I
For several years I have been trying to write a book maybe to Derrida, maybe about Derrida, never trying to explain his thinking or the deconstruction or if there is nothing outside the text. But each time that I started writing I felt like a hostage of his thinking. I haven’t been able to find the pretext until now.
I started reading Derrida as a master’s student in 2002. In those first readings of Derrida’s texts, I found his gift for thinking and interpreting the world, reality, and the twentieth century. A century in which essential transformations occurred in the world order. Changes and sequels that we still need to finish analyzing due to the proximity of the events that have been shaping our present.
Derrida: a (pre)text is a writing in deconstruction, following Paco Vidarte, student, colleague, and friend of Derrida, who in his doctoral thesis, “A thesis in deconstruction,” stated: Jacques Derrida “speaks and makes everyone speak, he ventriloquizes us the same way we breathe.”
For me, the affirmation or aphorism “Derrida ventriloquizes us” is the pretext to write about the Derrida I used to read. The pre-text that follows the trace of us, but who is the “us” Vidarte references? The group of readers of Derrida that are here in this Congress presenting their reading of Derrida?
Certainly, in all the years that I have participated in the Derrida Today Conference, I have found a dialogue, different perspectives of reading him, and in some cases very innovative interpretations of his texts, but I haven’t been able to find that us. Because my us is also my maternal tongue: Spanish or Mexican, the tongue that is not mine and is not the language in which Derrida wrote.
If (as we are saying along with others, and after them) there is no such thing as the language, if there is no such thing as absolute monolingualism, one still has to define what a mother tongue is in its active division, and what is transplanted between this language and the one called foreign. What is transplanted and lost there, belonging neither to the one nor the other: the incommunicable.
Jacques Derrida
That’s why the pre-text I found were translations of his work: the translation from French or English to Spanish. But the translation translates what, just the language? Or could it also translate the inscription, a context, a region, or a major event? Is translating Derrida’s work enough to universalize it? Does Derrida want to be universalized? No. So why bring Derrida and deconstruction studies to the present, in the context of the Mexican/Hispanic academy? Do we/us know how to read him?
II
First of all, it is important to note that I started reading Derrida when I was a student of Literary Theory and Comparative Literature in Barcelona, while he was still alive and the deconstruction was transforming Literary Theory in the world: most of us wanted to or did use it for Critical Literary, but we didn’t understand how exactly until after re-reading him a lot.
After the death of Derrida in 2004, I came back to Mexico City and started working as a professor of philosophy. I realized that Derrida wasn’t on the radar of the Mexican academy, until now. There is no us that reads Derrida, since in philosophy departments at Mexican universities there persists the metaphysical of presence or Marxist perspective. There have been some exceptions of Mexican philosophers who wrote about Derrida, but their reading is more of an explanation of what could be the best interpretation of his work in Western philosophy, not in Mexican philosophy.
The confrontation that still exists between analytical and continental philosophers is the same in the rest of the world as in Mexican departments of philosophy, as well as the disdain for his intellectual work: “The disdain did not dissipate even on his death” as Peter Salmon states in his book An Event Perhaps. A Biography of Jacques Derrida.
Salmon and other biographers present several examples in their books about the disdain of Derrida’s thinking which in most cases is a misreading because “Derrida’s defenders and advocates have not always been specifically helpful either—tending to concentrate their efforts on what might be called the more carnivalesque aspects of his thinking, his disruptive potential, while again ignoring the rigor of his philosophical project.” (Salmon)
In Mexico and Latin America, Derrida´s defenders prefer translating him as if there were no other possibility of doing philosophy if it is not Eurocentric philosophy. A Big mistake. That is why most thinkers prefer decolonization to deconstruction to appropriate the thinking of us, us that ventriloquizes colonization. An aporia.
III
So, do I have to read Derrida only in French or English to understand him, and to appropriate his thinking? French, a language that I don’t know, is not mine, and I have no interest in learning it because I had to learn Spanish and then English, as a historical and ideological colonization.
The optional study of Arabic remained, of course. We knew it was allowed, which meant anything but encouraged. The authority of National Education (of “public education”) proposed it for the same reason, at the same time, and in the same form as the study of any foreign language in Algeria! As if we were being told—and that, in the end, is what we were being told: “Let’s see, Latin is required for everyone in sixth grade, of course, not to speak of French, but do you, in addition, want to learn English, or Arabic, or Spanish, or German?” It seems that Berber was never included.
Jacques Derrida
In what language do we/us write philosophy when there is no official mother tongue? Why we can not use one of the other Mesoamerican mother tongues, Nahuatl for example, a language that I also don’t know but remains in the language that we speak right now: Mexican. A language that is us, that takes us between the present the past, and the future. Chapultepec, for example, is a word that refers to a Metro station, an avenue, a castle, or a forest. It represents and symbolizes the ontological and political sense of being Mexican, as a lot of other words, and concepts, that we use every day and in which we can do Mexican philosophy instead of Western philosophy. So, in which language I have to read or translate Derrida’s texts?
III
Is refusing to read Derrida in French a limit to understanding his philosophy and his legacy? Is my impossibility of reading in French an act also of resistance to the logocentrism? Am I less Derridean if I can’t read him in French? Does the Derridean exist as an us? Or does naming us as Derridean also exclude the other us?
Since I started reading Derrida in Spanish, then in English, and the references in German, a phantasmagoric language in Derrida’s text, specifically the last verse of the poem of Celan “Die Welt ist fort, ich muss dich tragen”, I always felt confident that I didn’t need to read him in French. Particularly because three of his best translators to Spanish were also his students, colleagues, and friends: Patricio Peñalver, Cristina de Peretti, and Paco Vidarte. Unfortunately, Vidarte died some years after Derrida.
There are also some other translators and publishers in Argentina that recently reprinted some of his books in Spanish to deconstruct, to resist, to aperture philosophy in Latin America. I am thinking specifically of two books: Psyché and Glas. In 2017 LaCebra, from Argentina, published the translation to Spanish of Glas/Clamor, made by Cristina de Peretti and Luis Ferrero Carracedo.
I think that, thanks to the fact that many of us have taken on this responsibility, today there are already a considerable number of Derrida’s texts translated into Spanish (largely due, by the way, to the work of South American and, more specifically, Argentine publishers), but even so, there is a considerable number of many of his very important books still need to be translated. And, so far, the most pressing and most difficult challenge was Glas [Clamor]. (the translation is mine)
Cristina de Peretii
As I said at the beginning, what is the pretext for still reading Derrida? What can I say about the thought, the intellectual work of this Algerian-French philosopher twenty years after he died in a Conference of Derrida? How can I read/write Derrida in this XXI century?
Vidarte’s thesis is an example of how Derrida ventriloquizes him and, for me, he is one of the best translators of his work. Vidarte did a non-literary translation because he wasn’t talking about Derrida he was writing alongside Derrida.
I am therefore, in any case, judged and condemned; this is what he has always sought to do: if I write in favor of his text, I write against him; if I write for/by him, I write against his text. This friendship is irreconcilable. In any case, he will vomit all this on me, he will not read, he will not be able to read. Do I write by/for him? What would I want to do to him, to his ‘work’? (the translation is mine)
Paco Vidarte
Friendship is also what remains in translation, and interpretation. Whatever language we used to dive into his text, it was the gift of Derrida´s geniality and the hospitality of his thinking. In that sense, deconstruction is the language in which we read Derrida; the language that remains in us, as a way of life and as a way of doing philosophy or philosophy to come.
IV
My reading of Derrida has been passionate, regardless of language, since it is a juxtaposition of several languages that displaces meaning, as Vidarte describes, and this reading has allowed me to explore borders beyond their limits, encompassing not only geopolitical but also ontological aspects.
Over the past two decades I have deconstructed from my reading of Derrida’s work several categories, such as aporia, border, citizenship, sovereignty, hospitality, autoimmunity, friendship, animality, and labor of mourning.
When I started bordering the limits, frames, and frontiers between Northern Mexican literature and Southern American literature, I realized that the border studies were not only the research about the space or the geopolitical boundaries, neither the re-significance of the other and the difference (différence), there are also, and mainly, the studies of the social ontology, the metaphor of the philosophical event, that allowed me to deconstruct the occidental idea of the otherliness based in the universal approach of the philosophical tradition and on a fixed identity demanded by logocentrism.
Roxana Rodríguez Ortiz
Certainly, I know that phenomena, major events such as migration, refugees, citizenship, politics, policies, law (Recht), justice, animality, autoimmunity, sovereignty, and more still need to be deconstructed for the present or the times to come. But that is not my proposal or the way I want to write “by/for him”. I propose to write “by/for him” about writing, the writing of us, us that have to take us.
Writing about the Derridean archive. About it: about it, but also over it, over-putting on it, superimposing one more layer of writing on the support that the archive of deconstruction itself offers us, superimposing the support of our archive to support from another file, support on media, (so)porting a Derrida leaving us (so)carry him.
Paco Vidarte
The writing “by/for him” does not disappear into the Babel Tower of one hegemonic language nor in academia. The writing of us, us that remains, us that is not only the human being, it is also animality, that let it/them/their touch, be touched by the writing “by/for him”.
This animal-machine has a family resemblance to the virus that haunts, but does not invade, everything I write. Neither animal nor non-animal, neither organic nor inorganic, neither living nor dead, this potential invader would be like a computer virus. It would lodge itself in an operator of writing, of reading, of interpretation. But, if I may point out in broad anticipation of what will follow, it would be an animal capable of crossing out (thus of erasing a trace, that of which Lacan says the animal is incapable). This quasi-animal would no longer have to refer to being as such (that of which Heidegger says the animal is incapable) since it would record the necessity of crossing out “being”. But, then, is crossing out “being” and going beyond or beyond the question (hence, the answer) something radically different from a species of animal? Another question to be continued.
Jacques Derrida
So, Derrida: a (pre)text is a text in deconstruction in which Derrida speaks to us, makes us speak, ventriloquizes us, and is writing to become: “an operator of writing, of reading, of interpretation”.
Derrida: a (pre)text is the essay for the Derrida Today Conference 2024.
Quote as:
Rodríguez Ortiz, R. (2024, June 12). Derrida: a (pre)text [web log]. Link: https://roxanarodriguezortiz.com/2024/06/12/derrida-a-pretext/
Roxana Rodríguez Ortiz 