Derrida Translating by Batchelor, Kathryn;

Short description:

Translation Studies struggled with Derrida's radical questioning. This book reveals his hidden obsession with translation, uncovering his "translation reflex" of constantly questioning concepts.

Batchelor reconceptualizes translation as philosophical tool through analysis of Derrida's work.

Long description:

For decades, Translation Studies has struggled to engage with Jacques Derrida, whose radical questioning of language seemed to undermine translation theory's foundations. This book reveals a hidden dimension: Derrida's obsessive engagement with translation throughout his career. The text uncovers his "translation reflex" of constant pausing to question how concepts might be translated, demonstrating how this overlooked practice shaped his philosophical thinking.

Examining translation alongside key themes from Derrida's later work including inheritance, mourning, and the messianic, Kathryn Batchelor reconceptualises translation as a philosophical tool, a response to intellectual heritage, and a means of confronting mortality. Through close readings of Derrida’s Husserl’s The Origin of Geometry, “Plato’s Pharmacy”, and other early texts, she highlights Derrida’s surprisingly conventional translation practices.  

As the first comprehensive study of Derrida as translator and the first book on Derrida and translation in two decades, this work challenges misconceptions about "anything goes" interpretations while offering insights into translation as a driving force in his development. Essential for scholars and advanced students in Translation Studies, Philosophy, Literary Theory, and Continental Philosophy.

“Batchelor’s book solves the problem of what translation scholars are to do with Derrida. Her solution is so obvious, so simple, that we have long been unable to see it: study not what he says about translation but how he translates. In doing that, Batchelor tends to turn Derrida’s translation strategies back on him: she “harries” the Derridean translated word in very much the same way Derrida harries the German word. For those of us who love Derrida and wish he had been a better translation theorist, Batchelor’s book is essential reading.” 

-Professor Douglas Robinson, The Chinese University of Hong Kong

"A foremost theorist of translation, Kathryn Batchelor seeks to ‘reconceptualize literary and philosophical translation’ and to do that with the help of Derrida. She combs through his work very thoroughly looking less for what he says about translation than for what he does with it, for ‘Derrida translating’. With great acuity, she pulls out many ideas from this practice that deserve welcome in translation studies, to which this book makes a a major contribution, no less than to studies of Derrida."

-Peggy Kamuf, University of Southern California,US

Table of Contents:

Acknowledgements

Presentation of citations

Introduction

1.     Derrida the Translator

2.     Translation, or Something Else

3.     Prowling

4.     Inheriting

5.     Mourning

Index