Athens, Still Remains: The Photographs of Jean-Franois Bonhomme

Translators’ Note

translators’ note Athens, Still Remains (Demeure, Athènes) was first published in 1996 by Editions olkos (Athens) in a bilingual French–Modern Greek edition. It appeared there as the preface to a collection of photographs by JeanFran çois Bonhomme published under the title Athens—in the Shadow of the Acropolis (Athènes—à l’ombre de l’Acropole). Derrida’s preface was subsequently published alone in French, along with Bonhomme’s photographs , by Éditions Galilée in 2009. This English translation is based on the Galilée edition. Derrida’s original French title, Demeure, Athènes, can be heard in at leastthreediVerentways:asanimperative,“Stay, Athens!”asadescription , “Athens stays” or “Athens remains,” or as a formulation typically found on oYcial documents to refer to one’s place of residence, “Residence : Athens.” The word demeure can thus be heard either as a noun, meaning house, dwelling, or residence, or as a verb, meaning to remain, stay, or reside. The verb demeurer also originally meant “to defer” or “to delay.” Derrida exploits all of these meanings in this work, along with a numberofrelatedidioms.BecausenosingleEnglishwordorevenphrase can cover all the diVerent meanings or valences of the French demeure, thetitleAthens,StillRemainsislessatranslationthanatranspositioninto a semantic field that is akin to the original but overlaps it only partially. Parts of this work were translated by David Wills and published in his translation of Jacques Derrida and Catherine Malabou’s Counterpath: TravelingwithJacquesDerrida(Stanford:StanfordUniversityPress,2004, 103–8). We are grateful to David Wills for allowing us to adopt so many of his felicitous word choices. A graduate seminar in the Philosophy Department at DePaul University in autumn 2009 allowed us to refine and improve this translation. We would like to express our gratitude to the members of the seminar, as well as to our colleague at DePaul, Elizabeth Rottenberg, for their many excellent suggestions. Finally, we would like to thank the Summer Grants Program of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at DePaul University for its generous support of this project. a t h e n s , s t i l l r e m a i n s ...