DERRIDA, Jacques. Letter to a Japanese friend

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DERRIDA, Jacques. Letter to a Japanese friend, 1983. In: Derrida and differance. ed. Wood & Bernasconi, Warwick: Parousia Press, 1985. p. 1-5.

{COMENTÁRIOS NA AULA COM ENEIDA LEAL – SEMINÁRIOS AVANÇADOS IV, 2000.2 - Instituro de Letras - UFBA} É a propósito da tradução do termo ‘Desconstrução’ para o japonês. A questão não é achar uma palavra qualquer (dentro da estrutura formal da língua japonesa), mas uma palavra que seja eficiente para englobar o conceito (polêmico) em francês. A perspectiva aqui vai além da escolha de uma palavra, portanto, mas do encontro de um conceito da filosofia ocidental com um ambiente oriental (mesmo que saibamos que, em termos de pensamento acadêmico, esse encontro não é tão ‘estranho’ assim). A ‘Desconstrução’ tem, sim, uma ambiência estruturalista, mas ela é também pós-estruturalista. É estruturalista por trabalhar com termos que se referem entre si... O trabalho de ‘Desconstrução’ é, de alguma maneira, ligado ao TRABALHO de re-escrita (termos muito usados por Derrida ao longo de seus estudos) – é TRADUÇÃO, reproposição, reconstrução. De um modo similar, ‘Desconstrução’ é uma ‘tradução’, no sentido do ‘desmonte’ de teorias e campos conceituais para ‘deslocá-los’, para colocá-los sob outra perspectiva, como o propoõe Derrida em suas análises.

Trechos diretos do texto

p.1 The question would be therefore what deconstruction is not, or rather ought not to be. I underline these words "possible" and "ought". For if the difficulties of translation can be anticipated (and the question of deconstruction is also through and through the question of translation, and of the language of concepts, of the conceptual corpus of so-called "western" metaphysics), one should not begin by naively believing that the word "deconstruction" corresponds in French to some clear and univocal signification.

p.1 When I chose the word, or when it imposed itself on me - I think it was in *Of Grammatology* - I little thought it would be credited with such a central role in the discourse that interested me at the time. Among other things I wished to translate and adapt to my own ends the Heidggerian word Destruktion or Abbau. Each signified in this context an operation bearing on the structure or traditional architecture of the fundamental concepts of ontology or of Western metaphysics. But in French "destruction" too obviously implied an annihilation or a negative reduction much closer perhaps to Nietzschean "demolition" than to the Heideggerian interpretation or to the type of reading that I proposed. So I ruled that out. I remember having looked to see if the word "deconstruction" (which came to me it seemed quite spontaneously) was good French. I found it in the Littré. The grammatical, linguistic, or rhetorical senses [portees] were found bound up with a "mechanical" sense [portee "machinique"]. This association appeared very fortunate, and fortunately adapted to what I wanted at least to suggest. Perhaps I could cite some of the entries from the Littré.

p.1-2"Deconstruction: action of deconstructing. Grammatical term. Disarranging the construction of words in a sentence. ’Of deconstruction, common way of saying construction’, Lemare, De la maniére d’apprendre les langues, ch.17, in *Cours de langue Latine*. Deconstruire: 1. To disassemble the parts of a whole. To deconstruct a machine to transport it elsewhere. {o grande trabalho de tradução: fazer existir algo fora} 2. Grammatical term... To deconstruct verse, rendering it, by the suppression of meter, similar to prose. Absolutely. (’In the system of prenotional sentences, one also starts with translation and one of its advantages is never needing to deconstruct,’ Lemare, ibid.) 3. Se deconstruire [to deconstruct itself] ... to lose its construction. ’Modern scholarship has shown us that in a region of the timeless East, a language reaching its own state of perfection is deconstructed [s’est deconstruite] and altered from within itself according to the single law of change, natural to the human mind,’ Villemain, *Preface du Dictionaire de l’Academie*."

p.2 A few more words on the subject of "the context". At that time structuralism was dominant. "Deconstruction" seemed to be going in the same direction since the word signified a certain attention to structures (which themselves were neither simply ideas, nor forms, nor syntheses, nor systems). To deconstruct was also a structuralist gesture or in any case a gesture that assumed a certain need for the structuralist problematic. But it was also an antistructuralist gesture, and its fortune rests in part on this ambiguity. Structures were to be undone, decomposed, desedimented (all types of structures, linguistic, "logocentric", "phonocentric" - structuralism being especially at that time dominated by linguistic models and by a so-called structural linguistics that was also called Saussurian - socio-institutional, political, cultural, and above all and from the start philosophical.)

p.2-3This is why, especially in the United States, the motif of deconstruction has been associated with "poststructuralism" (a word unknown in France until its "return" from the States). But the undoing, decomposing, and desedimenting of structures, in a certain sense more historical than the structuralist movement it called into question, was not a negative operation. Rather than destroying, it was also necessary to understand how an "ensemble" was constituted and to reconstruct it to this end. However, the negative appearance was and remains much more difficult to efface than is suggested by the grammaar of the word (de-), even though it can designate a genealogical restoration [remonter] rather than a demolition. That is why the word, at least on its own, has never appeared satisfactory to me (but what word is), and must always be girded by an entire discourse.

p.3 I would say the same about method. Deconstruction is not a method and cannot be tranformed into one. Especially if the technical and procedural significations of the word are stressed. (...) Can deconstruction become a methodology for reading and for interpretation? Can it thus be allowed to be reappropriated and domesticated by academic institutions?

// It must also be made clear that deconstruction is not even an act or an operation.

p.4 Deconstruction takes place, it is an event that does not await the deliberation, consciousness, or organization of a subject, or even of modernity. It deconstructs itself.(...) I recognize, my dear driend, that in trying to make a word clearer so as to assist its translation, I am only thereby increasing the difficulties: "the impossible task of the translator" (Benjamin). This too is meant by "deconstructs".

p.4 I would not even dare to say, following a Heideggerian schema, that we are in an "epoch" of being-in-deconstruction, of a being-in-deconstruction that would manifest or dissimulate itself at one and the same time in other "epochs". This thought of "epochs" and especially that of a gathering of the destiny of being and of the unity of its destination or its dispersions (Schicken, Geschick) will never be very convincing.

p.4 To be very schematic I would say that the difficulty of defining and therefore also of translating the word "deconstruction" stems from the fact that all the predicates, all the defining concepts, all the lexical significations, and even the syntactic articulations, which seem at one moment to lend themselves to this definition or to that translation, are also deconstructed or deconstructible, directly or otherwise, etc.

p.4-5The word "deconstruction", like all other words, acquires its value only from its inscription in a chain of possible substitutions, in what is too blithely called a "context". For me, for what I have tried and still try to write, the word has interest only within a certain context, where it replaces and lets itself be determined by such other words as "ecriture", "trace", "differance", "supplement", "hymen", "pharmakon", "marge", "entame", "parergon", etc.

p.5 What deconstruction is not? everything of course! What is deconstruction? nothing of course!

p.5 One final word to conclude this letter, which is already too long. I do not believe that translation is a secondary and derived event in relation to an original language or text. And as "deconstruction" is a word, as I have just said, that is essentially replaceable in a chain of substitution, then that can also be done from one language to another.

When I speak of this writing of the other which will be more beautiful, I clearly understand translation as involving the same risk and chance as the poem. How to translate "poem"? a "poem"?...

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