Monday, August 29, 2005
(4:12 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Positive Steps: On Derrida
This weekend I decided to do a test-run for the German exam, based on the parameters that had been given me -- three hours to render a page and a half of German prose into English. This test situation was in many ways disadvantageous compared to the real exam, since Anthony and Hayley were cleaning the rodent cages, chasing ferrets, and watching television at various points throughout my "exam." I passed with flying colors. In fact, I managed to translate twice as much in the time allotted. I only committed one significant error, transposing the subject and object in a sentence (when compared against the Kaufmann translation, using my own possibly idiosyncratic idea of what constitutes a "significant error"). I was using the new German dictionary I had just bought, the Oxford Duden unabridged edition, highly recommended by April Wilson in her German book. It was a joy to use -- so thorough, so precise.It seems like a pretty sure bet that I'm going to pass this exam, yet I feel as though I should be doing much, much more to prepare, that I won't really pass unless I pass by twenty miles, unless I produce the very best translation ever seen by the human eye. It's like I've already failed because I am not reading fluently in German after four months -- and of course I'm probably suppressing the memories of how painful my first few months of French were. At the four-month mark with French, I could still be stopped dead in my tracks by one sentence, spend my entire night trying to get that one sentence perfectly.
There is a certain kind of clarity that comes in the early phases of reading in a foreign language, a certain kind of expertise that not even the closest native speaker can achieve. It stems from having to grapple on a very detailed level with grammatical structure, with individual words -- patterns that would not be apparent to a native speaker become painfully apparent to the student kicking himself for looking up the same word for the fourth time within the space of one paragraph. Even now, I was able to draw up a list of words in Jean-Luc Nancy's French texts that I didn't notice in the Derrida texts I read -- the words I had to learn for the first time. As time goes on, that ability-stemming-from-inability obviously goes away, the text starts to feel somewhat familiar, even if it never feels like home.
It seems to me that this experience is something akin to the process of Derridean reading -- a laborious, minutely detailed process that notices all these strangely repeated words. Derrida comes to every text as though it were written in a foreign language, as though every text was an occasion to learn its language anew. Who else would notice that Rousseau so often uses the word "supplement" and who would even think to question the double meaning (so clear "in context" to the native reader), if not precisely a student who is learning French, who is using Rousseau as a reading text so that he can learn to read French? Derrida writes each essay as one who has had to look up the word in the dictionary a hundred times, who doesn't quite trust himself to understand the nuances and shades of meaning that a "native" speaker takes for granted.
Am I right about this? It seems almost impossible to tell -- and a little too coincidental that I used Derrida's Donner la mort as basically my first "reading text" in French, that I learned French in order to read Derrida (in order to read French). It is surely arrogant to assimilate the experience of probably the greatest philosopher of the 20th century into my own halting steps toward meeting a requirement for graduate school -- but there is evidence. Think of the epigraph to Given Time and that long footnote that surely constitutes one of his true tours de force -- it stems from looking up the word donner in the Littré. When we were going over that text in the Derrida seminar at CTS, when Ted was so effusive in his praise for this intricate footnote, I spoke up: "Well, he just looked it up in the Littré -- just like if I were to go to the library and dig through the OED. Any of us could have done that."
Few actually would, few have the patience for the laborious work of digging through reference books -- but think of all the other occasions when the dictionary comes out. Think of all the discussions of Benveniste, who offers something akin to a dictionary. And think of all the times when he probably is not explicitly citing the dictionary, but his selection of texts is what one would find from a trip through the dictionary -- did he come up with the Montaigne and Pascal quotes in Force of Law off the top of his head, for instance?
It's all a little too correct, unhealthy in its level of scholarly rigor -- no one can keep up, no one is going to do the more work that is required. One can easily get the impression that Derrida is always right, that he has anticipated every possible objection, out of a morbid fear of embarrassment, of being caught unawares. It seems to me that that is when one can start talking about the irruption of the radically other, when one can really start talking about surprise -- just as the Kierkegaardian religious is shown up most fully in its radical alterity and necessity when the ethical has been pushed to the point of despair.
