3 - Urgent Translation

Summary

He held out the book to us, saying “You've got to read this.” The book was De la grammatologie, and the young professor of French literature who exhorted us in this manner had just brought it back from Paris. We did not waste any time before obeying.

This scene took place in 1971, at Cornell University, but no doubt something similar was happening in those years at other American university graduate schools. Derrida's books were being transmitted there under the sign of a very particular urgency because they upset everything and gave rise to an experience of thinking that one did not easily get over. This urgency was also political: the American university had just been badly shaken by the events at Kent State in 1970, where four students had been gunned down by National Guard troops during a demonstration against the American bombing raids on Cambodia, which had extended the ravages of the war in Vietnam. With his books, Derrida called on readers to reflect on everything that connected this unavowable violence of the fathers toward their own sons and daughters. He thus gave us the means to re-establish links between current politics and the metaphysics of presence that he showed to have been long at work in the philosophical tradition. And he summoned us to think this thing—and to respond to it.

But this urgency had first to pass by way of translation if it was to broadcast its call beyond the very small milieu of readers of French in US universities. In 1973, six years after its publication in France, La Voix et le phénomène appeared in English translation; as for the translation of De la grammatologie, one had to wait until 1975. Thereafter, the rhythm accelerated, but there would always be a palpable delay, owing at once to the cumbersome machinery of publication at American university presses, where the majority of these translations appeared, and to the formidable difficulties attending the translation of a practice of writing that is as inventive and crafty as Derrida’s.