Force and Translation; Or, The Polymorphous Body of Language

Elissa Marder

philoSOPHIA, Volume 3, Number 1, Winter 2013, pp. 1-18 (Article)

Published by State University of New York Press

For additional information about this article

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essays

Force and Translation; Or, The

Polymorphous Body of Language
Elissa Marder

Or un corps verbal ne se laisse pas traduire ou transporter dans une

autre langue. Il est cela mme que la traduction laisse tomber. Laisser
tomber le corps, telle est mme lnergie essentielle de la traduction.
Quand elle rinstitue un corps, elle est posie.
Jacques Derrida, Freud et la scne de lcriture

The materiality of a word cannot be translated or carried over

into another language. Materiality is precisely that which translation relinquishes. To relinquish materiality: such is the driving
force of translation. And when that materiality is reinstated,
translation becomes poetry.
Jacques Derrida, Freud and the Scene of Writing

Babel Revisited (The Mother Tongue and

the Translation Machine)
On January 20, 2012, Lawrence Summers, former president of Harvard and
former Secretary of the U.S. Treasury, boldly announced a six-point vision for
reforming the U.S. education system in a New York Times Education supplement
editorial modestly entitled, What you (Really) Need to Know. For the

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purposes of this discussion, I will limit myself here to a brief e xamination of

what he says about the study of foreign languages and the merits of machine
translation in the item listed as number 5:
5 . The world is much more open, and events abroad affect the lives of
Americans more than ever before. This makes it essential that the educational experience breed cosmopolitanismthat students have international
experiences, and classes in the social sciences draw on examples from around
the world. It seems logical, too, that more in the way of language study be
expected of students. I am not so sure.
Englishs emergence as the global language, along with the rapid progress
in machine translation and the fragmentation of languages spoken around the
world, make it less clear that the substantial investment necessary to speak
a foreign tongue is universally worthwhile. While there is no gainsaying the
insights that come from mastering a language, it will over time become less
essential in doing business in Asia, treating patients in Africa or helping
resolve conflicts in the Middle East.
For those of us who still earn our living by teaching literary texts written
in foreign languages in foreign language departments in the university,
Summerss breezy assessment that the university of the future need not
(indeed ought not) include extensive foreign language study is, sadly, not
exactly news. On the contrary, there is nothing particularly innovative
or original about the position he advocates here: his vision of a future
global American universityin which virtually all speculative activities
are conducted solely in Englishhas already begun to be implemented
in various colleges and universities around the world. If his remarks are
nonetheless noteworthy, it is because of his apparent willingnesseven
eagernessto defend a policy that university officials often officially still
pretend to abhor. Indeed, Summerss position goes far beyond the more
familiar pragmatic voices that have concluded that the reduction of foreign
language instruction is a necessary and unavoidable consequence of the
unfortunate economic reality that the American university as we once knew
it has become financially untenable and hence unable to accommodate areas
of study that can be construed as nonessential. Instead, Summers goes a step
farther: he actively advocates against investing precious university resources in
foreign language study on ideological, political, quasi-philosophical, or dare
I say it, perhaps even theological, grounds. By appealing to the value of what he
calls here cosmopolitanism, he clearly implies that Englishs status as global
language discharges English speakers in the U.S. university system from any
potential obligation to any other language on the globe.

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According to Summers, English is optimally positioned to be a vehicle for

genuine cosmopolitanism because, as a so-called global language, it constitutes a receptive, inclusive, and welcoming common ground for multicultural
exchange that would be otherwise impossible given the sheer volume and overwhelming diversity of all the other languages in the world. In other words, in
his opinion, recourse to English actually facilitates and enhancesrather than
inhibitsgenuine multicultural encounters as it offsets the potentially destabilizing confusion of tongues that would otherwise ensue were one to attempt
to grapple with the unmanageable volume and diversity of the many foreign
languages that are actually spoken around the world. In this worldview, therefore,
English can no longer be considered merely a natural language among other
natural languages. As a global language, it aspires to be a universal language,
a lingua franca, into which all other languages and speakers can be absorbed,
assimilated, subsumed, and translated. It follows naturally from this that English
ought to be the sole language in the future university as English has a unique
responsibility (or so he argues), in todays world, to take on the task of serving as
universal translator to the many other peoples of the world. Here I would like to
pause briefly to point out that in his haste to explain why foreign language study
would be unnecessary in the American university of the future, Summers doesnt
even bother to mention the very existence of foreign literature as a potential
object of study, presumably because of the inherently limited return on such an
investment of energy and resources. Foreign literary texts are rarely applicable
instruments for deriving reliable positive knowledge about anythingmuch less
for any useful access to current economic, geopolitical, or even cultural context.
Furthermore, as I hope to show later on, to the extent that foreign literary texts
are both foreign and literary, they are twice exiled from Summerss dream vision
of a universal language of translation. In short, they partake in that which cannot
be translated by and into Summerss global picture.
It is no accident that Summerss claim regarding Englishs unique role as
a global language is coupled with a bold assertion about the rapid progress
in machine translation. Englishs capacity to serve as a vehicle of global
translation is depicted here as the penultimate rung in a ladder that aspires to
culminate in the lofty advances that will ultimately be achieved by machine
translation. Summers apparently holds out great hopes for the power of a
translation machine. He goes so far as to intimate that such a machine would
presumably be capable of processing all languages into one universal language
that, modeled after English, would operate as a kind of technological p
rosthetic
supplement to English. The translation machine would then facilitate the
smooth and seamless transfer of information from all the other languages
in the world back to and back through English as its privileged intermediary
relay point.

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Furthermore, in the one sentence in which Summers concedes that one

might potentially reap some insights from learning a foreign language
(While there is no gainsaying the insights that come from mastering a
language, it will over time become less essential in doing business in Asia,
treating patients in Africa or helping resolve conflicts in the Middle East) he
is alsoas if compelledto describe the encounter with the foreign language
as something one masters rather than learnseven as he quickly reasserts,
in the very same sentence, the apparently even more pressing need for mastery
of English in order to: do business in Asia, treat patients in Africa, and
resolve conflicts in the Middle East, thereby insinuating, even if he would
almost certainly vociferously deny this, that in his language, Asia means
money, Africa means illness, and the Middle East means conflict. Given his
underlying premise that English is a global language and that all languages are
potential objects of mastery, is it really so surprising that the map of the world
that is reflected back through his English translation so readily conforms to a
contemporary orientalist stereotype?
But Lawrence Summerss brief newspaper editorial would certainly not merit
the attention I have been devoting to it were it not for the fact that it raisesin
ways that go far beyond the specific policies he espouses regarding the future of
the universitya set of pervasive and very telling fictions and fantasies about
language and translation. In fact, embedded in his supposedly forward-looking
vision of the future lies a very regressive fantasy about language and power.
The fantasy of a powerful universal languagehere technologically enhanced
by the figure of the machine translationwith which one might overcome,
and perhaps even conquer, the differences among different people goes back to
the dawn of time and has many incarnations. The best known of such stories
is, of course Babel, the story that Jacques Derrida describes as the myth of
the origin of myth, the metaphor of metaphor, the narrative of narrative, the
translation of translation (Derrida 2007, 191).
Derrida discusses Babel as the myth of the origin of translation in a number
of different texts including Des Tours de Babel, Ulysse Gramophone, as well as
the interviews in the Roundtable on Translation in The Ear of the Other. 1 In
those interviews, Derrida specifically points out that in the story of Babel,
political violence is always already inscribed in the very attempt to construct
a global language.
I chose the example of Babel because I think it can provide an epigraph for all
discussions of translations. What happens in the Babel episode, in the tribe
of the Shems?They want to make a name for themselves and they bear
the name of name.[H]ow will they do it? By imposing their tongue on the
entire universe on the basis of this sublime edification. Tongue: actually the
Hebrew word here is the word that signifies lip. Not tongue but lip. Thus, had

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their enterprise succeeded, the universal tongue would have been a particular
language imposed by violence, by force, by violent hegemony over the world.
It would not have been a universal languagefor example in the Leibnizian
sensea transparent language to which everyone would have access. Rather,
the master with the most force would have imposed this language on the
world and, by virtue of this fact, it would have become the universal tongue.
(Derrida 1988, 100101)

In this invocation of Babel, Derrida asks us to think about how and why the
myth of a global language engages this regressive fantasy of returning to
that primordial tower in the hopes of finally overcoming differencesbetween
languages, peoples, wordsby laying claim to a mastery of language that is not
merely transparently accessible to all but that implicitly aspires to be omnipotent, divine, and virile. The fantasy of the sort of global language invoked
by Larry Summers relies upon faith in a model of translation so powerful
that it would effectively do away with any need for translation by its ability to
repair the faults within language and restore communication to a state of pure
plenitude and self-presence. The story of Babel is the mythic name for the wish
to move through translation beyond translation. Language-beyond-translation
is always imagined as a vehicle of power and presence. Like the phallic tower
it recalls, its aim is omnipotent invulnerability and its force is virile, machinic,
and divine. Paradoxically, this dream of a global language conceals its will to
power under the veil of transparency and universality.
Embedded within the dream of a global language that would take us beyond
translation lurks its corollary: the fantasy of a once present but now lost linguistic
plenitudesupposedly before language became alienated through differences
and translations. This fantasy of a lost linguistic plenitude often takes the form
of a nostalgicand sometimes even militantdefense of the purity of the
mother tongue. The term mother tongue conjures up a lost presence, the fantasy
of home and a return to the maternal body as the site of a unique, natural, and
protected origin. The technological powers ascribed to machine translation, the
divine powers attributed to the tower of Babel, and the supposed purity of the
mother tongue rely on the fantasmatic power of language; its fetishistic function
would be to repair and restore something that has presumably been lost and to
legitimize a claim on what can be called home.
The Mad Law of Translation
In 1996 (a decade or so after his most well-known works on translation), in his
autobiographical essay, Monolingualism of the Other; Or the Prosthesis of Origin,
Derrida explicitly interrogates the problematic relationship between language and
the fantasy of home: The language called maternal is never purely natural, nor

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proper, nor inhabitable (58). This strange and somewhat mad text is constructed
around the haunting refrain, Yes, I have only one language; yet it is not mine.
Throughout the book, via personal anecdotes about his own Franco-Maghrebian
childhood in Algeria as well as through discussions of other figures whose lives
were marked by exile and oppression ranging from Abdelkebir Khatibi to Hannah
Arendt, Derrida explores the relationship between politics, language, and
translation. Although he readily admits that colonization and global capitalism
do invariably compel certain people to learn the language of the masters, of
capital and machines; they must lose their idiom in order to survive or live better
(Derrida 1996, 30), he nonetheless refuses to endorse the notion that political
oppression through language is the cause of the estrangement from language,
arguing on the contrary that it is one of its more pervasive and pernicious effects.
Colonization through language is violent precisely because the colonizer not only
illegitimately appropriates language as his own, but also buttresses this false claim
with phantasmatic rationalizations amplified by force. Neither the colonizer nor
the colonized possess language, and he invokes the phrase monolingualism of
the other to articulate the terms of that nonpossession.2
The monolingualism of the other meansthat in any case we speak only one
languageand that we dont own it. We only ever speak one languageand,
since it returns to the other, it exists asymmetrically, always for the other, from
the other, kept by the other. Coming from the other, remaining with the other,
and returning to the other. (Derrida 1996, 40)

Moreover, Derrida relates the notion of monolingualism of the other to an

explicit rejection of the term mother tongue and everything that follows from it.
For him, the very invocation of the mother tongue inevitably conjures up the
violent claim on a naturalized (maternal) home in the name of whose purity
bands of brothers justify self-legitimatized acts of (presumably nationalistic or
tribal) aggression.
For never was I able to call French, this language I am speaking to you, my
mother tongue. These words do not come to my mouth; they do not come
out of my mouth. I leave to others the words my mother tongue. That is my
culture; it taught me the disasters toward which incantatory invocations of the
mother tongue will have pushed humans headlong. My culture was right away
a political culture. My mother tongue is what they say, what they speak; as
for me, I cite and question them. I ask them in their own language, certainly,
in order to make them understand me, for it is serious, if they indeed know
what they are saying and what they are talking about. Especially when, so
lightly, they celebrate fraternity. At bottom, brothers, the mother tongue,
and so forth, pose the same problem. (Derrida 1996, 34)

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Indeed, one ought to read the book s subtitle, Prosthesis of Origin, as the
emphatic antithesis of the phrase mother tongue as it conjures up language
as originally in translation and dependent upon translation.
Thus, global language and mother tongue both share the common
wish that language might restitute the relation to the (lost) maternal body
by providing a home that one could claim to possess. In both instances, the
question of force is never far removed; it finds expression in the dual need to
eradicate the differences between languages and to repudiate the differences
within each one. In both cases, there is a drive to protect language from the
destabilizing and impure effects of translation: global language supposedly
does away with the very need for translation by subsuming all other languages
under its aegis, whereas the mother tongue conjures up a relation to language
prior to any exposure to the language of the other. Moreover, implicitly, both
of these conceptions of language are associated with bodily figures that are
immune and invulnerable: the translation machine and the reconstituted
maternal body.
For Derrida, however, translation is not an operation that is performed upon
constituted given languages, but rather the very condition of possibilityand
impossibilityof language itself. Thus, when Derrida rereads the story of
Babel, he does so precisely in order to suggest that the unfinished tower of
Babel does not merely indicate the irreducible multiplicity of languages, but
rather that language is itself both irreducibly multiple and constitutively
incomplete.
Manyif not mostof Derridas first writings explicitly devoted to the
question of translation are glosses on Babel. Babel is one of the names that
Derrida gives to the many ways in which every language is always already in
translation. To say that a language is always already in translation is to say
that it is constitutively in a state of finitude, privation, and demand while
simultaneously opening itself up to idiomatic excess and linguistic multiplicity.
In Des Tours de Babel (and in several other texts devoted to Walter Benjamin
and translation), Derrida relates the story of Babel to Benjamins notion that
translation inhabits language from within as a necessity or a call. From this
perspectiveand it is certainly one that has become familiar to us in the wake
of Benjamins famous essay The Task of the Translator, Derrida suggests
that written works call out for translation from within as if from an internal
imperative:
The original is not a plenitude which would come to be translated by accident.
The original is in the situation of demand, that is, of a lack or exile. The
original is indebted a priori to the translation. Its survival is a demand and
a desire for translation, somewhat like the Babelian demand: Translate me.
(Derrida 1988, 152)

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Following Benjamin, Derrida invokes the f igure of Babel to suggest that

because all languages are in this originary state of privation, they are
indebted to one another through their common indebtedness to language
itself. In Des Tours de Babel, he is careful to explain that Benjamins
difficult and often-misunderstood notion of pure language (reine Sprache)
is a name for this original relation between languages. Thus, this pure
language does not in any way imply purity as self-identity, lack of
contamination, virginity, nor does it aspire to the totalizing invulnerability
that we saw at work in the claims for a universal language or the appeals
to a mother tongue: rather, Benjamins pure language is language that
is purely languageor language as such. In Des Tours de Babel, Derrida
insists on this point:
What is intended, then, by this co-operation of languages and intentional
aims is not transcendent to the language; it is not a reality that they
besiege from all sides, like a tower they are trying to surround. No, what
they are aiming at intentionally, individually and together, in translation
is thelanguage itself as Babelian event, a language that is neither the
universallanguage in the L eibnizian sense nor is it a language that is the
natural language each still remains on its own; it is the being-language of
the language, tongue or language as such, that unity without any self-identity
that makes for the fact that there are plural languages and that they are
languages. These languages relate to one another in translation according
to an unheard-of mode. They complete each other, says Benjamin; but no
other completeness in the world can represent this one, or that symbolic
complementarity. (Derrida 2007,22122)

In Des Tours de Babel, Derrida links his readings of Benjamins theory of

translation to Joyces polyglottal defiance of translation through the story of
Babel. He invokes Joyces rewriting of the story of Babel in Finnegans Wake to
show how Joyces text speaks through the body of English into multiple other
languages at the same time. Because Joyces English words speak simultaneously in English and against English, Derrida suggests that Joyces rendition
of Babel is critical to any understanding of translation. Speaking about Joyce
and Babel in the Ear of the Other, he says:
Finnegans Wake is for us today the major corpus, the great challenge to
translation, although certainly not the only one. However, a Babelian motif
runs from one end of Finnegans Wake to the other.[R]eferring to the event
of the tower of Babel, at the moment when Yahweh interrupts the construction
of the tower and condemns humanity to the multiplicity of languages
which is to say, to the necessary and impossible task of translationJoyce

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writesAnd he war. In what language is this written? Obviously, despite

the multiplicity of languages, cultural references, and condensations, English
is indisputably the dominant language in Finnegans Wake.But obviously
the German word war influences the English word, so we also have: He
was, he was the one who saidI am that I am, which is the definition of
Yahweh.I wonder what happens at the moment one tries to translate these
words. Even if by some miracle one could translate all the virtual impulses at
work in this utterance, one thing remains that could never be translated: the
fact that there are two tongues here, or at least more than one.[O]ne could
not translate the event which consists in grafting several tongues onto a single
body. (Derrida 1988, 9899)

For Derrida, this Joycean declaration of war (which, as we shall see in a

moment, is also a declaration of love) is the very law of translation. It is a law
that undermines any attempt to master the multiplicities in every language.
Furthermore, given our earlier discussion about Lawrence Summers and
machine translation, it is interesting to note that in his longer text devoted to
this same passage in Finnegans Wake, Two Words for Joyce, Derrida explicitly
brings up translation machines:
Imagine the most powerful and refined translation-machines, the most
competent translation teams. Their very success cannot but take the form of
a failure. Even if, in an improbable hypothesis, they had translated everything,
they would by that very fact fail to translate the multiplicity of languages.
They would erase the following simple fact: a multiplicity of idioms, not only
of meanings but of idioms, must have structured this event of writing which
now stands as law. It will have laid down the law about itself. It was written
simultaneously in both English and German. Two words in one, war, and thus
a double noun, a double verb, a noun and a verb which were in the beginning.
(Derrida 1984, 155)

Whenever Derrida invokes the law of translation (as he does here and he does
so in virtually every text in which translation is at issue), the law in question is
marked as mad, folle. For example, in Monolingualism and the Other, he writes
that the double postulation:
We only ever speak one language(yes, but)
We never speak only one language
is not only the very law of what is called translation. It would be the law
itself as translation. A law which is a little mad, Im willing to grant you that.
(Derrida 1996, 10)

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There are certainly several important reasons why Derrida often qualifies
the law of translation as being a little mad. First and foremost, however,
he suggests that the law of translation is mad because the very concept of
translation only pertains to that which, in language, cannot be translated. In
other words: whenever an utterance can successfully be transferred from one
language into another without undue loss, whenever an idea can be transposed
into other words (by a machine or anyone else), the labors and challenges that
are specific to the concept of translation are not engaged. Strictly speaking,
therefore, the question of translation only comes into play in those cases where
some degree of failure is constitutively inevitable and unavoidable.3 The notion
that translation is destined to failure is, of course, best known through Paul
de Mans reading of the word Aufgabe as giving up or defeat in the title of
Walter Benjamins Die Aufgabe des bersetzers.
However, I would like to suggest there might also be other ways of thinking
about the consequences of this mad law of translation. More specifically,
Iwould like to explore how it might serve as a starting point for rethinking
certain persistent assumptions about how sexuality and gender are inscribed
within language. By looking at the ways in which language bodies are differently sexed, gendered, animated, and idiomatically singular, I hope to open up
the question of what it means to inhabit a body.
I propose to begin this exploration by offering three (perhaps slightly mad
sounding) propositions that have begun to materialize through this reading of
Derridas writings on language and translation. I hope that they will help to
frame a different kind of approach to thinking about what translation might
have to do with sexuality, gender, and literature more generally: (1) the law
of translation is mad because no law governing language can account for the
myriad and untold ways in which every so-called natural language is singularly
and idiomatically embodied and because language itself constitutes something
like a strange kind of body; (2) Rather than thinking about the body of language
as modeled after or in reference to human embodiment as we think we know it,
I would like to suggest that we rethink what we think we know about bodies in
general on the basis of the ways in which languages emerge as bodies; (3)The
body of language manifests as those language events (comprised of idioms,
inflections, intonalities, rhythms, erotic intensities, homophones, homonyms,
diversity of genders and noun classes, and multiple divisions and arrangements
of persons) that resist translation and which, once subjected to translation, leave
no palpable trace of their once embodied singularities in the translated text.
Because there is neither purity nor plentitude in language, every language is
infinitely finite. Made of textured layers of differences and singularities, each
language produces its own irreducible, untranslatable idioms. In their very
untranslatability, idioms are language bodies that call out for translation and
that resist translation.
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Word-Bodies
Before concluding with a very brief look at the effects of translation on the
language bodies in Hlne Cixouss writings, let me clarify a point that has
been implicit in everything that I have been saying up to this point. I have
chosen to focus this discussion thus far on Derridas writings on translation
because, unlike most other philosophers, he not only puts translation at the
center of his thinking, but also challenges the foundational (albeit often
unstated) premise that the very language of philosophy is (or ought to be)
unconditionally translatable. 4 In The Ear of the Other he says:
What does philosophy say? What does the philosopher say when he is being
a philosopher? He says: What matters is truth or meaning, and since meaning
is before or beyond language, it follows that it is translatable. Meaning has the
commanding role, and consequently one must be able to fix its univocality or,
in any case, to master its plurivocality. If this plurivocality can be mastered,
then translation, understood as the transport of a semantic content into
another signifying form, is possible. There is no philosophy unless translation in this latter sense is possible. Therefore, the thesis of philosophy is
translatability in this common sense, that is, as the transfer of a meaning or
truth from one language or another without any harm being done. The origin
of philosophy is translation or the thesis of translatability, so that whenever
translation in this sense has failed, it is nothing less than philosophy that finds
itself defeated. (Derrida 1988, 120)

As anyone who has ever read any text by him can attest, by calling attention
to the (often unacknowledged) body of language in philosophical texts and
by holding philosophical concepts accountable to language in which they are
expressed, Derrida demands that philosophy become receptive to that which
cannot be said in philosophical language.5 One might even say (and I think
he has said so himself more or less in these words) there is no deconstruction
without translation and translation is another name for deconstruction.
But one might also say that there is no translation without the body of
language. In all of his texts in which translation is thematized, ranging from
Freud and the Scene of Writing up to What is a Relevant Translation? and
beyond, Derrida grapples with how to conceive of this body of language. Here
it is worth remarking that in Freud and the Scene of Writing, where Derrida
explicitly writes that it is the verbal body ( le corps verbal) that cannot be
translated or carried over into another language, in the English translation
Alan Bass carefully removes the word body from Derridas expression le
corps verbal and substitutes the word materiality for the word body in
each instance.

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Although Basss use of the term materiality in place of body is most

probably a sign of the times (and it thereby countersigns, as it were, its date of
publication in 1978), it is nonetheless very striking that, for his part, Derrida
does not use the term materiality, but verbal body instead. In one of his
latest texts explicitly devoted to translation (What is a Relevant Translation?), he returns to this question of the body of language, but in this text
he insists on using the simple word word as the word for what he earlier
indicated through the expression verbal body or corps verbal.6 Throughout this
text (which appeared in English translation in The Translation Studies Reader,
edited by Lawrence Venuti in 2000), Derrida explains why, in using the word
word, he is emphatically not referring to the linguistic unit that goes by that
name, but rather to the erotic event of a singular incarnation in the body of
language as it calls out for translation. In the following provocative passage,
he describes how the word simultaneously gives into and resists its passage
into translation:
As for the word (for the word will be my theme)neither grammar nor
lexicon hold an interest for meI believe I can say that if I love the word, it is
only in the body of its idiomatic singularity, that is, where a passion for translation comes to lick it as a flame or an amorous tongue might: approaching
as closely as possible while refusing at the last moment to threaten or to
reduce, to consume or consummate, leaving the other body intact but not
without causing the other to appearon the very brink of this refusal or
withdrawaland after having aroused or excited a desire for the idiom, for
the unique body of the other, in the flames flicker or through a tongues caress.
(Derrida 2000, 424)
Quil sagisse de grammaire ou de lexique, le motcar le mot sera mon sujet,
il ne mintresse, je crois pouvoir le dire, je ne laime, cest le mot, que dans le corps
de sa singularit idiomatique, cest--dire l o une passion de traduction vient le
lchercomme peut lcher une flamme ou une langue amoureuse: en sapprochant
daussi prs que possible pour renoncer au dernier moment menacer ou rduire,
consumer ou consommer, en laissant lautre corps intact, mais non sans avoir, sur
le bord mme de ce renoncement ou de ce retrait, fait paratre lautre, non sans avoir
veill ou anim le dsir de lidiome, du corps original de lautre, dans la lumire de
la flamme ou selon la caresse dune langue. (Derrida 2004, 561)

As embodied language, the word-body calls for translation into and with another
word-body in a singular and inimitable act of love. Here, Derrida imagines the
body-word as it calls out for translation and the body of the language into which
it will be translated as a conflagration of tongues that inflame one another into
a fragile, luminous, and precarious mode of being. The vulnerable language

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idiom discloses its own bodily being as it exposes itself to near-extinction in

the body of the other.
Later in the same essay, Derrida explicitly suggests that the philosophy
of translation and the ethics of translation must begin at the level of the
body of the word. In this important passage, he clarifies that he uses the
word word here to underscore that word-bodies are historical productions and
constructions:
The philosophy of translation, the ethics of translationif translation does
in fact have these thingstoday aspires to be a philosophy of the word, a
linguistics or ethics of the word. At the beginning of translation is the word.
Nothing is less innocent, pleonastic and natural, nothing is more historical
than this proposition, even if it seems too obvious. (Derrida 2000, 428)

He then goes on to describe what makes a word a word in his sense:

[W]henever several words occur in one or the same acoustic or graphic form,
whenever a homophonic or homonymic effect occurs, translation in the strict,
traditional, and dominant sense of the term encounters an insurmountable
limitand the beginning of its end, the figure of its ruin (but perhaps a translation is devoted to ruin, to that form of memory or commemoration that is
called a ruin; ruin is perhaps its vocation and a destiny that it accepts from the
very outset). A homonym or homophone is never translatable word-to-word.
It is necessary either to resign oneself to losing the effect, the economy, the
strategy (and this loss can be enormous) or to add a gloss, of the translators
note sort, which always, even in the best of cases, the case of the greatest
relevance, confesses the impotence or failure of the translation.Wherever
the unity of the word is threatened or put into question, it is not only the
operation of translation that finds itself compromised; it is also the concept,
the definition, and the very axiomatics, the idea of translation that must be
reconsidered. (Derrida 2000, 429)

Mduse: Queen of the Queers

Keeping in mind Derridas poetic formulation: [W]henever several words
occur in one or the same acoustic or graphic form, whenever a homophonic
or homonymic effect occurstranslation is devoted to ruin, to that form of
memory or commemoration that is called a ruin, we might say that Hlne
Cixouss writings are ruins in this special sense: in each and every word, they
are riddled at the source, ruined at the origin as they unfold in an explosion
of multiple tongues.

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More than any other writer working in the French language today, Hlne
Cixouss texts are dedicated to giving bodies to words and discovering bodies
in words. In this sense (as I have suggested in greater detail elsewhere),
all of Hlne Cixouss texts are untranslatable not because they are written
in French, but because they are not. 7 They are ruinously and ecstatically
written with word-bodies as if always already in original translation. Like
Joyce, at the level of the word, they are polylingual. Unlike Joyce, however,
Cixouss texts are not merely polylingual, they are polymorphously sexed,
polymorphously gendered, and polymorphously animated in every way. In
fact, as has been occasionally intimated, it might well have been she and
not Derrida who first coined the French witticism: animots.8 Animots is a
made-up word containing the elements of the French word for words (mots
preceded by the animating preposition ani) that is also a homonym for the
French word animaux meaning animals. Animots of all kinds populate her
texts. Before it was all the rage, Cixouss writings were host to embodied
creatures of all varieties of sexes and genders. In all of her texts, thousands
of tongues are grafted onto the body of each word. This image of a body
crowned by a crowd of tongues conjures up, of course, the figure by whom
and in relation to whom Hlne Cixous has become known to the Anglophone world: Medusa.
Given that Hlne Cixouss writings are ruined with translation, it is
perhaps not so surprising that they have also, for the most part, been ruined
by translation. Here I am particularly thinking of course of her most famous
text, The Laugh of the Medusa. For it is indeed the case that the highly
problematic American translation of The Laugh of the Medusa simultaneously made Cixous famous worldwide and trivialized and distorted the force
of the very text that made her name. The irony of the apparent necessity of
this convergence between global recognition on the one hand and dramatic
textual misrecognition on the other is, in itself, interesting and worthy of
further comment. 9 As I have written about this elsewhere, I will not discuss
this question in detail. Nonetheless, in the context of this discussion, it is
worth noting a few salient points about the fact that what went missing from
the translation was precisely its motivating point of departure: a celebration of
the potential resources found in the multisexed word-bodies in language. For
example, and this is the most obvious one, the very premise of Cixouss Laugh
begins by ruining the words for writing: crire and criture. Before the text even
begins, in the word crire, she uncovers the words rire and cri: laughter and
scream. When, therefore, she invokes the famous term criture fminine in the
first sentence of her text, Je parlerai de lcriture fminine: de ce quelle fera, the
text does not say, as the translation would have it, I will speak about womens
writing, about what it will do (Cixous 1981, 245); instead, it says (and here I
will not translate but rather paraphrase) something like: I will speak about the
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word-body writing by remarking that, in French, the word writing is always

already marked as feminine. By recalling that the body of writing is marked
as feminine, other bodies can write themselves otherwise by reaffirming the
mark of sexual difference already at work in the body of writing. In other
words, for Cixous, the invocation of criture fminine in Le Rire de la Mduse
was never about womens writing in any commonsense understanding of the
term, nor was it even about writing the body as commonly construed. Instead,
throughout that text, beginning with its very first words, Cixous was proposing
something stranger and more elusive by the term criture fmininesomething
that can only be felt, heard, and read, by attending to the word as ruin: she
was asking her reader to open herself up to be touched and licked by the erotic
tongue of the body of writing itself.
In a short new introduction to the recent French reedition of Le Rire de
la Mduse, Cixous writes about why she decided to republish Laugh of the
Medusa, in French, more than forty years after its original publication. In
this small and poignant text, which bears the title Un effet dpine rose (in
reference to the special meaning that pink hawthorns hold for Marcel Prousts
narrator), Cixous recounts her fraught and complicated history with her own
text. She tells about its irreverent conception: how it was an expression of
youthful exuberance (how, for example, she loved to laugh at the thought of
Medusa sticking her tongue out at the male establishments and institutions and
how Medusa let her laugh, cry, scream, howl, all at once), and how she wrote
it as part of collaborative energies shared with others including: Catherine
Clment, Ariane Mnouchkine, Annie Leclerc, and Jacques Derrida; how the
text was also an expression of a charmed time during which she (along with
Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, and others) founded an experimental university (Vincennes) in an enchanting forest. Looking back, she says that Medusa
was a scream in writingand that one only ever screams once in writing. But
then she adds that when she wrote Medusa, she thought she was making a call:
an open telephone call to the world at large. Instead, much to her surprise, she
discovered that in English translation, her open call was returned to her as a
feminist manifesto; her flying word-bodies had their wings clipped into service
as part of something called French Feminist Theory that then was integrated
into compulsory reading lists in universities, all over the world, in English.
Medusa traveled the world, in English translation. Cixous describes how the
fame of her English-speaking text transformed her, its estranged creator, into
something like a male author, a father figure.
Years after the French original had virtually disappeared from circulation,
in response to queries from some of her younger friends who had never seen
the original, Cixous tells how she decided to republish Le Rire de La Mduse.
At the end of her pink hawthorn preface, as she thinks back to the title of the
book that had formerly born the title La Jeune ne and as she contemplates the

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body of this new-old Mduse, now transformed into something like a French
translation of the American translation of the French translation of her original
ruined laughter, she reaffirms her love for Medusa. She writes: Cest Mduse
qui me la donn. La Muse de la littrature. Une queer. Dautres disent la queen des
queers. La littrature comme telle est queer. [It is Medusa who gave it to me. The
Muse of literature. A Queer. Others say queen of queers. Literature as such is
queer] (Cixous 2010, 3233; my translation).
How is one to translate this queer affirmation of Medusas queer gift? The
word that Cixous proposes here for the translation of this queer gift is literature. But the word literature, as it emerges from Cixouss very queer French
translation of it here, most emphatically does not refer to any specific collection of books or authors taught in any universities or anywhere else. Instead,
literature is the name for anything, anywhere, that makes bodies out of words.
If Lawrence Summers has his way, there may no longer be a place for the queer
bodies of literature in translation in the university, but literature must survive
and resist the onslaught of global language. Literature is that which gives bodies
to languages and it is from the bodies in literature that we can hope to rediscover
the polymorphous possibilities of the ones in which we think we live.
Emory University

Notes
1. For the English version of Ulysse gramophone, see Jacques Derrida, Two Words
for Joyce (1984).
2. See Rey Chows discussion of this point in Reading Derrida on Being Monolingual. Glossing Derrida, Chow writes:
To this extent, Derrida reads colonialism as both specific and universal: colonialism is a specific instance of the appropriation of language by the use of force
or cunning; at the same time, all practices of language involve such appropriation.
Referring to the colonial master, for instance, he writes: because language is
not his natural possession, he can, thanks to that very fact, pretend historically,
through the rape of a cultural usurpation, which means always essentially colonial,
to appropriate it in order to impose it as his own. That is his belief; he wishes
to make others share it through the use of force or cunning; he wants to make
others believe it, as they do a miracle, through rhetoric, the school, or the army
( 23 ). Having identified colonialism thus as an unnatural process of politicophantasmatic constructions (23), he nonetheless states his reluctance to analyze
language strictly according to colonialism because, he explains, colonialism applies
to all culture: I cannot analyze this politics of language head-on, and I would not
like to make too easy use of the world [sic] colonialism. All culture is originarily
colonial.Every culture institutes itself through the unilateral imposition of some

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3.

4.
5.

6.
7.
8.

9.

politics of language. Mastery begins, as we know, through the power of naming,

of imposing and legitimating appellations. (2008, 224)
See Paul de Man, Conclusions. Walter Benjamins Task of the Translator.
De Man writes:
If the text is called Die Aufgabe des bersetzers, we have to read this title more
or less as a tautology: Aufgabe, task, can also mean the one who has to give up.
If you enter the Tour de France and you give up, that is the Aufgabeer hat
aufgegeben, he doesnt continue in the race anymore. It is in that sense also the
defeat, the giving up, of the translator. The translator has to give up in relation to
the task of refinding what was there in the original. The question then becomes
why this failure with regard to an original text, to an original poet, is for Benjamin
exemplary. (1985, 33)
For a related discussion of this text, see Marc Crpon, Deconstruction and
Translation: The Passage into Philosophy (2006).
Many (even very fine) readers of Derrida seem to have trouble recognizing this.
They tend either to translate the body of his written texts into philosophical
concepts or they explain his writing by saying it is autobiographical, or literary,
or some combination. The point is that for Derrida, philosophy is not immune
to or separate from the body of the language in which it is written.
The French version of this text was published as Quest-ce quune traduction
relevante? Derrida, LHerne 83 (2004).
See my chapter Birthmarks (Given Names), in The Mother in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction: Psychoanalysis, Photography, Deconstruction (Marder 2012).
For Derridas use of the term animots, see, for example, Lanimal que donc je suis
where he writes: Nous suivons, nous nous suivons. Cette thorie d animots que je
suis ou qui me suivent partout et dont la mmoire me serait inpuisable, je ne vous en
imposerai pas une exhibition (2006, 290).
I have done a partial analysis of this phenomenon in an essay written for a forthcoming volume dedicated to the first German translation of The Laugh of the
Medusa: Die Kraft der Liebe (German translation of Force of Love).

References
Chow, R. 2008. Reading Derrida on being monolingual. New Literary History 39,
no.2: 21731.
Cixous, H. 2010. Un effet dpine rose. In Le rire de la Mduse et autres ironies, 2333.
Paris: Editions de Galile.
. 1981. The laugh of the Medusa. Trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen. In
New French feminisms: An anthology, ed. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron,
24564. New York: Schocken Books.
Crpon, M. 2006. Deconstruction and translation: The passage into philosophy.
Research in Phenomenology 36, no. 1: 299315.

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De Man, P. 1985. Conclusions. Walter Benjamins Task of the Translator. Yale French
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