Deconstruction and Philosophy in Translation: The Franco-German Connection

Abstract

In 1988 there was a conference in Heidelberg on the philosophical and political dimension of Heidegger’s thought, with contributions from Hans-Georg Gadamer, Jacques Derrida and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe. This article considers a number of exchanges between French and German philosophers in the late twentieth century, focusing on the theme of translation. Taking Derrida’s intervention as a starting point, the article moves on to explore Victor Klemperer’s analysis of the German language under Nazism, Derrida and Maurice Blanchot as readers of Heidegger, Paul de Man and Derrida’s interpretations of Walter Benjamin’s ‘Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers’, in the context of the post-war French reception of German thought. The article concludes with a discussion of ‘untranslatability’, as developed by the French philologist and philosopher, Barbara Cassin, in her Dictionary of Untranslatables (2014), taking the history of the concept and word ‘subject’ as a way of reflecting on Europe’s identity, past, present and future.

Keywords:

• Derrida
• Gadamer
• Heidegger
• Benjamin
• Barbara Cassin
• Deconstruction
• Philosophy in translation
• Europe

Notes on Contributor

Michael Syrotinski is Marshall Professor of French at the University of Glasgow and has published widely on contemporary French and Francophone African literature and philosophy, European critical theory, and comparative literature. His books include Singular Performances (Charlottesville: Virginia University Press, 2002) and Deconstruction and the Postcolonial (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007). He has recently edited a special issue of Paragraph (March, 2015) on ‘Translation and the Untranslatable’.

Notes

1 Terry Eagleton defines ‘logocentric’ as the belief ‘that discourses can yield us immediate access to the full truth and presence of things’. Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction, 2nd edn (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), p. 164.

2 Jacques Derrida, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, La Conférence de Heidelberg (1988). Heidegger: Portée Philosophique et politique de sa pensée, présentation de Mireille Caille-Gruber, note de Jean-Luc Nancy (Abbaye d’Ardenne: Lignes/IMEC, 2014), p. 47. Subsquently abbreviated to CH, with page references immediately following quotation in parentheses.

3 For an interesting reflection on their two ‘encounters’ in 1981 and 1988, see Gadamer’s interview with Carsten Dutt in Gadamer in Conversation: Reflections and Commentary, ed. and trans. by Richard E. Palmer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), pp. 61–77. Gadamer states bluntly that ‘Derrida’s incapacity for dialogue was once again manifest. Dialogue is not his strength’ (p. 62). I have retained Derrida’s and Gadamer’s French original (with my English translation) from the 1988 conference in order to respect Gadamer’s own set of ground rules in organizing the event, which is that the language of presentation and debate should be French, in spite of the confessed limitations of his own French. This was a conscious act of reciprocal linguistic hospitality, since in the previous meeting at the Goethe Institute in Paris, Gadamer spoke in German.

4 Victor Farias, Heidegger et le nazisme (Paris: Verdier, 1987). English edition: Heidegger and Nazism, ed. by Joseph Margolis and Tom Rockmore, trans. by Paul Burrell and Gabriel Ricci (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989).

5 Derrida and Lacoue-Labarthe have each written at length on Heidegger. See Jacques Derrida, De l’esprit: Heidegger et la question (Paris: Editions Galilée, 1987). English translation by Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), in which he allies Heidegger’s political crisis to a crisis ‘of the mind’ (l’esprit), a theme he takes up in L’autre cap (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1991). English: The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe, trans. by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael B. Naas (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992). For Lacoue-Labarthe, see Heidegger, Art, and Politics: The Fiction of the Political, trans. by Chris Turner (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990). Lacoue-Labarthe and his collaborator Jean-Luc Nancy were also both importers of German idealist philosophy into French theory. The literature on Paul de Man and Maurice Blanchot is too extensive to go into here, but see, for example, Responses: On Paul de Man’s Wartime Journalism, ed. by Werner Hamacher, Neil Hertz and Thomas Keenan (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988), and Lignes 43, ‘Les vies politiques de Maurice Blanchot 1930–1993’ (2014).

6 Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon, ed. by Barbara Cassin, Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra and Michael Wood (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), p. xvii. Original French text: Barbara Cassin (ed.), Vocabulaire européen des philosophies: Dictionnaire des intraduisibles (Paris: Seuil, 2004). Further references to the English edition of the Vocabulaire will appear in the text abbreviated as DU.

7 For a comprehensive account of Heidegger’s influence on post-war French intellectual thought, see Dominique Janicaud, Heidegger in France, trans. by François Raffoul and David Pettigrew (Bloomington, IN: University of Indiana Press, 2015). See also David Pettigrew and François Raffoul (eds), French Interpretations of Heidegger: An Exceptional Reception (New York: State University of New York Press, 2008).

8 Derrida, L’autre cap, p. 18; The Other Heading, p. 12.

9 Jacques Derrida, ‘Like the Sound of a Shell Deep Within the Sea: Paul de Man’s War’, trans. by Peggy Kamuf, Critical Inquiry, 14 (1988), 590–652.

10 Derrida, The Other Heading, p. 58.

11 Victor Klemperer, LTI: Notizbuch eines Philologen (1947) (Frankfurt a.M.: Röderberg, 1975). Subsequent references are abbreviated to LTI and immediately follow quotations in parentheses.

12 Martin Heidegger, Parmenides, trans. by André Schuwer and Richard Rojcewicz (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2009), p. 41.

13 See Heidegger, Parmenides, p. 40: ‘The realm of essence decisive for the development of the Latin falsum is the one of the imperium and of the “imperial”’.

14 The religious aspect is essential. Derrida in Foi et Savoir coins the term ‘mondialatinisation’ (translated as ‘globalatinisation’) to underline the inseparability of Christianity and Western imperial and epistemic dominance. See Foi et savoir (Paris: Seuil, 2000), p. 48.

15 Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster (1980), trans. by Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), p. 94. Subsequently abbreviated to WD, with page references immediately following quotation.

16 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, revised trans. by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016). Originally published in French as De la grammatologie (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1967).

17 This is another multiply authored entry, with Barbara Cassin again lead author, in collaboration with Clara Auvray-Assayas, Frédérique Ildefonse, Jean Lallot, Sandra Laugier, and Sophie Roesch.

18 Jacques Derrida, Des Tours de Babel, trans. by Joseph Graham, in Difference in Translation, ed. by Joseph Graham (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), pp. 165–248. Jacques Derrida, ‘What Is a “Relevant” Translation?’, trans. by Lawrence Venuti, Critical Inquiry 17 (2001), pp. 174–200.

19 Paul de Man, ‘On Walter Benjamin’s “The Task of the Translator”’, in The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), pp. 73–105.

20 Ibid., p. 75.

21 Walter Benjamin, ‘Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers’ (1923), in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. by Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, 7 vols (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1972–1989), iv.1, 9.

22 de Man, ‘On Walter Benjamin’, p. 86.

23 Ibid., p. 88.

24 Ibid.

25 The most fully developed examples of de Man’s rhetorically inflected deconstructive readings are to be found in Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke and Proust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979).

26 See Barbara Cassin, ‘Entre’ in Eloge de la traduction: compliquer l’universel (Paris: Fayard, 2016), pp. 227–39.

27 Derrida, The Other Heading, p. 29.