Transing Derrida

In an insert included in the French edition of Glas (1974), Derrida mentions something “turning into two towers [tours].” Think, perhaps, of the Babel story — one tower constructed to reach heaven, the other deconstructed by God. The earth’s peoples were scattered into confusion sown by a linguistic diversity that hampered our ability to understand one another and hence understand the Babel blueprint for that God-reaching pillar. Babel describes a world needing translation to help us overcome our linguistic barriers.

Glas is a Babelic text. Self-consciously, it enacts various kinds of “translations.” Glas detours around tours — erect structures figuring philosophy’s proud edifices, phallic emblems of right and privilege, cocksure intimations of Absolute Knowledge, no less. Glas twists and turns (a tour is also a “turn”) multiple languages around philosophy’s discourse, bastardizing its monolanguage into multilingual confusion in order to induce “polyglottic fecundations.” But while Glas may have benefited from Babel’s fertile polyglottism, many readers probably weighed the intellectual benefits against the cost and decided that their sanity was too high a price to pay — Glas is a maddeningly difficult text.

Concerning towers, readers confront Derrida invoking the “faussure (or faulsure) of a tower.” Apparently, faussure refers to the holes in a tower through which defenders hurled rocks at an attacking enemy. Derrida also speaks of a faussure which apparently designates the skirted curve where “the bell’s shape begins to widen, to flare out.” What does Derrida mean here, talking of bells and towers? Perhaps Derrida wished to reshape the philosophical echo-chamber — widen the bell-curve, that is, and strike that bell, that idiophone, differently in order to create both din and harmony. Babel is an acoustic space as much as it’s a built tower, moreover, one that broadcasts the sounds of cacophonous din and noisily polyglot garble. But inasmuch as Babel is translation’s emblematic edifice, perhaps translation offers a sounding-board for languages to sound — and harmonize — differently. Let tours resonate with towers and turns, then. Pry open fissures or faussures in monoglot idioms. Throw wordstones from the gantries of high towers — let them fall into scattered rubble, or pile into a cairn marking a tomb.

Glas dates from 1974. We’ve probably forgotten it. Remember, though, that each page has two columns (or towers). Hegel to the left, Jean Genet to the right. The columns butt up close, intruding upon each other’s generic privacy — the one philosophical, the other literary. There is interlocution, albeit across a gap, a conversation in translation as well as a dialogue of the deaf. There is talk of homosexual sex and of botanical sexuation. The Hegel column expresses Derrida’s resistance to Hegel’s dialectical self-confidence. Hegel advances upon anything adversarial to dialectics, calls that adversary Difference, and smoothly processes Difference away. But Derrida jams the dialectical cogs in the name of différance — a humbler, less categorical nickname for the grit Derrida throws into Hegel’s philosophical sprockets, the grit that abrades Hegel’s serenely lubricated philosophical machine. Derrida, as Wills and Bennington put it, infects Hegel with “the virus of différance.”

Grit in the well-oiled machine. Infection in the Hegelian body. Babel compromising philosophy’s idiophonic and idiolectic discourse. A clanging dissonance resounding in philosophy’s bell-tower. Nonetheless, “clang” chimes with Hegel’s account of language as it emerges from sound (Klang). “Glas” — knell, death-knell — engenders glottal sounds. The “gl” of throats gagging on gobbets of mucus and sperm. Gl-as: “as” offers itself to Gallic rearrangement (the feminine “sa”) and “sa” breeds a word for “knowledge” — sa-voir. Contemplate Hegel’s savoir absolu, the superb certainties of Absolute Knowledge, therefore, and “sa” as a shorthand (or castrating truncation) for what Hegel sought to achieve for philosophy.

There is more. Pronounce Hegel in French: eh-gl. Spoken in the accent of Pepé Le Pew (farts whiff malodorously over this text), ehgl becomes aigle, the French for “eagle.” Hegel thus translated gives us one of...