'Ça
commence à faire long, Monsieur Derrida,´ or so said Le
Monde at the time: as long and heavy and boring as
the OJ trial, and as directionless, as devoid of final
judgement, and yet just as passionnant, as intensely rich
in playing the cords of contradiction, justice, injustice,
the recherche of what happened but may not have happened.
I read it as an intensely personal book, full of the first
person that is yet rarely there: a self-reflection, by
Derrida, on the death of any certainty from the past,
but I suspect on a physical death as well. Long, heavy,
because the text is in mourning; it is the mourning of
a loss; it can only look backwards.
The
dedication to Chris Hani announces an impossible attempt
at involvement, annihilated by immediate and forceful
contradiction (to mourn the death of a communist murdered
by communists, in the dawn of liberation from Apartheid,
of which we hear little more). Yet mark the real desire
for substance: 'La vie d´un homme.. sera toujours plus
qu'un paradigme et autre chose qu'un symbole.' And this
later becomes the sole substance of a deconstructionist
ethics: 'Une pensée déconstructrice, celle qui m'importe
ici (to the first person of this text) a toujours (not
to my knowledge!) rappelé à l'irréductibilité de l'affirmation
et donc de la promesse, comme à l'indéconstructibilité
d'une certaine idée de la justice...' (147). And in the
corresponding footnote, an angry distinction between law
and justice, the latter more a matter of 'la propriété
de la vie´, where the law is no longer sure.
La
vie d'un homme, undeconstructable, substance, and this
at key points in a text on ghosts, the spectres of the
past that haunt the present, that tell us where to go,
and of which we have more than one reason to doubt.
Derrida
mentions translation little more than twice in the text
(plus passages on use and exchange value at the end, which
I don't suppose anyone else wants to relate to translation):
pp.
42-47. On the many possible translations of 'The time
is out of joint': organizing disorganizing translations,
but analyzed, surprisingly, linguistically, in a way that
many of us would venture to attempt. Conclusion, though:
the translations are 'out of joint', since the time(s)
of translation itself is 'out of joint'. Hence: 'la signature
de la Chose Shakespeare: autoriser chacune des traductions,
les rendre possibles et intelligibles sans jamais s'y
réduire.' (47) Question then of whether, according to
what is just, there can be responsibility to this Chose
Shakespeare in such a dijointed time. (The question seems
to go unanswered: there are no dead bodies lying around.)
p.
65. Similar disjunctions within Marx, reported to have
said 'One thing's for sure, I'm not a marxist': 'Marx
*vivait mal* cette disjonction des injonction en lui,
et qu'elles fussent *intraduisibles* les unes dans les
autres'. But then, adds Derrida, absolute translatability
between systems would render 'l'injonction, l'héritage
et l'avenir, en un mot l'autre, impossibles'. So the disjunction
is productive, and it is reached, twice, through reference
to translation.
Features
of this view of translation (leaving aside all it owes
to Benjamin):
- The Chose Shakespeare, this great text in the past,
still looms over all the translators, is still accorded
authority, if not as an original then as the text of all
possible translations. This inferiorisation of translations
is, I'm afraid, a constant in Derrida. Translators don't
bring gain; they just pick up the pieces; or get them
wrong and have to be corrected by the philosophe (cf.
pharmacy). - The disjointedness is constantly mal vecu,
se lo pasa mal, an unhappy state; by extension, since
the analogies are being exploited, the position of the
translator allows few pleasures, certainly no jouissance:
translators must, it seems, vivre mal their disjointedness.
This is not quite a constant in Derrida, but it certainly
is in this text. - The word 'avenir', future, smuggled
into the second passage above is one of the few occasions
dijointedness might actually lead somewhere. Yet this
future is never, here, any more than a working through
of the past, the other. The subject, particularly here
the translating subject, would seem to have no investment
in that future, which remains external.
That
is, no becoming is placed in this subjectivity. The only
substance is that of the person that lives and dies; it
is beyond deconstruction and thus the basis for a deconstructive
ethics. Thus, without becoming, we effectively reduce
the subject either to that substance or to the process
of mourning that can only reflect on the passing of substance.
Ethics cannot be of the future but of (cyclical?) life
and death.
Mourning,
hopefully, is long but not ever. Its function is surely
to deliver the subject from the past. Like psychoanalysis,
it lasts its time, but in order to cure. This book, which
certainly lasts its time, might function well only if,
once the mourning is over, we can live well and happily
in disjointed times, and create a mode of becoming what,
from within subjectivity, connects with a future that
is not entirely other.
By
extension, the translation analogies might yet mark out
an inhabitable space, hopefully liberated from those great
texts of the penumbrous past.
Read
the book if you will. But sooner or later we have to snap
out of it.
