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The Accessibility of Derrida Author(s): H. R. Swardson, Pascale-Anne Brault, Michael B. Naas Source: PMLA, Vol. 108, No. 5 (Oct., 1993), pp. 1167-1168 Published by: Modern Language Association.
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The Accessibility of Derrida To the Editor: Since I teach English composition and since you saw fit not just to publish but to seek out an article that begins with the following three sentences (Jacques Derrida, "The Other Heading: Memories, Responses, and Responsibilities," 108 [1993]: 89-93), I would like to know how you (or anybody who understands and approves) would answer the succeeding questions about the second sentence-as asked, say, by students who open PMLA knowing that it is the leading journal in a profession they have committed their English education to. ''To begin, I will confide in you a feeling. Already on the subject of headings [caps]-and of the shores on which I intend to remain. It is the somewhat weary feeling of an old European.'' Questions: (1) At what point is a reader to see what "Already" modifies and directs attention to? (2) What does "the subject of headings" denote or refer to? (3) What is a reader to make of "[caps]"-before getting the clue, twenty-three lines further on, that it is a translator's insertion and not an idiosyncrasy among the others? (4) What connection is a reader to make between this sentence and the ones that come before it and after it? If you can give no answers to these questions that are consistent with what we teach in composition class (taking care of readers, making modification clear to them, making reference only to publicly accessible things, maintaining sentence coherence), then I would like to know the theory that justifies your not doing so. I ask this with all respect, as one concerned for the profession and its reputation. H. R. SWARDSON Ohio University, Athens Reply: While H. R. Swardson's queries may have been better addressed by Jacques Derrida than by us, we feel a responsibility as translators to justify our read- ing and translation of Derrida's text. We have not consulted Derrida about this, and so all speculations concerning his style and argumentation are our own. As the editors of PMLA noted, the excerpt from The Other Heading begins five paragraphs into the text. A reading of the entire text would surely help recast, if not answer, some of Swardson's questions, since it would show, for example, how Derrida uses fragments throughout the text to develop or empha- size certain key words and phrases. Yet the excerpt can, we believe, be read on its own and our choices of translation justified on internal grounds. Here are the three lines as they appear in the French: "Je vous confierai pour commencer un sentiment. Deja au sujet des caps-et des bords sur lesquels j'ai l'intention de me tenir. C'est le sentiment un peu accable d'un vieil Europeen." The first thing to note is that we tried to respect both Derrida's choice of words and his syntax. We took this approach not out of some unalterable principle of translation but be- cause we felt it important for conveying Derrida's argument-an argument that ultimately revolves around the question of "publicly accessible things." We might, for example, have made "what 'Already' modifies" a bit clearer by combining the second line with the first, translating them as "To begin, I will confide in you a feeling that already concerns head- ings .... ," but the words "feeling" and "already" would have lost important emphasis, and Swardson would still have been able to ask why "already" is used at all, why any reader would be surprised that Derrida is already referring to headings or would think that he should not already be referring to them. It all comes down to the question of public accessibility. Those familiar with Derrida's style-a style that has been publicly accessible in English translation for well over twenty years-would suspect that the un- characteristically abrupt and straightforward first line is part of something more than an informal avowal of a personal feeling. Those acquainted with Derrida's attention to beginnings and with his careful use of terms would suspect that the word "feeling" is not quite-or not only-his. This suspicion would be reinforced a couple of lines later when Derrida speaks of "moving surreptitiously from the feeling to the axiom," and it would later be confirmed (though this passage is not included in the excerpt) by the discovery that the term is borrowed from Paul Valery, who, in History and Politics, expresses his feelings on the subject of France and Europe before developing them into a philosophical and political axiom. Derrida's point is that what might seem to be an offhand comment, the expression of a personal predilection or feeling, is never without ideological implications. Valery writes: ''I will end by summarizing for you in two words my personal impression of France: our special quality ... is to believe and feel that we are universal-by which I mean, men of universality .... Notice the paradox: to specialize in the sense of the universal. (436)'' Derrida's intention is to question the relation between a personal feeling or a particular cultural and political identity and any universalizing claim or axiom that is advanced on the basis of that feeling or identity. (Derrida later cites Valery's feeling on the subject of philosophical speculation itself: "It is my feeling (and I apologize for this) that philosophy is a matter of form" [4321.) By beginning the second sentence with "already," Derrida draws attention to the philosophical and political character of his own gesture, dispelling any illusions that he has not yet begun the properly philosophical analysis of European identity. Because readers might reasonably assume that Derrida's per- sonal feelings about Europe or about his status as a European lie outside the talk proper, that his informal incipit precedes the philosophical analysis of Europe, Derrida reminds readers that he is already introducing his subject-Europe's heading in the 1990s, the role of a heading or telos in the formation of any cultural or political identity. Derrida could also count on audience expectations concerning the subject of his text, since it had, in effect, already been announced-that is, in the title. As Derrida has ceaselessly pointed out, a title or heading never lies completely outside a text but always forms what might be called its border of public accessibility. Derrida's second line thus suggests that he is already introducing the subject indicated by the title and responding to the expectations of his readers. We realized, of course, that by leaving the second line a fragment we ran the risk of being misread, but since the two sentences surrounding it both speak of the same "feeling," we thought the risk minimized. And while "about" or "concerning" may have been more natural translations of "au sujet de" than was the overly literal "on the subject of," the briefer terms would not have alleviated the possibility of misreading or conveyed the sense of "headings" as the explicit theme or subject of the text. Finally, in writing "[caps]," we simply assumed-perhaps mistakenly- that its function as a translators' insertion would be one of the "publicly accessible things" that are established by, say, MLA convention. Such things as "taking care of readers, making modification clear to them, making reference only to publicly accessible things, maintaining sentence coher- ence" are, we would agree, central to the tasks of writing and translating, but, as The Other Heading demonstrates, none of these responsibilities can be taken for granted, and none of them is beyond philosophical scrutiny and critique. PASCALE-ANNE BRAULT MICHAEL B. NAAS DePaul University