Summer Workshop

Beginning in 2008, DSTP started holding a week-long workshop for the project team members and several invited younger scholars and graduate students. The venue for the workshop is IMEC (Institut Mémoires de l’Édition Contemporaine)located on the grounds of the former Abbaye d’Ardenne, outside of Caen, France. Starting in 2009, the workshop was supported for three years by the DSTP’s NEH grant and was able to host 16 participants, typically including the 6 team members, 3 junior scholars, and 6 graduate students. This format has been maintained every year since.

The workshop has two principal aims: first, it is an opportunity for the DSTP team to study and review together the volume of the series currently in process of translation; second, it provides intensive training for potential future translators of series volumes.

Over the six days of the workshop, discussions are devoted to study and analysis of Derrida’s French text alternating with sessions taken up with close readings of a draft of the translation. DSTP is committed to the thought that the process of having 16 people work collectively on these translations has significantly raised the level of accuracy of the translations prepared in this way.

If you value the work we are doing, please consider making a donation to DSTP to help fund the annual workshop.

Pascale-Anne Brault, Professor of French, DePaul University

Arne De Boever, doctoral candidate in comparative literature, Columbia University

Peggy Kamuf, Professor of French and Comparative Literature, University of Southern California

Shaoling Ma, doctoral student in comparative literature, University of Southern California

William Meyrowitz, doctoral student in philosophy, DePaul University

Tony Mills, master’s candidate in French, Northwestern University

Michael Naas, Professor of philosophy, DePaul University

Elizabeth Rottenberg, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, DePaul University

Samuel Solomon, doctoral student in comparative literature, University of Southern California

Available here are several of the presentations on sessions of La Bête et le souverain volume I made by participants at the 2008 workshop during the morning meetings.

Arne De Boever,"Biopolitics in Deconstruction"

Au fond, c’est bête

Two terms among others presented particular difficulties to the translator of volume I of The Beast and the Sovereign. The first is amply thematized as untranslatable by Derrida itself: as a noun, bête corresponds reasonably well with the English ‘beast,’ but as an adjective it defies translation: as Sessions 5 and especially 6 lay out at length, someone who is bête is not exactly stupid, not exactly idiotic, not exactly dumb, although all these words are in the same semantic field. And the corresponding noun, la bêtise, is not exactly stupidity, idiocy or dumbness – and is certainly not animality or bestiality. In this case the situation for the translator is both absolutely impossible and relatively straightforward: Derrida’s insistent mentioning and explicit thematizing of the very words bête and bêtise makes it an easy decision to leave them in French in the text – and as Derrida himself uses a discussion of just this word to demonstrate a kind of general impossibility of ever immobilizing the meaning of any term at all (entailing thereby a kind of general impossibility of translation altogether), the text itself explains its own untranslatability as it enacts it, but in a way that also teaches the anglophone reader some French and to some extent releases the translator from the burden of striving and failing to find an English equivalent: by telling the reader (in whatever language) that the French word bêtise cannot be translated into English by any of the most likely candidates, the text avoids all obscurity at the very moment it claims untranslatability, and demonstrates a sort of basic bêtise of any text whatsoever. The situation is more difficult and less satisfying in other cases. For example, in the same sessions devoted to bêtise, there is a repetitive and insistent use of the word fond, often in a reliteralizing use of the idiomatic French expression au fond, and often enough linked to cognate terms such as profond, fondamental or fondé, which are most readily translated as deep (or profound), fundamental or grounded. Here again the terms are thematized, but unlike bêtise, this thematizing does not simply allow the translator to avoid the problem of translating, and one must do one’s best across the slightly different semantic fields associated with the bottom, the deep and the depth(s), the ground, the base and the foundation. And if the translator is tempted to think there must be a bottom or basis to be found that would happily ground this dispersion of terms, the text itself is there to suggest that just that is part of bêtise itself, “Comme s’il y avait encore quelque bêtise à croire à la profondeur.” The translator, we might say, is always something of an ass.

Geoffrey Bennington

Geoffrey Bennington, Professor of French and Comparative Literature, Emory University

Pascale-Anne Brault, Professor of French, DePaul University

Arne De Boever, doctoral candidate in comparative literature, Columbia University

Rick Elmore, doctoral student in philosophy, DePaul University

James Griffith, doctoral student in philosophy, DePaul University

Peggy Kamuf, Professor of French and Comparative Literature, University of Southern California

Kir Kuiken, Assistant Professor of English, University at Albany-SUNY

Ronald Mendoza-de Jesus, doctoral student in comparative literature, Emory University

William Meyrowitz, doctoral student in philosophy, DePaul University

Tony Mills, master’s candidate in French, Northwestern University

Michael Naas, Professor of Philosophy, DePaul University

Elizabeth Rottenberg, Associate Professor of Philosophy, DePaul University

Kas Saghafi, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, University of Memphis

Samuel Solomon, doctoral student in comparative literature, University of Southern California

David Wills, Professor of French and English, University at Albany-SUNY

Available here are several of the presentations on sessions of La Bête et le souverain volume II made by participants at the 2009 workshop during the morning meetings.

	•Arne De Boever, “Derrida’s Theory of the Novel”
	•James Griffith, “Notes on the Imaginary Dialogue in Session 5”
	•Kir Kuiken, “Presentation Notes”
	•Michael Naas, “On Session Four”
	•Samuel Solomon, “Pedagogy’s Death”