Behind the Scenes of the Derrida Seminars Translation Project

This essay takes the reader behind the scenes of the Derrida Seminars Translation Project (DSTP). It offers two examples of DSTP’s dust-ups over English and suggests that these scenes of serious play not only bring out the stylistic and technical difficulties of translating Derrida, they also echo two earlier scenes of intra-linguistic translation within Derrida’s own texts. That is, this movement back and forth, fort and da, between English and English, translates the back-and-forth movement between French and French, which is further marked, literally marked, becomes remarkably literal, in the passage between the French of Derrida’s seminars and the French of his published texts.