With Respect to Angels

One of the great joys of translating a text by Jacques Derrida used to be having the opportunity to ask Derrida a few questions (never more than just a handful) about things we did not quite understand in his text. Sometimes we posed these questions in a letter (we never emailed with Jacques), sometimes over the phone (with the added anxiety of trying to coordinate our questions on two different phones), but most often in person, whether at Ris-Orangis, in a cafe in Paris, or in Derrida’s unofficial office during his time at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes, the lobby of the Hotel Lutetia on the Boulevard Raspail right across from the Ecole. During these sessions, we would ask Jacques questions about everything from what he ‘meant’ by a word or phrase to why he used a particular image or analogy to whether there was in a certain passage a reference or allusion we were not quite hearing. Jacques would always spend as much time as we needed for these questions, sometimes providing us with further context for understanding his argument, sometimes recounting anecdotes related to the work, and often making extremely helpful suggestions for our English translation. We would also sometimes use these get-togethers to point out the occasional typo in the French text or— and this was very rare— a line or passage we thought was confusing or ambiguous and so might be easily clarified in a future edition. Among our many memories of these question and answer sessions, two in particular stand out, and they both involve this latter variety of comment or question. The two incidents, both from the 1990s, were separated by about five years, and the setting for both was the Hotel Lutetia

Allusion · Analogy · Argument (complex analysis · Context (archaeology · Linguistics · Phrase · Point (geometry · History · Medicine · Philosophy · Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism · Psychology