonialism—he
speaks the tongue of the colonizer—and its victim—since his citizen-
ship is withdrawn. Moreover, the French language is not the language of
Derrida’s Jewish ancestors. Rather it is the language of the other in that
it belongs to the French ‘Catholic’ state. Language, religion and the state
are intimately entwined.90 There is hence in this politico-linguistic to-ing
and fro-ing a loss of presumed origin which must be recreated as a false
memory; a prosthesis of origin. In much the same way as the English
speaking Irish invented a lost Ireland.
What is most interesting, however, is that this politics of linguistic-
colonial violence is not unique: ‘Anyone should be able to say “I only
have one language (yet, but, henceforth, lastingly [à demeure]) it is not
mine”.’91 Monolingualism thus, belongs not only to the subject but also
to the other; indeed the other imposes its own monolingualism upon
the subject. Like the representatives from Provence who had to speak
the language of the other in order to plead for their rights and thereby
proved the other right; every subject must speak the language of the
other while making it their own. This inescapable monolingualism is
the law:

First and foremost, the monolingualism of the other would be that sover-
eignty, that law originating from elsewhere, certainly, but also primarily the
182 Derrida, the Subject and the Other

very language of the Law. And the Law as Language. Its experience would
be ostensibly autonomous, because I have to speak this law and appropriate
it in order to understand it as if I was giving it to myself, but it remains
necessarily heteronomous, for such is, at bottom, the essence of any law. The
madness of the law places its possibility lastingly [à demeure] inside the
dwelling of this auto- heteronomy.92

Language is instituted through an ‘originary’ alienation. Every lan-

guage is a language of the other, comes from the other and is offered to
the other. In this sense we are both hostage to this language of the other
and hosted in our own monolingualism at the same time. Every subject is
‘thrown into absolute translation’93 but this is a state of translation with-
out reference. The departure or source or original language is not pure and
is not known by the subject. In the case of the Algerian Jew, the ‘source’
language of Hebrew has been effaced and replaced by what Derrida terms
‘Catholic’ French. For the Irish (and we might say ‘Irish Catholic’) it has
been erased and forgotten by (‘Protestant’) English. Yet for every subject
whatever their language or citizenship, the language of the master—even
if it is presumed to be the ‘same’ as the ‘mother’ tongue—is the language
of the other. Every subject must speak the language of the law and cannot
escape this language of the law as other and as appropriated. In this way,
every subject is to some extent alienated from the source language.
Further, the very status of what is known as ‘source’ language is itself
a political invention based on asserted distinctions between idioms, lan-
guages and dialects. There is no such pure and purely unified thing as a
single language. Therefore, there are only languages of arrival [langues
d ’arrivée]. However, the arrival never takes place as such; one never fully
possesses or is fully possessed by a language entirely despite the inherent
desire to do so. Such desire to arrive fully and finally into a language
leads to a desire to construct or reconstruct a first language. Whether the
Franco-Maghrebian Jew or Irish ‘Catholic’, all subjects seek this original
language which would be pure, uncorrupted and testify to the memory
of their own historical, political, religious, ethnic, geographic origin. As
Derrida notes, ‘it is really a desire to invent a first language that would
be, rather, a prior-to-the-first language destined to translate that memory.
But to translate the memory of what, precisely, did not take place.’94 This
 Derrida and Translation 183

hoped-for language of origin cannot be created and becomes rather a yet-

to-arrive; a telos of language.
The monolingualism that Derrida speaks of, the monolingualism of
the ‘I’ and of the other, is however, not at one with itself but divided
from within.95 It is only unified into what might properly be called ‘a lan-
guage’ in the form of a promise of something which has never yet arrived.
Every time we speak to each other we promise a language to each other;
we promise to understand, to expropriate and appropriate into and out
of the languages of each other. In so doing we promise a language totally
translatable, a transparent meaning that remains and abides as impos-
sible. The promise says ‘there must be a language’ which as Derrida notes,
necessarily implies ‘ “for it does not exist” or “since it is lacking”.’96 This
promise gathers all languages together in their multiplicity and plurivo-
cality. The promise gathers language together not in its identity or unity
(as the being-language of language that Benjamin sought); but rather in
its difference with itself. The difference between my English and your
English, between Derrida’s French and the French of Blanchot, is the dif-
ference of language which permits language:

It welcomes it, collects it, not in its identity or its unity, not even in its
ipseity, but in the uniqueness or singularity of a gathering together of its
difference to itself: in difference with itself [avec soi] rather than difference
from itself [d ’avec soi]. It is not possible to speak outside this promise that
gives a language, the uniqueness of the idiom, but only by promising to
give it. There can be no question of getting out of this uniqueness without
unity. It is not to be opposed to the other, nor even distinguished from the
other. It is the monolanguage of the other. The of signifies not so much
property as provenance: language is for the other, coming from the other,
the coming of the other.97

Language thus is always a promise not simply to the other but also and
at the same time from the other. This promise does not promise something,
it holds no content as such but rather promises a future yet to come. It is
to be differentiated from the promise that language makes for Levinas;
this is not the promise of salvation for it does not yet commit me to save
the other as the absolute Other. Rather for Derrida the promise can only
184 Derrida, the Subject and the Other

resemble the salvation of the other who would be entirely Other. It is

important to recognize this difference between Levinas and Derrida. For
Levinas ‘every other is absolutely other;’ for Derrida this absolute other
cannot have yet arrived. Once the other arrives, I recognize them. In
Chapter Two I examined the idea of a ‘translating-subject’ between being
and otherwise than being and the movement between other and third.
For Derrida, this translation has always already taken place. Whereas
for Levinas the Other ruptures the immanence of ontology producing
a transcendence, for Derrida that transcendence—as a move towards an
absolute Other—can only be promised.98 The promise uttered every time
language is used ‘resembles messianism, soteriology, or eschatology. It is
the structural opening, the messianicity, without which messianism itself,
in the strict or literal sense, would not be possible.’.99
Language produces isolation, a monolingualism that disrupts the ideal
of a translatable language. At the same time, coming from/to the other, it
postpones that isolation so that it is not pure. Language holds the subject
hostage in a desert of their own and sometimes, as Derrida notes, ‘there
is a desert without a desert crossing.’100 There is unreadability, untranslat-
ability. Yet, because of this isolation and untranslatability, translatability
can be promised, the impossible becomes the chance of the possible.

Babel
Translation, in its most ordinary (and indeed its most problematic sense),
is the transfer of meaning from one language to another. It therefore
presupposes a multiplicity of languages and it is the ‘origin’ of this state
of multiplicity that I want to explore here. There are various myths that
explain the origin of language(s), though interestingly they share a num-
ber of tropes. The moment that language emerged, or the moment it
became multiple, is often mythologized as the same moment that society
came into being. Society as the law, as politics, as family genealogies rec-
ognized by name, or as different nations. In myths this birth of society
often takes on an architectural figure. The ability to raise a wall, construct
a tower, or erect a border, is the ability to mark a citizen inside the walls
from a foreigner outside them. In short the ability to ‘clearly’ identify.
 Derrida and Translation 185

Further, the origin of language(s) is said to take place at the same time as
a dispersion: a scattering of men which allows for the space in which to
build. This dispersion is also at the same time the cause of construction;
the need to build a bridge across the space, to close and enclose the space
and the need to translate the difference born of this space.
In this way the origin of languages and thus the origin of translation,
in a certain sense describes the origin of man as man and no longer man
as animal. Man speaks, translates, builds towns, writes laws, understands
the relation to death—all of these things draw the line between man and
beast and it is therefore unsurprising that they weave together in language
myths. As Derrida notes ‘one is given language and society at the same
time, at the moment when the pure state of nature is crossed, when abso-
lute dispersion is overcome for the first time. One attempts to seize the
origin of language at the moment of this first crossing over.’101
One of the Greek ‘origin’ myths of translation transmitted by Latin
scholar Hyginus centres on the figure of Hermes. According to this tale,
all men originally lived without towns or laws under the rule of Zeus and
spoke a single language. This peaceful co-existence was then disrupted by
mischievous Hermes who divided languages and nations from each other
leading to conflict amongst men.102 Hermes is also the patron of the trav-
eller and figure of border crossings; between nations (whose demarcation
he made possible), and indeed between life and death. Hermes not only
guides souls in their journey in the underworld but also guards the crypt
to prevent the souls of the dead from travelling to the land of the living.
Hermes is no doubt a translation of the Egyptian God of writing Thoth,
or in its Greek form Theuth, the myth of whom Derrida explores in
his essay ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’.103 The passages on Theuth and Hermes are
particularly interesting in that they mark the relation between the god
of writing and the god of death.104 Theuth or Hermes is a messenger, a
translator of the divine logos to mortal man. Yet this messenger can also
violently supplant his father Ammon; translating himself in this substitu-
tion into the place of his father or ‘origin’. The Hermes/Theuth/Thoth
myth marks non-identity and translating as originary rather than second-
ary. Derrida defines him in his ambiguity in many ways: he ‘is precisely
the god of non-identity,’ ‘god of the absolute passage between opposites,’
‘a floating signifier, a wild card, one who puts play into play.’105 Finally, as
186 Derrida, the Subject and the Other

between life and death, we might see him as the god of survie: ‘This god
of resurrection is less interested in life or death than in death as a repeti-
tion of life and life as a rehearsal of death, in the awakening of life and in
the recommencement of death.’106
Yet another translation ‘origin’ myth is that of the tower of Babel from
Genesis and it is this myth that I want to explore here in more detail with
Derrida. The tale is as follows:

Now the whole world had one language and a common speech. As people
moved eastward, they found a plain in Shinar and settled there. They said to
each other, ‘Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly.’ They used
brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar. Then they said, ‘Come, let us build
ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may
make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the
whole earth.’ But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower the
people were building. The Lord said, ‘If as one people speaking the same
language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be
impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so
they will not understand each other.’ So the Lord scattered them from there
over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. That is why it was called
Babel—because there the Lord confused the language of the whole world.
From there the Lord scattered them over the face of the whole earth.107

In the biblical structure this tale is situated shortly after the tale of the
Great Flood and immediately precedes the account of Abraham’s geneal-
ogy. As such the Babel narrative acts as a hinge between the history of
man in general and the emergence of a named identifiable lineage. As
Elad Lapidot phrases it: ‘[i]n the process of Genesis, the Tower of Babel
stands at the limit between the universal and the particular.’.108
The myth shares the themes of building, nation making, travelling,
and naming. For Derrida, it is a deeply significant myth for a number of
reasons. It not only tells the origin of the multiplicity of languages and
the necessity of translation, it also reflects the need for myth acting thus
as a mythical origin of myth itself. It is ‘the narrative of narrative, the
translation of translation.’109 Further, Babel is a narrative of interruption;
the unfinished tower reflects for Derrida a structural order of incomplete-
ness or ‘the impossibility of finishing.’110 This impossibility of finishing
 Derrida and Translation 187

is tied to the impossibility of a pure uncrossable limit which would mark

a pure and self-contained identity. I will break my own reading of this
myth here into two: the proper name and multilingualism.

The Proper Name

Proper names, like the subject, only come into being through differentia-
tion. In the last chapter, I touched on the claim that the debt of transla-
tion passes through the trait which contracts a subject to their proper
name.111 Here I will show that since that trait itself is never pure, can
never be fully assumed; then no more so can the debt of translation. As
Davis has pointed out, the proper name ‘is the most explicit example
of the assumption that language names things—that words or signs can
have a one-to-one correspondence with a referent that exists, as a “real”
presence, before and outside language.’112 Derrida describes the proper
name as the original myth of a transparent legibility, a myth he finds
operating in the work of structural anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss.
Derrida goes on to explain that a proper name purports to be a unique
appellation for a unique present being, while in fact it can only func-
tion within a system of differences ‘within a writing retaining the traces
of difference.’113 While Lévi-Strauss describes the Nambikwara tribe as
‘prohibiting’ proper names, Derrida contends that this prohibition is
‘derivative with regard to the constitutive erasure of the proper name.’114
That is, the proper name emerges only through differential traces which
contaminate and thereby erase the propriety of the proper name. Even
in naming it a ‘proper name’ we are using language, archē-writing as a
differential system and hence ‘obliterating’ that which we claim to name
in its uniqueness or propriety. What we really have are ‘so-called’ proper
names or improper names. A proper name is ‘only a designation of appur-
tenance and a linguistic-social classification.’115
This issue of the impropriety of the proper name is necessarily impli-
cated in the name ‘Babel’. What this so-called proper name names is
unclear. It is the narrative text I cited above from the Bible, it is the
name of the city in that story, and finally, it is the name of God which
he proclaims over the city. The name ‘Babel’ is therefore already perform-
188 Derrida, the Subject and the Other

ing in its name the event that it describes: multiplicity. As illustrated

with the example of Pierre, proper names are in general not translated.
While they often begin with a meaning within a single language they, to
become proper names as such, must transcend this meaning to become
‘the reference of a pure signifier to a single being—and for this reason
untranslatable.’116 Of course this is precisely what Derrida seeks to show
as impossible. The difference between a proper name and a common
noun may appear to be revealed in translation. The proper name ‘Pierre’
remains ‘Pierre’ in English, whereas the common noun pierre is mutated
by its linguistic crossing into ‘rock’. However, we cannot pass over the
fact that in French common name and proper name—these ‘two abso-
lutely heterogeneous values or functions’—are laid over each other, the
one effacing the other. The proper name thus holds a strange position
within language; on the one hand it begins as a common noun properly
belonging to a language and hence translatable.117 On the other hand it
is untranslatable inasmuch as it purports to reference a unique being, as
Derrida notes:

[F]irst that a proper name, in the proper sense, does not properly belong to
the language; it does not belong there, although and because its call makes
the language possible (what would a language be without the possibility of
calling by a proper name?); consequently it can properly inscribe itself in a
language only by allowing itself to be translated therein, in other words,
interpreted by its semantic equivalent: from this moment it can no longer
be taken as a proper name.118

The name ‘Babel’, as Derrida underscores by reference to Voltaire, sig-

nifies in a double manner. ‘Babel’, coming from Ba meaning ‘father’ and
Bel meaning ‘God’ would have been taken to name ‘city of God (the
father)’, a frequent name of capital cities at the time.119 However, as a
common noun it also means ‘confusion’. In addition, the very state of
confusion is itself confused; for on the one hand it names the ‘confusion’
into which the people of Babel were thrown when their language was
made multiple and they could no longer understand each other. And
on the other hand, it names the ‘confounding’ of their project to build a
tower reaching the heavens.120
 Derrida and Translation 189

What is at play in this récit (as Derrida refers to it) is in fact a battle of
the proper name.121 The tribe of Shem wish to ‘make a name’ for them-
selves so that they will not be scattered across the face of the earth. This
urge to universalism is disrupted, however, even within their own name
for ‘Shem’ is also the common noun ‘name’. The Semites ‘want to make
a name for themselves, and they bear the name of name.’122 This ‘making
a name’ is at one with the construction of the tower and the imposition
of a universal language. As Derrida notes, the passages preceding God’s
destruction of the tower tell of the Semites’ establishment of empire.123
The establishment of an empire, of a genealogy—and we should not for-
get the place of the Babel narrative as that which precedes the genealogy
of Abraham—is made through construction and linguistic imposition; it
is also made by controlling the border and pathways.124
Power exerts itself through language as illustrated by the example of
the imposition of the French mother tongue under the decree of Villers-
Cotterêts in 1539.125 This decree, which might be read as making the law
transparent to the king’s subjects, can also be read as the violent impo-
sition of a tongue by the one who controls the border.126 In the same
way, the universalist aspirations in Babel are double. They could be read
as a move towards ‘a peaceful transparency of the human community’
through the goal of absolute translatability.127 However, as Derrida notes,
the Shems wish to impose a universal language ‘by violence, by force, by
violent hegemony over the rest of the world.’128 This is not the universal
language of Descartes or Leibniz to which everyone would have access,
but rather the language of the stronger master. Absolute translatability
would be the erasure of the difference that translation practices, and this
erasure is rarely neutral. Whichever way we read the Semites’ plan to
make a name for themselves it is interrupted by another name: the name
of God: ‘[t]hey cease to build the city. Over which he [YHWH] pro-
claims his name: Bavel, Confusion.’129
God disrupts the building of the tower by the imposition of his name;
he marks with his name the communal place where understanding is
no longer possible. YHWH, the bearer of an unpronounceable name,
chooses this other name for himself and imposes it upon ‘the children
who henceforth will bear his name, the name that he gives the city.’130 In
giving his name God also gives all names in that he gives all languages;
190 Derrida, the Subject and the Other

the name of God is thus the name of the origin of tongues: Babel.131 But
this is a gift that is also a poison for it disrupts the understanding that
pre-existed it. ‘[H]e imposes confusion on them at the same time that
he imposes his proper name.’132 This punishment imposed by God may
be due to the Semites’ aspiration to build a tower to the Most High, to
transgress a border they had no right to cross. However, for Derrida, the
punishment is more deeply linked with the Semites’ plan to make a name
for themselves; to give themselves a name and to gather under this name
as a unity, the one as the other.133 Lapidot on the other hand does not see
this as a punishment but rather as an empowerment and takes issue with
Derrida’s reading. In the biblical narrative God creates through the word
(a situation echoed in the Stefan George poem and Heidegger’s reading
of it that I discussed in Chapter One). Uttering the word for something
creates it—‘let there be light’, for example. Lapidot argues that the word
has to separate from God in order for the creation to have independence
from its creator; so that in the Babel narrative God is giving this same
power to man. In giving the multiplicity of languages God is giving man
the difference that allows for creation. Without being able to translate
man would only have limited creative power.134 Lapidot claims ‘Derrida,
for his part, ultimately seems to have a tendency to understand linguistic
diversity and translation as a necessary evil, one that was imposed on
humanity against its will, and even against its good reason, but for its
own good.’135 While Lapidot provides an enriching analysis of the Babel
text he appears to pass over Derrida’s insistence that without difference—
here linguistic diversity—there is nothing at all. As Davis points out, for
Derrida the narrative is not about a ‘fall’ from some mythical universal
language but rather about the manner in which language has no pure ori-
gin.136 Nor does it indicate some nostalgia for a mythical lost origin: ‘on
the contrary, the disruption of such nostalgia through a demonstration
that there was no ‘origin’ […] has been the project of deconstruction.’137
In this battle of proper names between Babel/God/‘confusion’ and
Shem/‘name’ ‘the one that will carry the day is the one that either imposes
its law or in any case prevents the other from imposing its own.’138 The
law that the name of God imposes is translation; he at the same time
imposes and forbids translation through his name which is both trans-
latable and untranslatable. God, in proclaiming his name, in imposing
 Derrida and Translation 191

multiple tongues upon man, makes translation as necessary as it is impos-

sible. As Derrida notes, the war that God declares against the Shems is
already raging in his name (and we might add in the name of the Shems
as well); the name itself is ‘divided, bifid, ambivalent, polysemic: God
deconstructing.’.139
The Babel narrative reveals the double bind of all proper names. God
orders man to translate his name yet in the same movement illustrates
its impossibility; his name cannot be translated since it is a proper name
and as common noun signifies only ‘confusion’ or ‘ambiguity’.140 As such
inflicted on man, on the tribe of Shem, is the double imperative to trans-
late and at the same time not to translate the name:

I would say that this desire is at work in every proper name: translate me,
don’t translate me. On the one hand, don’t translate me, that is, respect me
as a proper name, respect my law of the proper name which stands over and
above all languages. And, on the other hand, translate me, preserve me
within the universal language, follow my law, and so on. This means that
the division of the proper name insofar as it is the division of God—in a
word insofar as it divides God himself—in some way provides the para-
digm for this work of the proper name.141

If the debt of translation passes between the traits that link subjects to
their names, and yet in those very names is this double bind of translate/
don’t translate, then the subject as soon as she is named is indebted to
translation. Language begins in naming, in calling by the proper name
and the subject begins in responding to the double command of that
name. The subject is hence called forth by and through the command of
translation.
But names can change over time; over the course of one’s life, even
over the course of a single day, our relation to our own name changes.
When we are called by our proper name our response depends upon the
one who calls so that we respond to our proper name as many different
people: as daughter, as teacher, as father, as student, as patient, and so on.
The proper name is the name that calls us, but rarely does it call us as the
same subject each time. If the proper name is the possibility of an address
by the other (and also to the other), and yet if this proper name is always
192 Derrida, the Subject and the Other

already divided and ambivalent; what are the implications of the proper
name for the subject/other relation? While there is not the space here to
examine in detail Derrida’s relation to psychoanalysis, his response to a
particular psychoanalytic practice will shed a little light on this issue of
the proper name. Psychoanalyst Patrick Mahony notes that throughout
life we acquire a multitude of names; nicknames, names of endearment,
formal titles, and so on. However, one of the distinguishing characteris-
tics of certain psychoanalytical practices is for the analyst not to address
the patient by any of these names to which she can be egocentrically
bound. In freeing the patient from the self-identity bound to their name
or names, the practice seeks to allow the patient to ‘go towards multiple
transpositions and transformations of his names.’142
Derrida agrees with Mahony that we have different names across our
lives which both accrue and disappear over time. The hypothesis then
of this particular psychoanalytic practice, rephrased by Derrida, is that
there might be a secret proper name unrelated to our public or known
name: a ‘kind of absolutely secret first name which functions all the time
without our knowing it.’143 This name would not necessarily have to be
in a language as it is ordinarily understood—we could be called by our
secret name through a gesture, a smell or even a particular scene. In the
experience of one of these ‘names’ our secret ‘proper’ self would then be
called forth. Behind this hypothesis, however, is the presumption of a
pure ‘proper’ idiom. A name that would be absolutely proper would be
self-referential and uncontaminated by any other sign or mark; it would
be an absolute idiom.144 Indeed a secret proper name as such would also
have to be untranslatable. In order to be pure, absolute, absolutely proper
it could not risk itself in the mutation of a translation, for once trans-
lated it would revert to a position of common noun. Untranslatable, the
secret proper name would hence remain only within us; like Husserl’s
pure expression, it would be lived by us ‘in the blink of an eye’ with-
out the contaminating detour through ‘external’ time or space. Such an
uncontaminated sign—linguistic or otherwise—is impossible as such.
There may be gradations of the secret proper name, there may be effects
of it but it remains impossible in its pure sense.145 As Derrida surmises:
‘the secret mark could be what it is only in a relation of differentia-
tion and thus also of contamination.’146 The mark to be a mark remains
 Derrida and Translation 193

inscribed in a network of differential relations and emerges only through

différance so that the proper name, even the secret proper name, is, like
any other name or word: both translatable and untranslatable at the
same time.
This impossibility of the absolutely pure proper name affects the pos-
sibility of the address to or the call of the other. Staying with the example
of this psychoanalytical practice, the goal would be to reach a point where
the analyst could address the patient without any ambiguity regarding
who the patient is. Derrida notes that the impetus behind this practice
is to reach a moment wherein ‘the analyst would say “you” in such a
way that there would be no possible misunderstanding on the subject of
this “you”.’147 In not addressing the patient by their public proper name
psychoanalysis would find the direct path, the pure address to them.
However, as Derrida highlights, if the impossibility of purity within the
system of the mark is fully assumed, this contamination means that an
address can be diverted. The path from one to the other, from me to you,
is not direct. The proper name, caught up in a system of contamination
and confusion, can always send the address off course:

Well, if what I have just said is at all pertinent, that is, if the most secret
proper name has its effect of a proper name only by risking contamination
and detour within a system of relations, then it follows that pure address is
impossible. I can never be sure when someone says to me—or to you—
‘you, you’ that it might not be just any old ‘you’. I can never be sure that
the secret address might not be diverted, like any message or letter, so that
it does not arrive at its destination. This is inscribed in the most general
structure of the mark. The proper name is a mark: something like confu-
sion can occur at any time because the proper name bears confusion within
itself.148

The situation is somewhat similar in the demand made by the reader of

the author of a text. A reader demands narrative from a unified, single and
identifiable author. The name of the author on a text, their signature, is
that upon which the reader calls. It is this ‘demand for narrative’ that writ-
ers such as Blanchot or Joyce seek to disrupt.149 This confusion of paths,
this detouring, is in effect what happens in the tours of Babel and not
194 Derrida, the Subject and the Other

only in a linguistic sense but also in a geographical and cultural sense. In

proclaiming his proper name imposing and forbidding translation, God
also produces a scattering of the Semites across the face of the earth. This
scattering produces what Derrida terms a ‘disschemination’, a word which
plays with a multitude of meanings.150 Phonically it echoes the sound of
‘dissemination’, a spreading out or scattering of the filial seed so that gene-
alogy is no longer assured. With the French word for ‘path’ [chemin] at its
centre it can be understood as a diverting from a path a ‘de-chemin-ation.’
It is also a de-‘Shem’-ination; a detour from the plan of the tribe of Shem
to build a tower and impose their name or tongue. It is also a ‘diss-‘shem’-
ination’, that is, a detour from the possibility of the name [shem] itself.
In this state of confusion what paths are open to the Biblical translator
when faced with the proper name ‘Babel’? Derrida praises French translator
André Chouraqui for offering a particularly literal translation of Genesis,
yet even Chouraqui appears to reach a limit with this word. As cited, he
translates the name as ‘Bavel, Confusion’. Whereas in the Hebrew text
there was one word audible as ‘City of God’ and at the same time ‘con-
fusion’, in Chouraqui’s translation there are two words. He is forced to
a certain analysis or explanation and while capitalization in ‘Confusion’
produces the effect of the proper name, for Derrida it is an insufficient
compromise.151 Antoine Berman describes what happens in Chouraqui’s
translation as an ‘unfolding’ of a phrase or word that in the original is
‘folded’.152 It is this ‘folded’ nature of a word that for Derrida is always
threatened by translation while at the same time being the very ‘chance’ of
translation. Chouraqui’s translation does more than a translation, properly
speaking, should:

It comments, explains, paraphrases, but does not translate. At best it repro-

duces approximately and by dividing the equivocation into two words
there where confusion gathered in potential, in all its potential, in the
internal translation, if one can say that, which works the word in the so-
called original tongue.153

As with pharmakon which can be heard at the same time as ‘poison’

and ‘remedy’; what is lost in translation is this particular equivocation,
the undecidability, the homonymic and homophonic effect. Could this
 Derrida and Translation 195

double meaning at play in a word be called a translation? In this regard,

Roman Jakobson proposes three categories of translation; interlingual,
intralingual and intersemiotic. Intersemiotic translation is translation
across different signifying mediums, ‘an interpretation of verbal signs
by means of signs of nonverbal sign systems.’154 For example, Stéphane
Mallarmé’s poem L’après-midi d ’un faune (1876) could be said to have
been intersemiotically translated to Claude Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-
midi d ’un faune (1894) which in turn was further translated to a ballet
of the same name (1912) by Vaslav Nijinsky. We could also think of
the Merchant of Venice and the intersemiotic translation of money into a
pound of flesh. Intralingual translation is for Jakobson rewording, to say
‘in other words’. Here the message is given different clothes but from the
wardrobe of the same language. Finally there is interlingual translation,
what Jakobson terms ‘translation proper’ which is ‘an interpretation of
verbal signs by means of some other language.’.155
Someone whose mother tongue is the same as that of the Bible would
effect what Derrida terms ‘a confused translation of the proper name
[Babel] by its common equivalent without having need for another
word. It is as if there were two words there.’156 Could this be, however,
Jakobson’s intralingual translation? It is not a rewording as such for
there is no need for another word; the translating that takes place in
the name ‘Babel’ divides the name already without recourse to another
word ‘outside’ itself. The name, and every name, is already divided
‘inside’ itself because it is already contaminated by what is ‘outside’
it. In other words, the name functions because it is both proper name
and common noun at the same time. At issue with Jakobson’s ‘reas-
suring tripartition’157 is the presupposed unity of any given language.
As Derrida notes, Jakobson’s ‘intralingual’ and ‘interlingual’ translation
presuppose that one can know the limits, the beginning and end points
of any one language.
Derrida further notices that Jakobson offers a ‘translation’ of two
of his descriptions: ‘intralingual translation or rewording’ and ‘interse-
miotic translation or transmutation’.158 However, with the third form
of translation Jakobson does not ‘translate’, describing it simply as
‘interlingual translation or translation proper.’159 Davis points out
that Jakobson thus distinguishes between the literal and the figural,
196 Derrida, the Subject and the Other

privileging le sens propre ‘the literal sense’ of translation.160 In this way

Jakobson falls prey to the notion that the meaning of ‘translation’ is
transparent. Derrida describes this as the presupposition that everyone
knows ‘what is a language, the relation of one language to another and
especially identity or difference in fact of language.’161 However it is
this presumed unity and identity of a language that Derrida seeks to
disrupt. If Babel names the fact of translation it is not only because it
names the origin of languages but also because language itself, even
in what is called ‘one’ language, is already divided. Babelization takes
place in every language:

The border of translation does not pass among various languages. It sepa-
rates translation from itself, it separates translatability within one and the
same language. […] Babelization does not therefore wait for the multiplic-
ity of languages. The identity of a language can only affirm itself by open-
ing itself to the hospitality of a difference from itself or of a difference with
itself.162

Pas de Monolinguisme

Babel as a name both translates and does not translate itself; this is not
only the case with the proper name but with all language in general. It
is a situation which no theory, which is always produced in a language,
can escape or dominate. This ‘Babelian performance’ of language serves,
for Derrida, ‘as an introduction to all the so-called theoretical problems
of translation.’163 One of the difficulties of these theories of translation,
as described with the example of Jakobson, is the presumption of uni-
fied identity. This presumption reaches its limit when addressing the
event of multiplicity. There are two kinds of multiplicity that transla-
tion struggles with. The first is that of multiple meanings in a single
phrase or word (‘Babel’, pharmakon, l’arrêt de mort, pas and so on). The
second is that of multiple languages in a single language (a French word
in an English text, for example). While I will here examine each of these
individually, it should be noted that Derrida’s own logic would prevent
a clear and absolute separation between the two. As he notes in ‘Plato’s
 Derrida and Translation 197

Pharmacy’: ‘Theuth is evoked indeed as the author of difference: of dif-

ferentiation within language and not of the plurality of languages. But it
is our belief that at their root the two problems are inseparable.’164 I out-
lined above the manner in which the proper name is divided and here
I want to explore that division in order to show that the multiplicity at
play in language is mirrored in the multiplicity at play in subjectivity.
That the concept of a secure and clearly defined self-identity, relies on a
model of binary opposition that is inherently problematic.
I begin this mapping of multiplicity from language to subject with
another ‘untranslatable’ phrase from Derrida: il y va d ’un certain pas.
The phrase is of particular interest here since it gathers the themes of
identity, belonging, and translation together. Derrida poses this phrase
within an exploration of life and death. The question of how we can
understand the words ‘my life’ or ‘my death’, of how we can think of
these things as ‘proper’ to us; raises the issue of belonging. What does it
mean to say ‘my life belongs to me’ or, as Heidegger says, ‘my death is
my own most proper possibility’? What is the nature of this belonging?
These questions are not unrelated to the manner in which words are said
to belong to a language and the manner in which we speak of ‘my lan-
guage’ as that which belongs to us, or as that to which we belong. All of
these issues pose the question of how something (a life/a language) can
be limited or absolutely determined. Death is often considered as the
limit or border of life. Or it is considered as that which has no border—
an infinite beyond. With either understanding death would seem to be
most often construed as involving a certain step: from here to there, from
life to or across death: Il y va d ’un certain pas. Which could be literally
and variously translated as: ‘It is about a certain step’/‘It is about a certain
“not”’/‘He goes along there at a certain pace’/‘He goes along there with
a certain gait’.
This discussion of the life/death border first took place at a conference
whose title and theme was ‘Le Passage des frontières (autour de Jacques
Derrida)’—‘The Crossing of Borders around Jacques Derrida.’165 In rais-
ing the theme of border crossings, the conference title already poses the
issue of hospitality; of how to welcome the one who crosses the border.
The first duty of which, argues Derrida, is to pay duty, homage and atten-
tion to linguistic difference. In order to fulfil this duty as both host and
198 Derrida, the Subject and the Other

guest, Derrida begins ‘with an untranslatable sentence.’166 We recall the

manner in which Derrida insisted on the untranslatability of his title
‘What is a “Relevant” Translation?’ There at issue was the fact that the
language to which ‘relevant’ belonged was undecidable. It could not
be determined as French or English and nor could its German echo, as
a translation of the Hegelian Aufheben/Aufhebung, be overcome. Now
however, Derrida begins with a sentence—il y va d ’un certain pas—which
would seem to belong quite simply to the French language. Its linguistic
border is not ambivalent in the way that ‘relevant’ was.
The sentence is no doubt difficult to translate into another language
without an essential loss of some of its ambiguity. The clumsy English
sentence—‘it is about a certain step/not’ or ‘he goes along there at a
certain pace/with a certain gait’—struggles to capture its polysemic
play. It ends up explicating rather than translating in the same way that
Chouraqui’s ‘Bavel, Confusion’ did above. This untranslatability testifies
to the phrase’s belonging to the French language, since no other language
could capture these multiple meanings in exactly the same way. However,
the phrase’s singular ‘identity’ as French is revealed only by its division
within French. The hyper-translatability within French leads to untrans-
latability ‘outside’ of French. Not only because within French its meaning
is ambiguous, but more importantly because any translation will lose the
undecidable nature of this meaning.
Derrida illustrates three different ways to understand this sentence in
French. Firstly the il may mean ‘he’, a masculine personal subject who
‘goes’ [va] ‘there’ [y] at a certain pace or gait. Secondly, the il may be
the neuter ‘it’, so that il y va would be ‘it is about’ or ‘what is concerned
here’. The sentence would say that what is in question is the gait or step
or traversal [pas].167 Finally however, Derrida notes, we might introduce
‘inaudible quotation marks or italics’ through which ‘one can also men-
tion a mark of negation, by citing it: a certain “not” [pas] (no, not, nicht,
kein).’168 The sentence performs Babel already in its ‘own’ language.
One may object that surely context would provide the clue to deci-
phering which of these three possible pathways the phrase would answer
to. However, what context cannot do is provide certainty; ‘no context is
absolutely saturable or saturating. No context can determine meaning
to the point of exhaustiveness.’169 Context may offer us the possibility of
 Derrida and Translation 199

excluding certain meanings, a sort of negative path to determination. Yet,

even in order to be subsequently excluded, the irrelevant meaning would
still arise. Any meaning chosen or determined would remain haunted
by its remainder, by its excluded negative. The ‘shibboleth’ effect already
operates within the French.170
If Babelization can be performed in a word or phrase within only ‘one’
language, what happens in a text written in more than one language at
the same time? Derrida argues that translation theory tends to focus its
attention on the translation of one single language into another single
language. The translation of the source language or la langue de départ,
into the target language or la langue d ’arrivée. Translation theory assumes
the unity of each of these departing and arriving languages, it assumes
translation moves in a straight line from departure to arrival and that
each of these are enclosed with a sure and indivisible border separating
them:

[L]et us note one of the limits of theories of translation: all too often they
treat the passing from one language to another and do not sufficiently
consider the possibility for languages to be implicated more than two in a
text. How is a text written in several languages at a time to be translated?
How is the effect of plurality to be ‘rendered’? And what of translating with
several languages at a time, will that be called translating?171

What happens if the departure language is already inhabited by another,

its unity already disrupted form within? Walter Benjamin’s essay on trans-
lation, for example, includes a quotation from the poet Mallarmé. This
quotation is left entirely in French in Benjamin’s German text.172 What
then is the translator to do when faced with this multilingual text? The
translation of Benjamin’s essay into English leaves the Mallarmé quote in
French achieving, if not the same, at least a measure of the performative
force achieved in the German. However, in the translation into French by
Maurice de Gandillac, which Derrida cites extensively, this ‘performative
force’ is lost. The Benjamin text in French becomes homogenous, undi-
vided by a second language. The situation is similar with the Borges story
‘Pierre Ménard: Author of the Quixote’. This ‘critical essay’ by Borges
examines the work of the fictional French author Pierre Ménard who,
200 Derrida, the Subject and the Other

consumed by jealousy for Cervantes’ work, undertakes the project of

writing Cervantes’ Don Quixote. Ménard does not translate or produce
a ‘version’ or parody of the Quixote but re-creates it line by line. While
Borges’ fiction is written in Spanish, Derrida notes its language is inhab-
ited by a ‘Frenchness that inserts a slight division within the Spanish.’173
Translated into French, however, this ‘slight division’ is lost. How is a text
written in several languages at a time to be translated?
I mentioned above the strange relationship of English speaking Irish
people to both the Irish and the English language. James Joyce captures
this sense of disjointedness vividly and perhaps nowhere more so than in
Finnegan’s Wake, ‘the major corpus, the great challenge to translation’.174
Derrida takes the example of ‘And he war’ from this work to further illus-
trate the impossibility of deciding upon a single language for a single text.
The phrase ‘he war’ occurs in a sentence that specifically names Babel:
‘And let Nek Nekulon extol Mak Makal and let him say unto him: Immi
ammi Semmi. And shall not Babel be with Lebab? And he war. And he
shall open his mouth and answer: I hear… ’175 The phrase ‘he war’ may
well be within what Derrida terms the dominant language of the text
(English), but it is also, as Derrida highlights, haunted by the German
war as ‘was’.176 So that the line ‘And shall not Babel be with Lebab?’
could in fact be read with the answer ‘And he war [was].’ I might add
that there is further an echo of Dublin pronunciation at play here in that
‘were’ is often pronounced ‘war[e]’. As such while the French translation
as il-guerre, ‘he declares war’, captures what takes place–God declares war
against the Shems—it nonetheless loses this German (and Dublin) echo
found in the ‘English’ text. What is lost is ‘the event which consists in
grafting several tongues onto a single body.’177 Even if one might find
a translation that captured all the layers of meaning at play in Joyce’s
phrase, what translation could not capture would be the fact that there
are many languages here. Yet for Derrida this pluralistic play of mul-
tiple languages, which marks translation as impossible, is not exclusive
to Joyce. Translation ‘can get everything across except this: the fact that
there are, in one linguistic system, perhaps several languages or tongues.
Sometimes—I would even say always—several tongues. There is impu-
rity in every language.’178
 Derrida and Translation 201

***

All so-called identities, inasmuch as they are formed through language,

are implicated in this impurity. There is always more than one: more
than one meaning within a language; so that translation is always already
operating within linguistic borders. But also more than one language; so
that the very singularity of ‘one’ language is necessarily inhabited by and
in fact constituted through another. The subject, called forth by language
through the proper name, that is, the demand to translate and not to
translate, is also multiple, divided and ambivalent. As such, the subject/
other relation becomes for Derrida, a complicated one. The address of
one to the other cannot be guaranteed, it can always be diverted from
its course. Not only because the call of the other must traverse a spacing
which interrupts and contaminates it, but also because what is named as
‘subject’ or ‘other’ is itself already divided. The ‘identity’ of language is
constructed by a division or difference within itself and this is also the
condition of the subject as self. ‘Condition of the self, such a difference
from and with itself would then be its very thing.’179 There cannot be a
single direct call of one which directly reaches a single unified other. Once
these poles are named they are already divided, the call diverted. Crossing
borders—between languages, between life and death or between self and
other—implies stepping across some kind of line. For Derrida that line is
necessarily already divided, so that one can never be sure quite where or
when the crossing takes place. The French phrase, il y va d ’un certain pas,
is divided in its meaning; Benjamin’s German text is also in French; the
English word ‘relevant’ is a French word with German echoes; and so it
goes on. Borders are necessarily porous, which means identity is necessar-
ily multiple or demultiplied:

[W]here the identity or indivisibility of a line (finis or peras) is compro-

mised, the identity to oneself and therefore the possible identification of an
intangible edge—the crossing of a line—becomes a problem. There is a
problem as soon as the edge-line is threatened. And it is threatened from its
first tracing. This tracing can only institute the line by dividing it intrinsi-
cally into two sides. There is a problem as soon as this intrinsic division
divides the relation to itself of the border and therefore divides the being-
one-self of anything.180
202 Derrida, the Subject and the Other

Notes
1. This was originally a conference presentation at the Quinzièmes
Assises de la Traduction Littéraire à Arles (ATLAS) in 1998. The
translator of this article into English, Lawrence Venuti, also pub-
lished an article on his experience of translating Derrida and insti-
tutional resistance to Translation Studies in general titled
‘Translating Derrida on Translation: Relevance and Disciplinary
Resistance’ (Yale Journal of Criticism, 2003 Vol. 16 No.2 pp. 237–
262). For Venuti’s strategy of how to translate Derrida, see in par-
ticular pp. 252–7 of this article.
2. Relevant n. p. 44 /trans. p. 196 n.8.
3. In Le pas au-delà (1973) Blanchot introduces the neologism of an
arrête which combines both the verb arrêter and the noun arête
meaning ‘ridge’, ‘cutting edge’ or ‘backbone’. This edge or sharp
dividing line introduces an instability to arrêter making it perform
in an undecidable way as something like ‘death ridge’ or ‘suspen-
sion edge’.
4. DTB pp. 209–216 /trans. pp. 165–172.
5. OA p. 160 /trans. p. 120 [my italics].
6. Venuti, article cited, p. 255 Venuti here notes that he maintains the
various spellings in his own English version of the text, as well as
the numerous words in German in order to foreground the issue of
translation and to turn the reader into a translator.
7. Relevant, pp. 22–3 /trans. p. 176 Baugh & Cable (op. cit. pp. 163–
181) list the noun of this adjective, ‘relieve’, as coming to English
through the Norman invasion and hence a contribution from
French. The Oxford English Dictionary also cites it as arriving from
Latin through the French relever an early meaning of which was to
‘rise from the dead’. However, while one can find numerous defini-
tions of relever in French dictionaries the adjective relevante is con-
spicuously absent.
8. See DG, p. 231 /trans. p. 162.
9. Relevant p. 25 /trans. p. 178 [italics in original].
10. Relevant pp. 25–6 /trans. pp. 178–9.
 Derrida and Translation 203

11. Relevant p. 27 /trans. p. 180 The ‘word’ here of course, carries mul-
tiple meanings. ‘In the beginning was the Word [λόγος], and the
Word was with God [Θεόν], and the Word was God’ (John 1:1,
New International Version [NIV]). On the one hand, in the con-
text it is strictly speaking a calculable measurement. On the other
hand, ‘word’ also means promise, honour, oath as in ‘I give you my
word’—‘I make a promise to you’. And from this in French parole
we derive the English word ‘parole’; a prisoner gives his ‘word’ to
abide by the law or to return to prison at a given time.
12. Relevant p. 28 /trans. p. 181 The question of translation as a ruin
ties with the notion of a sur-vival; a translation makes present a
trace of the original not as fully present but as a memory of what
was once the ‘original’. This would also be the case of all texts as
translations of other texts and as containing within them their own
future translations. The architectural motif should also not be
passed over. As Derrida notes in a commentary on Descartes’ use of
the word roman and the dream of a universal language which would
be like a completed tower of Babel; architecture and linguistics can-
not be separated—see Transfert pp. 327–8 /trans. p. 32.
13. Relevant pp. 30–1 /trans. p. 183.
14. Picking up on this idea of economy in the play Simon Critchley
and Tom McCarthy in their own reading argue that the play illus-
trates the Aristotelian distinction between two types of economy.
On the one hand a ‘proper’ economy of the household or oikos
which would be understood as a good, that is to say, finite or lim-
ited economy which seeks only what is necessary for the household
to live well—the oikonomia of Antonio. And on the other hand, an
illusory or indefinite economy based on the infinite exchangeability
of goods through the introduction of money (to chrema)—the
techne chrematisike of Shylock. (Critchley & McCarthy ‘Universal
Shylockery: Money and Morality in The Merchant of Venice’,
Diacritics vol.34, no.1, 2004 pp. 3–17) See in particular p. 7 and
pp. 13–14.
15. Relevant p. 31 /trans. p. 184.
16. Relevant p. 33 /trans. p. 185.
17. Relevant p. 34 /trans. p. 186.
204 Derrida, the Subject and the Other

18. Relevant p. 40 /trans. p. 192.

19. Critchley & McCarthy, op.cit. p. 13.
20. Relevant p. 35 /trans. p. 188.
21. Shakespeare (Merchant of Venice [MV] 4.1.180–3) cited in Derrida,
Relevant p. 39 /trans. p. 191.
22. Relevant p. 39 /trans. pp. 191–2.
23. Shakespeare (MV 4.1.184–93) cited in Derrida; Relevant pp. 39–40 /
trans. p. 192.
24. Relevant p. 40 /trans. p. 193.
25. Relevant n. p. 40 /trans. n.5 p. 193.
26. Davis, op.cit., p.50.
27. Relevant p. 42 /trans. p. 194 See also ‘Theology of Translation’ in
Transfert pp. 371–394 /trans. pp. 64–80.
28. Relevant pp. 42–3 /trans. p. 195.
29. Relevant p. 43 /trans. p. 196.
30. In a lecture delivered in 1968 and subsequently published in 1972:
‘Le puits et la pyramide: Introduction à la sémiologie de Hegel’
(‘The Pit and the Pyramid: Introduction to Hegel’s Semiology’).
Published in M pp. 79–127 /trans. pp. 69–108 On the use of this
translation, see also ‘Les fins de l’homme’ (‘The Ends of Man’) (in
M pp. 129–164 /trans. pp. 109–136), in particular pp. 139–142 /
trans. pp. 117–119.
31. Relevant pp. 43–4 /trans. p. 196 See also OA pp. 171–2 /trans.
pp. 129–30.
32. ‘De l’économie restreinte à l’économie générale: Un hegelianisme
sans réserve’ (‘From Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism
without Reserve’) in ED pp. 369–407 /trans. pp. 327–350.
33. VP p. 115 /trans. p. 103 This of course does not mean that we
know nothing but that ‘we are beyond absolute knowledge.’ What
Derrida seeks to undermine with the idea of ‘an unheard-of ques-
tion’ is the history of philosophy as ‘an absolute will-to-hear-oneself-
speak’ that would in some way come before or as foundational to
representation. The question of hearing (ouïr) and the ear (oreille)
remained a concern for Derrida in many ways, see for example
L’oreille de l’autre (The Ear of the Other—OA) or ‘L’oreille de
Heidegger Philopolémologie (Geschlecht IV )’ [in Politique de
 Derrida and Translation 205

l’amitié (Paris: Editions Galilée, 1994) pp. 341–419. Trans. by

John P. Leavey Jr. ‘Heidegger’s Ear: Philopolemology (Geschlecht
IV )’ in John Sallis (ed.) Reading Heidegger: Commemorations
(Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1993) pp. 163–218]. In this lat-
ter work part of Derrida’s reading of Heidegger is to interrogate
how one can hear what Heidegger describes as the ‘unheard’ essence.
34. M trans. p. 43 n.15.
35. Relevant p. 46 /trans. p. 198.
36. Relevant pp. 44–5 /trans. p. 197.
37. Benjamin, p. 62 /trans. p. 75.
38. Relevant p. 45 /trans. p. 197.
39. Relevant p. 46 /trans. p. 198.
40. Relevant p. 46 /trans. p. 199.
41. Relevant pp. 46–7 /trans. p. 199.
42. Davis notes that the ‘certain concept’ of translation that Derrida
refers to—an unproblematic transfer of meaning ‘without any
essential harm being done’—is indeed that which has dominated
translation theory at least since the Middle Ages (see Davis p. 18).
43. Transfert pp. 283–342 /trans. pp. 1–42.
44. Transfert p. 289 /trans. p. 5.
45. Transfert p. 290 /trans. p. 6 ‘du droit à la philosophie’ could also be
translated as: ‘for the right to philosophy’; Derrida is playing here
with what becomes the principle focus of this essay, namely that in
order to plead for one’s right (to philosophy or for one’s rights in
general) one must speak the language of the law.
46. Transfert p. 297 /trans. p. 11.
47. Transfert p. 299 /trans. p. 12.
48. Transfert p. 299 /trans. p. 12.
49. Transfert pp. 300–301 /trans. pp. 12–13.
50. Transfert p. 301 /trans. p. 13.
51. Declan Kiberd Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern
Nation (London: Random House, 1995) p. 624.
52. Seamus Deane was a founding member of the Field Day Project; a
literary project that produced a number of plays (including Brian
Friel’s Translations), poems, pamphlets and recordings and in short
sought to establish a cultural space within which the dual nature of
206 Derrida, the Subject and the Other

Irish identity could be mutually explored and in particular trans-

lated. See Aidan O’Malley Field Day and the Translation of Irish
Identities: Performing Contradictions (London: Palgrave Macmillan,
2011), see in particular ‘In Other Words: Locating a Touring
Theatre Company’ pp. 1–24.
53. See Declan Kiberd, op.cit. In particular: ‘Writing Ireland Reading
England’ pp. 268–285 and ‘Translating Tradition’ pp. 624–638
For a detailed account of the ‘translational-transnational’ history of
the Irish language and the history of translation in the establish-
ment of ‘Irish’ identity see for example Michael Cronin Translating
Ireland: Translation, Languages, Culture (Cork: Cork University
Press, 1995). There is not the space here to discuss the issue of post-
colonialism and translation; an area of prolific scholarship over the
last thirty years.
54. Transfert pp. 321–2 /trans. p. 28.
55. Transfert p. 317 /trans. p. 24.
56. Transfert p. 295 /trans. p. 9 Derrida cites the letter of Henri II to
Guy de Bruès in 1556.
57. Transfert p. 320 /trans. p. 7.
58. Transfert pp. 314–316 /trans. pp. 22–4.
59. Descartes Discourse on Method cited in Derrida, Transfert pp. 283–4
/trans. p. 1 and passim.
60. Cited by Derrida Transfert p. 308 /trans. p. 19.
61. Transfert p. 314 /trans. p. 22.
62. Survivre pp. 140–1 /trans. pp. 76–7.
63. Survivre p. 161 /trans. p. 95.
64. DTB p. 239 /trans. p. 196.
65. DTB pp. 239–243 /trans. pp. 196–200.
66. Kimberley Brown ‘In Borges Shadow’ Janus Head 8 (1), 2005 pp.
349–351 However, this seems to be only di Giovanni’s version of
events. Lawrence Venuti claims the relationship was ended by
Borges himself as a result of de Giovanni’s excessively free transla-
tions that Borges felt significantly distorted his work—see Lawrence
Venuti The Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics of Difference
(London & New York: Routledge, 1998) pp. 4–5.
 Derrida and Translation 207

67. Henri Desbois, Le droit d’auteur en France (Paris: Dalloz, 1978)

p. 41 cited in Derrida DTB p. 243 /trans. p. 199.
68. DTB p. 242 /trans. p. 199 For more on the strange situation of the
translator who ‘both is and is not an author’ in terms of copyright
law, see for example Lawrence Venuti The Translator’s Invisibility: A
History of Translation (London & New York: Routledge, 1995)
pp. 6–12.
69. Maurice Blanchot La part du feu (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1949)
p. 173 /trans. by Charlotte Mandell The Work of Fire (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1995) p. 176.
70. Survivre p. 192 /trans. p. 121.
71. Survivre p. 191 /trans. p. 120.
72. Survivre p. 192 /trans. p. 121.
73. Relevant p. 26 /trans. p. 179.
74. Blanchot, cited in Derrida, Survivre p. 195 /trans. p. 123.
75. Survivre p. 196 /trans. p. 124.
76. Survivre p. 196 /trans. p. 124.
77. Survivre p. 197 /trans. p. 125.
78. Survivre pp. 197–8 /trans. pp. 125–6.
79. Originally presented in a different and shorter form at a bilingual
conference in 1992 Louisiana State University, entitled Echoes from
Elsewhere/Renvois d’ailleurs.
80. Mono. p. 15 /trans. p. 2 and passim.
81. Mono. p. 13 /trans. p. 1.
82. Mono. p. 24 /trans. p. 9.
83. Mono. p. 67 /trans. p. 38.
84. Mono. p. 68 /trans. p. 38.
85. Mono. p. 67 /trans. p. 38.
86. Mono. p. 68 /trans. p. 38.
87. Mono. pp. 29–51 /trans. pp. 12–27 Derrida also discusses the
Franco-Algerian situation in De l’hospitalité: Anne Dufourmantelle
invite Jacques Derrida à repondre (Paris: Clamann-Lévy, 1997)
Trans. by Rachel Bowlby Of Hospitality Anne Dufourmantelle Invites
Jacques Derrida to Respond (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
2000) pp. 125–133 /trans. pp. 141–147.
88. Mono. p. 35 /trans. p. 16.
208 Derrida, the Subject and the Other

89. Mono. p. 32 /trans. p. 14.

90. Mono. pp. 87–8 /trans. p. 52: ‘They [Franco-Maghrebian Jews]
could not identify themselves in the terms of models, norms, or
values whose development was to them alien because French, met-
ropolitan, Christian, and Catholic. In the milieu where I lived, we
used to say “the Catholics”; we called all the non-Jewish French
people “Catholics,” even if they were sometimes Protestants, or
perhaps even Orthodox: “Catholic” meant anyone who was neither
a Jew, a Berber, nor an Arab. At that time, these young indigenous
Jews could easily identify neither with the “Catholics,” the Arabs,
nor the Berbers, whose language they did not generally speak in
that generation’.
91. Mono. p. 42 /trans. p. 21.
92. Mono. p. 69 /trans. p. 39.
93. Mono. p. 117 /trans. p. 61.
94. Mono. p. 118 /trans. p. 61 See also, Kiberd, op.cit. in particular
‘Return to the Source?’ pp. 133–36.
95. Mono. p. 123 /trans. p. 65.
96. Mono. p. 126 /trans. p. 67.
97. Mono. p. 127 /trans. p. 68.
98. Mono. p. 128 /trans. p. 68 See also pp. 109–111 /trans. pp. 90–1
where Derrida discusses Levinas’s own relation with the French lan-
guage as a ‘host’ language though never a maternal language.
99. Mono. p. 128 /trans. p. 68.
100. Mono. p. 134 /trans. p. 72.
101. DG p. 329 /trans. p. 231 Although Derrida is here referring to
Rousseau’s essay ‘On the Origin of Languages’ and not to a myth,
it nonetheless reflects many of the mythic motifs.
102. Deborah Levine Gera Ancient Greek Ideas on Speech, Language and
Civilisation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003) pp. 117–118.
103. Diss. pp. 69–198 /trans. pp. 69–186
104. Diss. pp. 95–107 /trans. pp. 89–97.
105. Diss. p. 105–6 /trans. pp. 96–7.
106. Diss. pp. 105–6 /trans. pp. 96–7.
107. Genesis 11:1–9 (New International Version [NIV]).
 Derrida and Translation 209

108. Elad Lapidot ‘What is the Reason for Translating Philosophy? I

Undoing Babel’ in Lisa Foran (Ed.) Translation and Philosophy
(Oxford: PeterLang, 2012) pp. 89–105 [Hereafter Lapidot] p. 89.
109. DTB p. 209 /trans. p. 165.
110. DTB p. 209 /trans. p. 165.
111. DTB pp. 228–9 /trans. p. 185.
112. Davis, op.cit. p. 10.
113. DG p. 159 /trans. p. 109.
114. ibid.
115. DG pp. 163–4 /trans. p. 111.
116. DTB p. 210 /trans. p. 166.
117. From which it might at first seem that the measure of translatability
would be equal to the measure by which a word belongs to a lan-
guage. Paradoxically, however, we will discover further on in this
chapter that the more a word or phrase belongs to just one language,
the less translatable it becomes. That is to say, the more a word/
phrase is particular to one language—the less open it is to the
other—the less translatable it becomes. And, as we saw in the last
chapter, a text if totally untranslatable in fact disappears entirely. So
that it is only by belonging and not belonging to a language at the
same time that a word/phrase/text can manage to sur-vive.
118. DTB p. 216 /trans. p. 172.
119. DTB p. 210 /trans. p. 166 (Derrida cites Voltaire’s Dictionnaire
philosophique)
120. DTB p. 210 /trans. p. 166.
121. OA pp. 135–6 /trans. p. 101.
122. OA p. 135 /trans. p. 100.
123. DTB p. 211 /trans. p. 167.
124. Transfert pp. 293–4 /trans. p. 8 ‘The imposition of a State language
implies an obvious purpose of conquest and administrative domi-
nation of the territory, exactly like the opening of a road [...] But
there is a still more urgent necessity for us, right here: that by which
the aforementioned figure of the path to be cleared imposes itself,
in a way, from within, in order to tell the progress of a language.’
125. Transfert p. 291 /trans. p. 6.
126. Transfert pp. 283–309 /trans. pp. 1–19.
210 Derrida, the Subject and the Other

127. DTB p. 218 /trans. p. 174.

128. OA p. 135 /trans. p. 101.
129. Genesis 11:8–9 translated from the French translation by
Chouraqui, cited by Derrida DTB p. 214 /trans. p. 170. This ‘over
which he proclaims his name’ is significantly different in other
translations of the text. In English language versions of the text
such as the NIV we read: ‘That is why it was called Babel—because
there the Lord confused the language of the whole world’ and in
the King James Version (KJV): ‘Therefore is the name of it called
Babel; because the Lord did there confound the language of all the
earth.’ Similar formulations are found in both the French Louis
Segond translation: ‘C’est pourquoi on l’appela du nom de Babel,
car c’est là que l’Éternel confondit le langage de toute la terre’ [That
is why it was called by the name of Babel, since it was there that the
Eternal confused the language of all the earth]; and in the standard
Reina Valera Spanish translation: ‘Por esto fué llamado el nombre
de ella Babel, porque allí confudió Jehová el lenguaje de toda la
tierra’ [For this reason was it called by the name Babel, because
there Jehova confused the language of the all the earth]. It is worth
noting in even this limited selection of translations, the number of
names God has: the Lord, the Eternal, Jehova, YHWH. The next
chapter looks at the impossibility of naming God and names of the
impossible. What has actually happened in this English translation
of Derrida’s text is the effacement of ambiguity. The phrase in the
Chouraqui translation is ‘Sur quoi [la ville] il clame son nom:
Bavel, Confusion.’ The son here could be ‘his’ or ‘its’ and Derrida
plays with the undecideability of to whom this son belongs. Graham,
on the other hand, decides on ‘his’. As Davis notes: ‘This reduction,
however reasonable, obscures the process of the strong reading that
Derrida gives the Babel story, which keeps the plurivocality of
‘Babel’ as the name of both the city and of God in play, and thus
demonstrates the impossibility of language naming an identity that
exists before or outside context.’ (Davis p. 11).
130. DTB p. 214 /trans. p. 170 See also OA p. 135–6 /trans. p. 101.
131. DTB p. 211 /trans. p. 167.
132. OA p. 136 /trans. p. 101.
 Derrida and Translation 211

133. DTB p. 213 /trans. p. 169.

134. See Lapidot op.cit.
135. Lapidot p. 101.
136. Davis, p. 12.
137. Davis p. 42.
138. OA p. 136 /trans. p. 101.
139. DTB p. 214 /trans. p. 170.
140. OA p. 136 /trans. p. 102.
141. OA p. 137 /trans. p. 102.
142. Patrick Mahony in Derrida OA p. 129 /trans. p. 96 Mahony’s
extended question takes place in the Freudian framework in rela-
tion to transference/translation and Derrida’s neologism tranche-
fert which is a play on the psychoanalytical term
transfert—‘transference’, see OA pp. 127–46 /trans. pp. 94–110.
143. OA p. 141 /trans. p. 106.
144. OA p. 142 /trans. p. 107 See also DG p. 162 /trans. p. 110.
145. OA p. 142 /trans. p. 107 See also DTB p. 248 /trans. p. 205.
146. OA p. 142 /trans. p. 107.
147. OA p. 142 /trans. p. 107.
148. OA p. 142–3 /trans. p. 107 The issue of being sent ‘off course’ and
its relation with psychoanalysis was explored in Derrida’s La Carte
Postale: de Socrate à Freud et au-delà (Paris: Flammarion, 1980)
trans. by Alan Bass The Postcard: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). Christopher Norris
in commenting on this work notes: ‘In La Carte postale Derrida will
play all manner of inventive games with this idea of the two postal
‘systems’, the one maintaining an efficient service (with the law and
police on hand if required), while the other opens up a fabulous
realm of messages and meanings that circulate beyond any assur-
ance of authorized control. […] there always comes a point where
meaning veers off into detours unreckoned with on thematic (or
indeed allegorical) terms.’ [Christopher Norris, Derrida (Harvard:
Harvard University Press, 1988) p. 116] These two ‘postal systems’
are always operative together and at the same time—the address or
the proper name function precisely because they are always under
212 Derrida, the Subject and the Other

the threat of not functioning. Their functioning can never be

described as pure.
149. Survivre p. 139 /trans. p. 78: ‘I shall not say that Blanchot offers a
representation, a mise en scène of this demand for narrative, in La
folie du jour: it would be better to say that it is there to be read, ‘to
the point of delireium’, as it throws the reader off the track.’
150. OA p. 137 /trans. p. 103.
151. OA pp. 138–9 /trans. p. 104.
152. Antoine Berman ‘La Traduction comme épreuve de l’étranger,’
Texte (1985) pp. 67–81, Trans. by Lawrence Venuti ‘Translation
and the Trials of the Foreign’ in Lawrence Venuti (ed.) The
Translation Studies Reader (London, New York: Routledge, 2000)
pp. 284–297 [hereafter Berman].
153. DTB p. 216 /trans. p. 172.
154. Roman Jakobson ‘On Linguistic Aspects of Translation’, 1st pub-
lished in 1959 reprinted in Lawrence Venuti (ed.) The Translation
Studies Reader (London, New York: Routledge, 2000) pp. 113–118
[Hereafter Jakobson] p. 114.
155. Jakobson p. 114.
156. DTB p. 217 /trans. p. 173.
157. DTB p. 218 /trans. p .174 For more on Derrida’s reading of
Jakobson see ‘Linguistics and Grammatology’ in DG pp. 42–108 /
trans. pp27–73 in particular see pp. 78–80 /trans. pp. 53–55 where
Derrida interrogates Jakobson’s notion of writing as ‘parasitic’ upon
speech.
158. Jakobson p. 114 cited by Derrida DTB p. 217 /trans. p. 173.
159. Jakobson p. 114 cited by Derrida DTB p. 217 /trans. p. 173.
160. Davis pp. 28–9.
161. DTB pp. 217–8 /trans. p. 174.
162. Apories p. 28 /trans. p. 10.
163. DTB p. 219 /trans. p. 175.
164. Diss. p. 100 /trans. p. 93 (my italics).
165. The conference took place in Cerisy-la-Salle in July 1992. (Apories
p. 11 /trans. p.ix) The conference title, its ‘proper name’, could be
translated in a myriad of ways: ‘The passage/crossing/changeover of
 Derrida and Translation 213

borders/frontiers (around about/at the turns of [autour also sounds

like aux tours—at the tower(s)/turn(s)] of Jacques Derrida’.
166. Apories p. 26 /trans. p. 8.
167. Apories pp. 27–8 /trans. pp. 9–10.
168. Apories p. 28 /trans. p. 10.
169. Apories pp. 26–7 /trans. p. 9.
170. Apories p. 27 /trans. p. 9.
171. DTB p. 215 /trans. p. 171 Derrida does not detail exactly what or
whose translation theory he is discussing here. As he often does he
describes it only generally as a ‘certain understanding of translation’
in the way he often comments on a ‘certain understanding of read-
ing’. This ‘certain understanding of translation’ Derrida describes as
‘the transfer of meaning or a truth from one language to another
without any essential harm being done.’ (OA p. 159 /trans. p. 120)
Davis notes that this concept of unproblematic transfer of meaning
is indeed that ‘which has historically dominated discussions of
translation theory.’ While she notes exceptions to this rule are to be
found in the Middle ages, in particular in the writings of Augustine,
she highlights ‘such medieval theory, which accepted the arbitrary
nature of ‘fallen’ human language, also rested upon the notion of an
ultimate, divine truth, existent if not fully knowable. Like the phi-
losophy of Plato, it subscribed to a metaphysics of presence.’ (Davis
p. 18) Translation theory in recent years, however, seems to have
undergone a dramatic shift away from this paradigm. What is most
interesting about this shift, however, is that Davis links it specifically
with the impact of Derrida’s work. The proponents of a more subtle
understanding of translation theory—Rosemary Arrojo or Lawrence
Venuti for example—do not subscribe to the idea of unproblematic
transfer and are ‘most notably those sensitive to deconstruction.’
(Davis p. 91) See for example Arrojo ‘The Revision of the Traditional
Gap Between Theory and Practice and the Empowerment of
Translation in Postmodern Times’ in The Translator Vol. 4 No. 1
(1998) pp. 25–48 or Venuti The Scandals of Translation: Towards an
Ethics of Difference (New York: Routledge, 1998).
172. Benjamin p. 64 /trans. pp. 77–8.
214 Derrida, the Subject and the Other

173. OA p. 134 /trans. p. 100.

174. OA p. 132 /trans. p. 98.
175. James Joyce Finnegan’s Wake (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2012) p. 258 [my emphasis] Finnegan’s Wake as a whole could be
read as a performance of the Babelian event and it continuously
references the Babel narrative—one of the principle characters, for
example, is ‘Shem the Penman’. Joyce was also a theme in Derrida’s
Introduction where he compares Husserl and Joyce under the rubric
of translatability and ‘anti-historicism’ (Introduction pp. 104–106 /
trans. pp. 102–104). His two essays on Joyce are published together
in Ulysse gramophone: deux mots pour Joyce (Paris: Galilée, 1987). An
extended discussion of the phrase ‘he war’ from Finnegan’s Wake
along with what Derrida terms ‘the Joyce software today, joyceware’
takes place in ‘Two Words for Joyce’ [trans. by Geoffrey Bennington
in Derek Attridge & Daniel Ferrer (eds.) Post-structuralist Joyce:
Essays from the French (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1984)]. In ‘Ulysses Gramophone Hear Say Yes in Joyce’ [trans. by
Tina Kendall & Shari Benstock in Derek Attridge (ed.) Acts of
Literature (London: Routledge, 1992) pp. 253–309] Derrida exam-
ines occurrences of the telephone in Ulysses to describe a type of
‘pre-original yes’.
176. OA p. 133 /trans. p. 99.
177. OA p. 133 /trans. p. 99.
178. OA p. 134 /trans. p. 100.
179. Apories p. 28 /trans. p. 10.
180. Apories p. 30 /trans. p. 11.