Kristian Olesen Toft

The dissertation The Question of Translation in the Seminar of Jacques Derrida traces theoretical and practical questions of translation as they arise in five unpublished seminars by French philosopher Jacques Derrida, held between 1979/80 and 1986/87. It offers close readings of unpublished seminar manuscripts in a general investigation of what it means to ask: “What is translation?” The INTRODUCTION argues that the singular nature of this question calls for an approach which is not simply theoret-ical, before providing a general overview of Derrida’s work on translation. Each subsequent chapter focuses on an unpublished seminar, often in comparison with published texts based on the manuscripts. CHAPTER I is a close reading of Derrida’s 1979/80 seminar Le concept de la littérature comparée et les problèmes théoriques de la traduction, and the published essay Des tours de Babel, a revision of the final sessions of the seminar. The seminar concerns the status of comparative literature and the role of translation, before offering detailed readings of the Biblical story of Babel and Benjamin’s Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers. CHAPTER II turns to the 1981/82 seminar La langue et le discours de la méthode, and two published essays, S’il y a lieu de traduire I-II, based upon several of its sessions. Dedicated to language and method in Descartes and Spinoza, the seminar touches upon the relation of method and translation, including the dream of a truly philosophical language, distinct from all natural languages, as well as the structure of the text of philosophy as the remainder after a necessarily false start. CHAPTER III considers the 1984/85 seminar Fantôme de l’autre, the first in a series on Nationalité et nationalisme philosophiques. It treats the idiom in philosophy and the relation between philosophy and nationalism, with Fichte’s philosophical nationalism as enigmatic paradigm. This lays the ground for the second half of the seminar, published as Geschlecht II-III, whose discussions of reading, idiom and nationalism will be treated in detail with respect to Heidegger, in particular. CHAPTER IV treats the 1985/86 seminar Mythos, logos, topos, the second on Nationalité et nationalisme philosophiques, which provides an elaborate discussion of the Greek word khōra as it appears in Plato’s Timaeus, including the paradoxes in the reception history of khōra as itself a universal receptacle. On the basis of extensive archival research, the chapter offers a reconstruction of the seminar, the manuscripts of which differ significantly than Derrida’s other seminars. Finally, CHAPTER V turns to Derrida’s 1986/87 seminar Le théologico-politique, the third on Nationalité et nationalisme philosophiques, and the published essay Les yeux de la langue, based on three of its sessions. It considers sacred language and its possible secularization according to a series of primarily German Jewish authors: Spinoza, Rosenzweig, Scholem and Mendelssohn. Running through the seminar is a terrible ambiguity of deconstruction, brought out exemplarily in these thinkers, caught in a system of language, politics, religion, and Enlightenment.

René Descartes plays a small but pivotal role in Jacques Derrida’s 1961–62 course, ‘The Notion of World’. In contrast, one finds the world everywhere in Descartes’ own texts, from the Discourse on Method to The World. A more extensive discussion of Descartes’ world is found in Derrida’s 1981/82 seminar, Language and the Discourse on Method, which takes up Descartes’ travels throughout the world, a spacing before Cartesian extension, and the tension between universal reason, shared by the whole world, and the necessity of writing philosophy in one language rather than others.

Jacques Derrida's scattered remarks on the ambiguous role examples play in the passage between the universal and the singular revolve around an often-neglected point: any attempt to theorise exemplarity will itself be subject to the law it seeks to account for. This oversight limits scholarship on the subject, but may be amended by returning to the loci classici on exemplarity in Derrida's Glas, La vérité en peinture, Passions, and elsewhere. Moreover, in three texts published in the 1980s: La loi du genre, Préjugés and Psyché, Derrida emphasises how literature is particularly given to ‘remark’ its own status as literature and as such provides a privileged example of the problem of exemplarity. Another example in which exemplarity is in general singularly implicated is deconstruction itself.

Khora, as it figures in Plato’s Timaeus, as read by Jacques Derrida, poses a singular translation problem, not only for having more than one meaning, but also for having less than one. This might be thought of in terms of Derrida’s distinction between ‘polysemy’ and ‘dissemination’, in so far as any concept of translation will ‘re-mark’ a translation or reception of something like khora, the ‘all-receiving’. This means both that khora is untranslatable and that its translation into every language is inevitable, which has implications for the question of a ‘politics of khora’, as becomes particularly apparent in Derrida’s unpublished seminar from 1985–86.