Derrida Jacques Ear of The Other 1985
Derrida Jacques Ear of The Other 1985
Derrida Jacques Ear of The Other 1985
JACQUES DERRIDA
7Taru;lated by Avital Ronell
Texts and Discussions
with JACQUES DERRIDA
THE EAR OF
THE OTHER
Otobiography, Transference,
Translation
Preface vii
Translator's Note xi
Otobiographies 1
Roundtable on Autobiography 39
Roundtable on Translation 91
vii
viii Preface __ _ --------------- ---
JACQUES DERRIDA
Tra,~~lated by Avital Ronell
1. Logic of the Living Feminine
" ... for there are human beings who lack everything, except one
thing of which they have too much-human beings who are nothing
but a big eye or a big mouth or a big belly or anything at all that is
big. Inverse cripples (umgekehrte KruppeJ] I call them.
"And when I came out of my solitude and crossed over this bridge
for the first timsid~ trust my eyes and looked and looked again,
and said at las , 'An ear! An ear as big as a man!' I looked still more
closely-and i , underneath the ear something was moving,
something pitifully small and wretched and slender. And, no doubt
of it, the tremendous ear was attached to a small, thin stalk-but this
stalk was a human being! If one used a magnifying glass one could
even recognize a tiny envious face: also, that a bloated lile soul was
dangling from the stalk. The people, however, told me that this great
ear was not only a human being, but a great one, a genius. But I never
believed the people when they spoke of great men; and I maintained
my belief that it was an inverse cripple who had too little of every-
thing and too much of one thing.''
When Zarathustra had spoken thus to the hunchback and to those
whose mouthpiece and advocate (Mundstuck and Fursprecher] the
hunchback was, he turned to his disciples in profound dismay and
said: "Verily. my friends, I walk among men as among the fragments
and limbs of men (Bruchshicken und GJiedmassen]. This is what is
terrible for my eyes, that I find man in ruins (zerstriimmert] and
scattered (zerstreut) as over a battlefield or a butcher-field (Schlacht-
und SchliJchterfeld). ("On Redemption," Thus Spake Zarathustra)
I would like to spare you the tedium, the waste of time, and
the subservience that always accompany the classic pedagogi-
cal procedures of forging links, referring back to prior prem-
ises or arguments, justifying one's own trajectory, method,
system, and more or less skillful transitions, reestablishing
3
4 Otobiosraphies ________________ _
Seeing that before long I must confront humanity with the most diffi-
cult demand that has ever been made of it, it seems indispensable to
me to say who I am (wer ich bin is italicized). Really, one should
know it, for I have not left myself .. without testimony." But the
disproportion between the greatness of my task and the smallness of
my contemporaries has found expression in the fact that one has
neither heard nor even seen me. I live on my O\vn credit II go along
living on my own credit, the credit I establish and give myself: Ich
lebe auf meinen eigenen Kredit hin): it is perhaps a mere prejudice
that I live (vielleicht bloss ein Vorurteil doss ich lebe).
death of the one who says "I live" in the present: further. let
us assume that the relationship of a philosopher to his "great
name"-that is, to what borders a system of his signature-is
a matter of psychology, but a psychology so novel that it
would no longer be legible within the system of philosophy as
one of its parts, nor within psychology considered as a region
of the philosophical encyclopedia. Assuming, then, that all
this is stated in the Preface signed "Friedrich Nietzsche" to a
book entitled Ecce Homo-a book whose final words are
"Have I been understood? Dionysus versus the Crucified" (ge-
gen den Gekreuzigten), Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, Christ but not
Christ, nor even Dionysus, but rather the name of the versus.
the adverse or countemame, the combat called between the
two names-this would suffice. would it not, to pluralize in a
singular fashion the proper name and the homonymic mask? It
would suffice, that is, to lead all the affiliated threads of the
name astray in a labyrinth which is, of course, the labyrinth of
the ear. Proceed, then, by seeking out the edges, the inner
walls, the passages.
Between the Preface signed F.N., which comes after the
title, and the first chapter, "Why I Am"So Wise," there is a
single page. It is an outwork, an hors d'oeuvre. an exergue or
a flysheet whose topos. like (its) temporality, strangely dislo-
cates the very thing that we. with our untroubled assurance,
would like to think of as the time of life and the time of life's
recit, * of the writing of life by the living-in short. the time
of autobiography.
The page is dated. To date is to sign. And to "date from" is
also to indicate the place of the signature. This page is in a
certain way dated because it says "today" and today "my
birthday," the anniversary of my birth. The anniversary is the
moment when the year turns back on itself. forms a ring or
annulus with itself, annuls itself and begins anew. It is here:
my forty-fifth year, the day of the year when I am forty-five
years old, something like the midday of life. The noon of life,
even midlife crisis,t is commonly situated at about this age, at
the shadowless midpoint of a great day.
Here is how the exergue begins: "An diesem vollkommhen
Tage, wo Alles reift," "On this perfect day when everything is
ripening, and not only the grape turns brown, the eye of the
sun just fell upon my life [has fallen due as if by chance: fiel
fl\ir eben ein Sonnenblick auf meinen Leben)."
It is a shadow less moment consonant with all the' "mid-
days" of Zarathustra. It comes as a moment of affirmation,
returning like the anniversary from which one can look for-
ward and backward at one and the same time. The shadow of
all negativity has disappeared: "I looked back, I looked for-
ward, and never saw so many and such good things at once."
Yet, this midday tolls the hour of a burial. Playing on every-
day language, he buries his past forty-four years. But what he
actually buries is death, and in burying death he has saved
life-and immortality. "It was not for nothing that I buried
(begrub] my forty-fourth year today; I had the right to bury it:
whatever was life in it has been saved, is immortal. The first
book of the Revaluation of All Values, the Songs of Zarathus-
tra. the Twilight of the Idols. my attempt to philosophize with
a hammer-all presents [Geschenke) of this year, indeed of its
last quarter. How could I fail to be grateful to my whole life?-
and so I tell my life to myself" ("Und so erziihle ich mir mein
Leben").
He indeed says: I tell my life to myself; I recite and recount
it thus for me. We have come to the end of the excrgue on the
flysheet between the Preface and the beginning of Ecce Homo.
To receive one's life as a gift. or rather, to be grateful to life
for what she gives, for giving after all what is my life: more
precisely, to recognize one's gratitude to life for such a gift-
the gift being what has managed to get written and signed
with this name for which I have established my own credit
and which will be what it llas become only on the basis of
what this year has given me (the three works mentioned in the
passage), in the course of the event dated by an annual course
of the sun, and even by a part of its course or recourse, its
returning-to reaffirm what has occurred during these forty-
four years as having been good and as bound to return eter-
nally, immortally: this is what constitutes. gathers, adjoins,
and holds the strange present of this auto-biographical recit in
place. "Und so erziihle ich mir me in Leben." This recit that
buries the dead and saves the saved or exceptional as immor-
tal is not auto-biographical for the reason one commonly un-
derstands, that is, because the signatory tells the story of his
life or the return of his past life as life and not death. Rather, it
is because he tells himself this life and he is the narration's
first, if not its only, addressee and destination-within the
text. And since the "I" of this recit only constitutes itself
though the credit of the eternal return, he does not exist. He
does not sign prior to the recit qua eternal return. Until then,
until now. that I am living may be a mere prejudice. It is the
eternal return that signs or seals.
Thus, you cannot think the name or names of Friedrich
Nietzsche, you cannot hear them before the reaffirmation of
the hymen, before the alliance or wedding ring of the eternal
return. You will not understand anything of his life, nor of his
life and works. until you hear the thought of the "yes, yes"
given to this shadowless gift at the ripening high noon, be-
neath that division whose borders are inundated by sunlight:
the overflowing cup of the sun. Listen again to the overture of
Zarathustra.
This is why it is so difficult to determine the date of such an
event. How can one situate the advent of an auto-biographical
recit which, as the thought of the eternal return, requires that
we let the advent of all events come about in another way?
This difficulty crops up wherever one seeks to make a deter-
mination: in order to date an event, of course, but also in
order to identify the beginning of a text, the origin of life, or
the first movement of a signature. These are all problems of
the borderline.
14 Otobiosraphies ______
I shall not read Ecce Homo with you. I leave you with this
forewarning or foreword about the place of the exergue and
the fold that it forms along the lines of an inconspicuous limit:
There is no more shadow, and all statements, before and after,
left and right, are at once possible (Nietzsche said it all, more
or less) and necessarily contradictory (he said the most mutu-
ally incompatible things, and he said that he said them). Yet,
before leaving Ecce Homo. let us pick up just one hint of this
contradicting duplicity.
What happens right after this sort of exergue, after this date?
(It is, after all, a date:* signature, anniversary reminder, cele-
bration of gifts or givens, acknowledgment of debt.) After this
"date," the first chapter ("Why I Am So Wise") begins, as you
know, with the origins of "my" life: my father and my mother.
In other words, once again, the principle of contradiction in
my life which falls between the principles of death and life,
the end and the beginning. the high and the low, degeneracy
and ascendancy, et cetera. This contradiction is my fatality.
And my fatality derives from my very genealogy, from my
father and mother. from the fact that I decline, in the form of a
riddle, as my parents' identity. In a word, my dead father, my
living mother, my father the dead man or death, my mother
the living feminine or life. As for me, I am between the two:
this lot has fallen to me, it is a "chance," a throw of the dice:
and at this place my truth, my double truth, takes after both of
them. These lines are well known:
*From "dora liUero.'' "letter given," the first words of a rnedieval formula
indicating the time and place of a legal act.-Tr.
26 Otobiographies
The historical method has become so universal in our time, that even
the living body of language (der Jebendige Leib der Sprache) is sacri-
ficed to its anatomical study. But this is precisely where culture
[BHdung) begins-namely, in understanding how to treat the living
as living [das Lebendige aJs Jebendig], and it is here too that the
mission of the master of culture begins: in suppressing historical
interest' which tries to impose itself there where one must above all
else act [handeJn: to treat or handle] correctly rather than know cor-
rectly [richtig). Our mother-tongue is a domain in which the pupil
must learn to act correctly.
(Berthold) Auerbach and (Karl) Gutzkow are really poets, for his disgust (Ekel)
at both will be so great that he will be unable to read them any longer, and
thus the problem will be solved for him. Let no one imagine that it is an easy
matter to develop this feeling to the extent necessary in order to have this
physical loathing; but let no one hope to reach sound aesthetic judgments
along any other road than the thorny one of language, and by this I do not
mean philological research, but self-discipline in one's mother-tongue'" ("Sec-
ond Lecture").
Without wishing to exploit the German word "Signofur," one could say that
Nietzsche's historical disgust is aroused first of all by the signature of his era-
that by which his era distinguishes, signifies, characterizes, and identifies it-
self: namely, the democratic signature. To this signature, Nietzsche opposes
another one that is untimely, yet to come and still anachronistic. One could
reread the "First Lecture" from this point of view, with particular attention to
this passage: "But this belongs to the signature without value (nichfswurdigen
Signofur) of our present culture. The rights of genius have been democratized
so that people may be relieved of the labor by which one forms oneself, and of
the personal necessity of culture (Bildungsorbeit, Bildungsnof)."
Otoblosraphies 25
publish these lectures. On July 25, 1872, after the Fifth Lec-
ture, he writes to Wagner that "in the beginning of the coming
winter, I intend to give my Basel audience the sixth and sev-
enth lectures 'on the future of our educational institutions.' I
want at least to have done with it, even in the diminished and
inferior form with which I have treated this theme up until
now. To treat it in a superior form, I would have to become
more 'mature' and try to educate myself." However, he will
not deliver these two last lectures and will refuse to publish
them. On December 20, he writes to Malvida von Meysenbug:
"By now you will have read these lectures and have been
startled by the story's abrupt ending after such a long prelude
[he is referring to the narrative fiction, the imaginary conver-
sation that opens the first lecture), and to see how the thirst
for genuinely new thoughts and propositions ended up losing
itself in pure negativity and numerous digressions. This read-
ing makes one thirsty and, in the end, there is nothing to
drink! Truthfully, what I set out to do in the final lecture-a
series of nocturnal illuminations filled with extravagances and
colors-was not suitable for my Basel audience, and it was a
good thing the words never Jeft my mouth" (italics added].
And toward the end of the following February, he writes:
"You must believe me ... in a few years I will be able to do
better, and I will want to. In the meantime, these lectures have
for me the value of an exhortation: they call me to a duty and
a task that are distinctly incumbent upon me.... These lec-
tures are summary and, what is more, a bit improvised ....
Fritsch was prepared to publish them, but I swore not to pub-
lish any book that doesn't leave me with a conscience as clear
as an angel's."
Other protocol: One must allow for the "genre" whose code
is constantly re-marked, for narrative and fictional form and
the "indirect style." In short, one must allow for all the ways
intent ironizes or demarcates itself, demarcating the text by
leaving on it the mark of genre. These lectures, given by an
academic to academics and students on the subject of studies
in the university and secondary school, amount to a theatrical
26 Otobiographies
I know my fate (Ich kenne mein Los]. One day my name will be
associated with the memory of something monstrous (Ungeheures)-
a crisis without equal on earth, the most profound collision of con-
science (Gewissens-KoJJision), a decision (Entschiedung) that was
32 Otobiographies
State? What is that? Well, then, open your ears to me. For now I shall
speak to you about the death of peoples.
Stale is the name of the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly it tells
lies too; and this lie crawls out of its mouth: "I, the State, am the
people." That is a lie! ...
Confusion of tongues of good and evil: this sign I give you as the
sign of the state. Verily, this sign signifies the will to death! Verily, it
beckons to the preachers of death ....
''On earth there is nothing greater than 1: the ordering finger of God
am 1"-thus roars the monster. And it is only the long-eared (asses)
and shortsighted who sink to their knees! ...
State I call it where all drink poison, the good and the wicked:
state, where all lose themselves, the good and the wicked: state,
where the slow suicide of all is called "life."
Not only is the State marked by the sign and the paternal
figure of the dead, it also wants to pass itself off for the
mother-that is, for life, the people, the womb of things them-
selves. Elsewhere in Zarathustra ("On Great Events"), it is a
hypocritical hound, which, like the Church, claims that its
voice comes out of the "belly of reality."
The hypocritical hound whispers in your ear through his
educational systems, which are actually acoustic or acroa-
matic devices. Your ears grow larger and you turn into long-
Otobiographies 35
End of quotation. I have just read and you have just heard a
fragment of a discourse lent or cited by Nietzsche, placed in
the mouth of an ironic philosopher ("the philosopher laughed,
not altogether good-naturedly," before holding forth as has
just been related). This philosopher is old. He has left the
university, hardened and disappointed. He is not speaking at
noon but after noon-at midnight. And he has just protested
against the unexpected arrival of a flock, a horde, a swarm
[Schwarm] of students. What do you have against students?
they ask him. At first he does not answer; then he says:
Omphalos
The temptation is strong for all of us to recognize ourselves
on the program of this staged scene or in the pieces of this
musical score. I would give a better demonstration of this if
the academic time of a lecture did not forbid me to do so. Yes,
to recognize ourselves, all of us, in these premises and within
the walls of an institution whose collapse is heralded by the
old midnight philosopher. ("Constructed upon clay founda-
tions of the current Gymnasien-culture, on a crumbling
groundwork, your edifice would prove to be askew and un-
steady if a whirlwind were to swirl up.")
Yet, even if we were all to give in to the temptation of
recognizing ourselves, and even if we could pursue the dem-
onstration as far as possible, it would still be, a century later,
all of us men-not all of us women-whom we recognize.
For such is the profound complicity that links together the
protagonists of this scene and such is the contract that con-
trols everything, even their conflicts: woman, if I have read
correctly, never appears at any point along the umbilical
cord, either to study or to teach. She is the great "cripple,"
perhaps. No woman or trace of woman. And I do not make
this remark in order to benefit from that supplement of
seduction which today enters into all courtships or court-
rooms. This vulgar procedure is part of what I propose to call
"gynegogy."
No woman or trace of woman, if I have read correctly-save
the mother, that's understood. But this is part of the system.
The mother is the faceless figure of a figurant, an extra. She
gives rise to all the figures by losing herself in the background
of the scene like an anonymous persona. Everything comes
back to her, beginning with life; everything addresses and des-
tines itself to her. She survives on the condition of remaining
at bottom.
ROUNDTABLE ON
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Trall~'ilated by Peggy Kan1uJ
Rodolphe Gasche: The Internal Border
Yesterday, listening to "Otobiographies," we heard you,
Jacques Derrida, proceed with a revalorization and a reevalua-
tion of biography (a philosopher's; in this case, Nietzsche's) in
relation to a written corpus. This procedure olf your part
might at first appear paradoxical, not to say disappointing.
That is, if one were to listen to it with the wrong ear, then one
could easily reinterpret your gesture as sketching out a return
to certain academic positions-to psychobiography, for ex-
ample-all the more so since, inevitably, you make use of the
same language. Is it the same, however? As we will no doubt
return to this question tomorrow during our discussion of
translation, I will set it aside for the moment in order to in-
quire instead into how your approach to the problem of auto-
biography differs from traditional ones.
In the first place, autobiography, as you see it, is not to be in
any way confused with the so-called life of the author, with
the corpus of empirical accidents making up the life of an
empirically real person. Rather, the biographical, insofar as it
is autobiographical, cuts across both of the fields in question:
the body of the work and the body of the real subject. The
biographical is thus that internal border of work and life, a
border on which texts are engendered. The status of the text-
if it has one-is such that it derives from neither the one nor
the other, from neither the inside nor the outside.
You say that Ecce Homo is an autobiographical text because
in it the signatory recounts his life. You situate the lift-off point
for this account of self to self in the case of Ecce Homo (and
here I can't help thinking of the fantasy of auto-engendering
in "The Case of Philippe," which Serge Leclaire analyzes in
41
42 Roundtable on Autobiography
*n'est pas du tout, une tranche; n'est pas du tout une tranche. See below,
pp. 104-05, for this use of .. tranche."-Tr.
Roundtable on Autobiography 43
tion of the author and that of the person, the confusion that
Rodolphe Gasche has just evoked and which Nietzsche seems
to refuse in Ecce Homo. In this, Nietzsche with you, and you
together with Nietzsche, pose the problem of the text-of its
beginning and its origin-in terms of a relation between the
one who signs (the author) and the one who reads or, as you
put it yesterday, who hears.
My question has two parts. First of all, can it be that here-
between two texts (Ecce Homo and On the Future of Our Edu-
cational Institutions) and two terms (autobiography and otobi-
ography), and despite the anachronistic order-one encounters
one of those passages from the critical, based on transportable
univocality and formalizable polysemia, to the deconstructive?
In other words, is it here that we find a passage to that which
overflows in the direction of dissemination and seems to con-
cern problems of political and institutional order in the univer-
sity? H so, is it possible to link the deconstructive to any par-
ticular ideological content (of teaching in the institution)?
Whether the power struggle be political, religious, economic, or
technical, how is one to formulate it in writing when, at a
certain level, writing is itself an interpretation of power? What
does one do with the transmission of this power which is the
very decipherment of the text?
Second, as I decided to open with the question of the auto-
biographical genre, that place of a contract signed by the au-
thor, I would like to relate the two parts of my question to the
pronoun "I," which is not only the addresser but the addres-
see, the one for whom one always writes, and only in his/her
absence. At the beginning of Speech and Phenomena, you
placed this passage from Edmund Husserl in exergue: "When
we read the word 'I' without knowing who wrote it, it is per-
haps not meaningless, but it is at least estranged from its nor-
mal meaning." You then followed, it seems to me, a program
explicitly laid out in a later text (Pas), where you say that "in
order to accede to another text, another's text, one must as-
sume, in a certain very determined manner, the fault, the
weakness, not avoiding what the other will have managed to
Roundtable on Autobiography 49
am their crypt and they both speak to me. They both speak in
me so whatever I say, they address it to each other."
I don't know if you can tell from this very scanty summary,
but the analysis of a crypt can be done only according to
procedures that are far from classical in psychoanalysis. The
forms of the "analytic situation,'' and even the process of
transference and so on, are unsettled by Abraham's and To-
rok's theory about the crypt. When it's a text that one is trying
to decipher or decrypt using these concepts and these motifs,
or when one is looking for a ghost or a crypt in a text, then
things get still more difficult. or let us say more novel. I say a
ghost and a crypt: actually the theory of the "ghost" is not
exactly the theory of the "crypt." It's even more complicated.
Although it's also connected to the crypt, the ghost is more
precisely the effect of another's crypt in my unconscious.
Now. as for Nietzsche being a reader of Hegel: it's a standard
topic, of course. Nietzsche is a reader and a major critic of
Hegel. All of Nietzsche's affirmations can be interpreted as
anti-Hegelian affirmations. Well, obviously, as is always the
case when one has a great adversary-and Hegel is Nietzsche's
great adversary, isn't he?-there will be moments when the
adversaries greatly resemble each other. It would be easy to
show that there is a dialectic, a Hegelianism in Nietzsche.
and the message by her reception. Instead, let us say that she
already writes when I write. What in the old terminology is
called the addressee is here already in the process of writing
in my place, and this implies all the possibilities of combina-
tion that such a "lending each other a hand" might have in a
situation like that.
since we may be quite sure that this boy from the North African
plains spoke a patois and not the classical Latin he studied.
Next, he learned Greek, a totally alien language whose appren-
ticeship was odious to him. Who dispensed this instruction? It
was a grammarian whose pedagogy, like a horse-trainer's, re-
lied on the whip. The whip is the institutional legacy of the sin
of Adam-the father of us all-and its justice is dispensed ac-
cording to the ancient Law of a Father who is very angry at the
sons of Adam. Thus, for Augustine the liberal arts are a form of
slavery, a spiritual labor to which man was condemned follow-
ing his sin and his exile from paradise. From grammatica, the
child moves on to rhetoric, the most vain of all the sciences of
discourse (artes sermocinaJes). Learning rhetoric had the effect
of alienating Augustine from the Gospels, whose discourse
seemed to him unworthy of Cicero's. Spiritual exile from origi-
nal truth was now accomplished, rather, nearly acomplished,
since his mother was a Christian and was praying continually
for his conversion.
This estrangement from the ultimate meaning of everything,
this exile in the external shell of language, prepares, however,
the conclusion of Augustine's autobiography. That autobiogra-
phy does not take the discursive form of a closed recit; rather,
it takes that of a return to the Father in the form of an exegesis
of the biblical text. Thus, having been reborn to life through
Christ and illuminated by the Holy Spirit, Augustine joyfully
closes his Confessions with a long explication of the first
verses of Genesis which tell the story of God's creation of the
universe. His abandonment of the narrative of his personal
origins in favor of an exegesis of the creation story is a "liter-
ary" strategy that imposes precise limits on the autobiographi-
cal enterprise, even on the institution of literature itself.
I hope that one may recognize in my improvised remarks
certain themes that Jacques Derrida has evoked in "Otobiogra-
phies." In both cases, it is a question of credit, of credibility.
Saint Augustine says that one must read his autobiographical
text charitably, with credit-the reader must give him credit
As for Augustine himself, his interlocutor is God. Thus God
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Roundtable on Autobiosraphy 83
Eugene Vance
Can modernity escape that determinism?
the proper name or the signature: It's always the same thing,
but each time it's different; each time it's a different history to
which one must pay close attention. In this way one may see
that, in spite of everything, finally-and this is where I be-
gan-Nietzsche attempted something which, in relation to the
Christian unfolding of this scene, was, precisely, of a "decon-
structi ve" type.
Now, you asked a question about deconstruction which I
am trying to reconstitute and you will tell me if I do so
inaccurately. You wondered whether, instead of deconstruct-
ing, it would not be interesting to attempt, well, a more posi-
tive gesture, perhaps an autobiographically deconstructive
writing ...
Eugene Vance
No. I would say that it seems to me just as interesting to
study constructions that don't work as it is to practice decon-
structions that don't work either, that is, which don't entirely
succeed.
Claude Levesque
Doesn't the word come from Heidegger?
Pierre Jacques
No, I don't assume it. That's what I'm asking.
*"Translator, traitor."-Tr.
Roundtable on Translation 95
*See Derrida's remarks, pp. 104-05, below, for an explanation of this neolo-
gism.-Tr.
96 Roundtable on Translation _____________ _
your essay "Du tout" ("Of the Whole") which justly contests
the limits of psychoanalytic transference. Let us recall that
early on Freud conceived the latter as a set of "false connec-
tions" and considered every isolated act and each of the
analysand's associations as a compromise (Standard Edition,
12:103). Since, moreover, all of the patient's utterances are
more or less closely tied to the tranche-fert or the false con-
nection, could we not conceive psychoanalysis as a semiotic
of approximations, or, better still, a semiotic of decentered
transformations? Indeed, in Fors, you show, on the one hand,
that these transformations are operating according to a radical
and interminable deviation (here one thinks of the possible
cleavage of the crypt in the id and the ego) and, on the other,
that a written case is but an asymptotic place of "conver-
gences" for all the possible translations and betrayals, an in-
terminable approximation of the idiom.
In order to think about these decentered transformations
somewhat differently, one could take as a guide and by way of
a specific example the following consideration: Throughout
our lives, we acquire a series of names, beginning with the
nicknames and names of endearment from childhood all the
way to the formal titles and other names of adulthood. One of
the characteristics of clinical discourse in the analytic context,
which sets it apart from all other formal or intimate dis-
courses, is that one almost never addresses the patient by any
of these names which are so egocentrically bound up with
him. By setting off the discharge of forgotten material to fill
the void, this narcissistic deprivation also induces the patient
to let himself go toward multiple transpositions and transfor-
mations of his names, whose many vicissitudes can be ap-
proached only by further research.
On a strictly terminological plane, I have done a thorough
inventory of the word "translation"-Obersetzung-in all of
Freud's texts. While he considers repression to be a rift or
fault in the translation, on several occasions in his writings he
implicitly conceives all of the following to be translations:
hysterical, phobic, and obsessional symptoms, dreams, recol-
Roundtable on Translation 97
l
j~~_!l do everything except mark this linguistic diffureiiCe
nscribed in the language, this difference- of language systems
nscribed in a single tongue. A~. Jt can get eyery_thing
acmss exeept tbis the fact that there are, in one linguistic s~s
.tem f18FR8tJ8 sevsral languages or tongues. Sometimes-1<
would even say always-several tongues. There is impurity in
every language. This fact would in some way have to threaten
every linguistic system's integrity, which is presumed by each
of Jakobsen's concepts. Each of these three concepts (intralin-
gual translation, interlingual or translation "properly speak-
ing," and intersemiotic translation) presumes the existence of
one language and of one translation in the literal sense, that is,
as the passage from one language into another. So, if the unity
of the linguistic system_ is 1!9tJ~-~l;l_r~_ thi~g,_ ~-~1 ~f this-concepru~
alization aro~~d.. tr~Q~I~tio.D (in the so-called proper- s-ense af
translaffonf is threatened.
I chose the. exa-rlipi~~f Babel because I think it can provide an
epigraph for all discussions of translation. What happens in the
story of Babel? We think we know that story, but it is always in
our interest, I believe, to reread it closely. Also, one should read
it if possible in the language in which it was written, because
the singularity of the story is that a performative takes place as
a recit in a tongue that itself defies translation. What is being
told in this biblical recit is not transportable into another
tongue without an essential loss. I don't know the original lan-
guage thoroughly, but I know enough of it (a few words) to try
to define with you this challenge to translation.
What happens in the Babel episode, in the tribe of the
Shems? Notice that the word "shem'' already means name:
Shem equals name. The Shems decide to raise a tower-not
just in order to reach all the way to the heavens but also, it
says in the text, to make a name for themselves. They want to
make a name for themselves, and they bear the name of name.
So they want to make a name for themselves-how will they
do it? By imposing their tongue on the entire universe on the
Roundtable on Translation 101
*Piece, slice. from troncher: to slice. separate. decide. The play is on the
psychoanalytic term rronsfert: transference.-Tr.
Roundtable on Translation 105
*Here is how this text is laid out typographically: At the bottom of the page,
running the length of the text entitled .. Living On" and accompanying it, a
note. another text is inscribed which has the title .. Borderlines .. (lournaJ de
bord: ship's journal or log). Both were written by Jacques Derrida and both
were meant from the first to be translated. The wager is the following: The
note, .. Borderlines," written in a stenotelegraphic style, tends (by principle
and by contract) toward the greatest possible translatability ... Living On," on
the other hand. which is the chief or principal text. puts into motion an
enigmatic and disjointed writing where the unrepresentable" is in force-
and this. precisely, by means of the recit or the performative. These two texts
play at the limits of the everyday concept of translation: the note cannot be
totally translatable ("totally translatable," says the narrator, "it disappears as a
text"); just as .. Living On" cannot remain completely untranslatable (.. totally
228 Roundtable on Translation
tion is the following: How, in effect, does one text read an-
other? By proposed contract, your ship's log-"Borderlines"-
promises, just like some translating language or translator
metalanguage, to aim for the greatest possible translatability.
Be that as it may, it nevertheless tends toward a distortion of
the initial contract, and in the end you say as much. You do
not keep your promise, since the double band reproduces the
supplementary trait of this structure and gives rise to a lesson
(to your translators). This lesson is not in the form of a revela-
tion of a paradigm, but rather of a cross-reference to the net-
work of texts which are living by means of what you call
"living on" [sur-vie], and living on only because they are at
once translatable and untranslatable. You say that if you are
continuing to speak of "texts" instead of making reference to a
differential network, an indefinite movement of traces refer-
ring back to other differential traces, it is partly for strategic
reasons. I wonder if the force of this strategy does not come
from maintaining divisions that are always both arbitrary and
nonarbitrary. I say this because it seems to me that writing-in
the sense you give to the term-draws at least part of its con-
testatory force from that which it contests: the institution.
Benjamin writes: "There is no muse of philosophy, nor is
there one of translation. But despite the claims of sentimental
artists, these two are not banausic. For there is a philosophical
genius that is characterized by a yearning for that language
which manifests itself in translations." Just as one could pro-
pose, as Claude Levesque did yesterday, that Derrida is to be
found somewhere "derriere le rideau" in the fortlda, making
allusion to the text entitled "Freud's Legacy," couldn't one
untranslatable ... the text dies immediately"). Although the typographic fron-
tier between the note and the text seems clear cut, one comes to realize that it
is destined to be constantly overrun. The same is true of its corollary: the
division which is marked between the critical (the translating metalanguage
of the note) and the deconstructive (the play of writing in .. Living On," which
overflows in the direction of dissemination). It is, moreover, the coupling of
the terms .. deconstruction" and .. criticism" that gives the whole volume its
title.
Roundtable on Translation 1.19
*"These imperfect tongues, imperfect in that they are several ... "-Tr.
:122 Roundtable on Translation
secret contract between themselves and not only with the nar-
rator, is at work in the contract as I have just described it. This
complicates the situation infinitely, but I think one must refer
to it.
The expression "false friends," which you cited, exists in
French as well, but there is another expression in the every-
day code of translation. In school, as one says, one had to be
on one's guard also against "belles infjdeJes" [beautiful, faith-
less ones]. These beJJes infideles are the same as false friends,
that is, apparently correct translations that in fact lay a trap.
From this, then, I postulate, on the one hand, that the neces-
sity of possible translation is the necessity and the impossibil-
ity at the same time of the autotranslation of each text by itself:
and, on the other hand, that translation is only the possibility of
translation, only the possibility or impossibility of every text's
self-speculation by itself. It will not surprise us that Hegel. for
example, says in The Aesthetics that poetry is defined by being
always translatable. It's not surprising, after Derrida's analyses
of Hegel, that it would be Hegel who said that. If philosophy is
translatable, poetry is all the more so, because poetry, as he
defines it, is subordinated to philosophic meaning, to a "Be-
deutung" already comprehending itself.
The second stage I wanted to propose was once again on the
subject of Heidegger. I want to come back to a text of Heideg-
ger's in order at least to suggest that, in Heidegger, the Hegelian
gesture remains all the same, perhaps in spite of everything,
inscribed in this problem of translation. Unfortunately, I don't
have the text here, but I was thinking of that first paragraph in
"Der Spruch des Anaximander" ("The Anaximander Frag-
ment"), where Heidegger says more or less that, in order to
speak this original speech, the original speech which speaks
the origin, we must do an "Ubersetzung," a translation, et cet-
era. It is interesting to note here that the word "Obersetzung"
has a double etymology in German and thus a somewhat
stronger semantic field, since one of the senses of "Uberset-
zung" (translation, metaphor, transfer) is to leap over an abyss.
Thus it poses both the abyss dividing things in two and at the
same time the possibility of leaping over the abyss. The text
continues and in the same paragraph, beginning with this pos-
sible translation, the opposition appears between language and
thought. This opposition, which is perhaps still an echo of a
1-legelian problematic, is always there to the extent to which he
says, "Dichten ist denken" ["to make poetry is to think"). If one
verifies the etymology of the word "dichten" in Ding's dictio-
nary (which is justified insofar as Heidegger ventures into
etymological considerations), one realizes that "dichten" also
rnoans "to think." and thus one remains within the circle of the
228 Roundtable on Translation
process that is just the reverse of this one. That is, just as apha-
sia manifests itself by a kind of dissolution of the phonic ap-
paratus, a destructuring reversal of the order of implication
prevailing in the acquisition of phonemes, one could say that
there exists a kind of aphasia or ideological destruction of psy-
choanalytic discourse. This destruction, which proceeds under
the auspices of what Lacan has named the SAMCDA (Mutual Aid
Society Against Analytic Discourse), follows a reversal of the
order of those conversions that, starting out from ordinary dis-
course, end up at psychoanalytic discourse, passing by way of
phenomenology. This reversal is a kind of turning inside out of
that translating operation which ends up at the anasemic or
antisemantic terms of psychoanalytic discourse. Basically what
you have then is a rephenomenalization of the discourse, a
resemanticization and a reconstruction of what the psychoana-
lytic translation had-perhaps-deconstructed.
I would like to give an example of this process and, of course,
it comes from a text by the famous "New York Trio": Heinz
Hartman, Ernst Kris, and Rudolph Loewenstein. The trio, for
reasons it would surely be fascinating to study, has found itself
taking on the role of the collective agent (or agents) of this
resemanticizing operation of the Freudian discourse at the
heart of the North American psychoanalytic establishment.
In an article written in 1949 and entitled "The Theory of
Aggression," the three authors confide that they don't know
what to do with the Freudian theory of the death instinct,
which-in other words-makes no sense in their reading of
Freudian metapsychology. In effect, they say (and they are
going to be playing on the register of interlingual translation
in a manner that is at the very least equivocal), the instincts,
which they distinguish from drives, are an object for biology,
whereas drives and only drives constitute psychoanalytic no-
tions. They oppose aggressive drives to the death instinct
which, because it is an instinct, they leave to biology and to
Freud's biologizing speculations.
There is a surprising translation mistake here, a false sense,
to be precise. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, where he in-
Roundtable on Translation 233
Eugene Vance
I meant to say, between philosophy and poetry as translat-
ing performances.
Jacques Derrida
Yes, but I did not say that philosophy was a translating
performance. I said that the philosophic project was the pro-
ject of a certain type of translation-translation interpreted in
a certain manner. That's what I meant to say in "Plato's Phar-
macy" and what I reiterated just a moment ago. That is. the
philosophical act does not consist in a translating perfor-
mance in that transformative or productive sense to which
you have just referred. Rather, I was pointing to the idea of the
140 Roundtable on Translation
Eugene Vance
Allow me to rephrase my question. What is the place of a
manifestly poetic performance in a text such as Glas or
"Plato's Pharmacy"? Do you consider poetry to be subordi-
nated finally to philosophical discourse, as Paul Ricoeur, for
example, would claim?
... Poetry has been tampered with." but also it has been .. touched upon ...
.. reached." .. attained.-Tr.
Roundtable on Translation 145
Jacques Derrida
I'm not the one who introduced them.
Donald Bouchard
My second question is this: Is it necessary to have sacred
texts and is a perfect translation possible? I think that transla-
Roundtable on Translation 14'1
Jacques Derrida
To respond, or rather not to respond but to resonate with
your first question: I don't know if one can get out. I don't
think there is any sense in always wanting to get out. One can
get out for a moment, but actually I don't know whether mad-
ness consists in not being able to get out or in wanting to get
out. Basically, what form does an exit take? All one can say is
that in every closed place, there are things called "exits," and
that's what defines it as a closed place. To this first type of
question-and I am not sure I have understood very well
where it was going-1 cannot reply.
Concerning your allusions to Benjamin and the question
about the necessity of sacred texts, I am going to be very pru-
dent-and not only by refusing to take responsibility for Ben-
jamin's text. It's true that there are things in that text which
can make one uncomfortable and which begin with the sacred
text, insist on the messianic character of translation, and so
on. Yet, a sacred text, if there is such a thing, is a text that
does not await the question of whether or not it is necessary
that there be such a thing: if there is a sacred text, then there is
a sacred text. You are wondering whether or not the sacred
text is necessary: this is a question which that text couldn't
care less about. The sacred text happens, it is an event, if there
is such a thing, and it doesn't wait for anyone to accept the
idea that there may be such a thing. It's an event, and that's
what Benjamin means. One always has to postulate an origi-
nal. This may look like a very classical position and basically
like a distinction between the original and the translated ver-
sion. This appearance is very reassuring, but at the same time,
in a less classical and less reassuring manner, Benjamin often
says that one recognizes the difference between a translation
and an original in that the original can be translated several
148 Roundtable on Translation
Jacques Derrida
Yes, it has been published in translation. It's a text that was
written in French but which I knew would appear first in
English, so it is marked by this particular address. It appeared
a few days ago in the United States.
Monique Bosco
The others are very important, very difficult texts by Blan-
chot: Death Sentence and "The Madness of the Day." This was
Roundtable on Translation 151
Jacques Derrida
If one refers to a certain concept of translation that prevailed
up until Benjamin perhaps, the concept according to which
translation is derivative, or in a position of derivation in rela-
tion to an original that is itself seminal, then the fact that
women are often translators or that they are invited to do so
(objectively, statistics would show that they are often in the
position of translators), this fact, in effect, comes out of a
subordination which poses a political problem. I don't want to
insist on this-it's obvious to everyone. If, however, one dis-
places somewhat the concept of translation on the basis, for
example, of what Eugene Vance did just a moment ago, or
from a perspective that would see translation as something
other than a secondary operation, at that moment the position
of the woman translator would be something else, even
though it would still be marked sexually. One must not fail to
notice that Benjamin uses the term "translator" in the mascu-
line and not in the feminine. I believe this is consonant with
the whole system of his text. He speaks of the translator, not of
the woman translator, and the translator in general can be
either a man or a woman. It is in this general sense that Benja-
min presents the translator. If one displaces this classical per-
spective, one becomes conscious-from within that classical
perspective and from within the text I'm talking about-that
the so-called original is in a position of demand with regard to
the translation. The original is not a plenitude which would
come to be translated by accident. The original is in the situa-
tion of demand, that is, of a lack or exile. the original is in-
debted a priori to the translation. Its survival is a demand and
a desire for translation, somewhat like the Babelian demand:
Translate me. Babel is a man, or rather a male god, a god that
is not full since he is full of resentment, jealousy, and so on.
He calls out, he desires, he lacks, he calls for the complement
- - - - - - - - - - - - Roundtable on Trfmslalion 153
Monique Bosco
Yes, that's clear. On the other hand, however, do you agree
that there is a problem of sexual difference which enters in at
the level of translation? Only one of my books has been trans-
lated by a man, and it was a completely different book.
1.54 Roundtable on Translation
Jacques Derrida
And that's because a man translated it?
Monique Bosco
I'm beginning to think so. [Laughter.]
Jacques Derrida
It's altogether possible. I'm convinced you're right to ask the
question, but the analysis of the effects remains very tricky.
When you raised the question of sexuality in translation, I was
thinking of something else. I was thinking of what happens
when one has to translate sexed personal pronouns with un-
sexed ones. Let me explain what I mean. At the end of Death
Sentence, there is a passage where Blanchot says first of all "la
pensee," and it is clear that he is talking about "thought." Then
there is a slippage which takes one to the last line of the text
where he writes: "Et a elle, je dis 'viens' et eternellement elle
est la ["And to that thought I say eternally, 'Come,' and eter-
nally it is there"]. From the grammatical point of view (and one
can follow the grammatical and rhetorical order of the text
leading to the grammatical point of view), the feminine pro-
noun "elle" unquestionably refers to "la pensee" or "thought."
Yet, obviously Blanchot has played on the "elle," or he has let
it play, let it slip toward "elle" or "she." In English, naturally, a
rigorous translation must relate "elle" to "pensee" so that it
becomes "it." At that moment, the text totally caves in. More-
over, in the existing translation of Death Sentence, this is just
what happened: the "elle" at the end-which is a sublime
"elle"-is crushed, broken down by the necessity for a gram-
matically rigorous translation. There are problems like this all
the time in translating from French to English as well as be-
tween German and French. When the translator becomes aware
Roundtable on Translation 1.55
*But can any note take up the slack here. in this situation? In his essay on
Benjamin's "The Task of the Translator," Blanchot writes: "The translator is
indeed a strange. nostalgic man: he experiences in his own language. but in
the manner of something missing. everything promised him in the way of
present affirmations by the original work (the work which remains more-
over-he can't quite reach it since he's not at home. at rest in its language but
is an eternal guest who doesn't live there). Thars why.1f we can believe the
testimony of specialists. he is always in more difficulty as he translates with
the language to which he belongs than at a loss with the one he doesn't
possess" eTraduire. '" in L'Amitie. p. 72; my translation).-Tr.
256 Roundtable on Translation
Jacques Derrida
I am having trouble translating your last question to myself.
I've received it, but I have not understood it very well. if by
understanding one means being able to reproduce and trans-
late it. Like everyone, I always try, I think, to translate or to
translate myself-to autotranslate---which includes that ges-
ture of appropriation that is part of translation. However, if
you have seen or noticed or heard a third ear for the last few
days, then it may be that this operation of autotranslation is
impossible. I am conscious of it in part. It is less a question of
autotranslation turned back in on itself, trying to master the
Unheimliche or the uncanny so that it becomes simply the
familiar, than it is of the opposite movement. But this is not to
say that one has to turn oneself over, bound hand and foot, to
the Unheimliche, because I don't believe in that. In other
words, I don't believe in seeking out absolute risk, absolute
nonreappropriation, alienation, and madness for their own
sake, and, besides, I don't want to have anything to do with
that. I'm too afraid of it. What I was trying to do was work out
a kind of economy with the means at hand, an economy that
would not be one of a maniacal and "self-centered"* auto-
translation. Let's say I was trying also to produce texts that
produce other ears, in a certain way-ears that I don't see or
hear myself, things that don't come down to me or come back
to me. A text, I believe, does not come back. I have insisted a
Andre Beaudet
If your own text comes back as a kind of echo, I was wonder-
ing whether it was possible for someone else to plug into your
work. Is it possible to write on the basis of ~our work?
Jacques Derrida
What does that mean: "on the basis of"? On the basis of
means starting from, which is to say going away from. As to
what you called an echo: There are, in effect, echoes. It would
158 Roundtable on Translation
Jacques Derrida
I completely agree. Indeed, all he has done is to translate
translation in the most enigmatic sense. He does this not only
through multiple versions but sometimes by very small modi-
fications. Sometimes it is the mention of the word "recit" or
"novel" that simply disappears; or else he deletes one little
page from the end, leaving the rest of the text intact; or still
other times there are massive mutations, as with Thomas the
Obscure, where, of the 350 pages crammed into the first ver-
sion, he retains something very economical, 120 or 150 pages,
for the second version. What is remarkable is that, in spite of
everything, this translation and this transformation, even
when they erase something, keep the memory or the trace of
what they are erasing. The version is not a translation that
comes from the original and-how to put it?-from which
comes the original as if there was here an original and there a
translation. No; there is an increase. The second translation of
Death Sentence keeps the trace of the erasure in the erasure
itself. The memory of all the versions is archived, as in the
Library of Congress. It is a still larger language, as Benjamin
would say: it is an increased corpus which has grown from the
original to the translation, from the first to the second version.
As for proper names in Blanchot, they are at once apparently
insignificant names which are then loaded with a thousand
possible translations and meanings. I mentioned Thomas. Well,
there is an immense implicit discourse on Thomas' proper
name. One has to interpret the recit as the translation of the
proper name into the story which transforms it into a common
name. One finds there a translation of Thomas' proper name
beginning with the biblical references. the character of the
double Thomas, of Didyrne, of Thomas the Obscure. Since Tho-
mas' surname--the Obscure-is a common noun qualifier, one
can see the whole recit as a translation, in a certain way. of the
proper name. One could also talk about the initials in Death
Roundtable on Translation 161
Sentence. The I can be translated right away into Jesus and then
into a number of other things. Natalie can also be translated
into Jesus, since it signifies Noel, Nativity. Thus, in a certain
sense the proper name is pregnant with the recit, which can be
interpreted as a translation of the proper name.
Claude Levesque
We must necessarily bring to a close this exchange which,
all the same, is infinite and thank Jacques Derrida very
warmly. His passage among us will have been an event, but
the kind of event that is much more ahead of us than already
behind us. I speak as the interpreter-the translator-for each
one of us when I say to him: Thanks for many things-for
coming, for his generosity which each one of us has so clearly
felt, for the total and careful attention he has brought to each
of us. Finally, we thank him for being what he is. A question
still remains in the end: Who is he? Who is Jacques Derrida?
Perhaps we may venture to answer by saying that he is unique
and innumerable, like all of us, differently than all of us.
Jacques Derrida
I too want to thank you for your presence, your attention,
your patience. This is not just a polite formula on my part, but
a real sign of gratitude. Thank you.
Works Cited