On the Handing Down of Deconstruction

To speak of the ‘handing down’ of deconstruction explicitly, of course, repeats Derrida’s use of the term in his introduction to the Origin of Geometry and therefore recalls his arguments relating to geometry as a tradition passed on from generation to generation over successive periods of historical time. To do so in the context of this special issue of Paragraph marking the fiftieth anniversary of Spivak’s translation of De la grammatologie reminds us that the ‘handing down’ of tradition always, in one way or another, takes place in and as an act of translation. The term ‘handing down’ itself has an interesting fate in its transformation from the original German text of the Origin, through to Derrida’s rendering, and then to its appearance in the later English translation of Derrida’s Introduction by John P. Leavey. The verb and adjective in French that are used by Derrida, and that Leavey consistently translates as ‘to hand down’ or ‘handed down’, are ‘transmettre’ and ‘transmis’. Husserl’s German original perhaps has slightly more variation, using substantives such as ‘Wissenstradition’ or longer phrases referring to an ‘aus Tradition vorliegende Geometrie, die wir gelernt haben’. However, the key verb used is in the context of handing down is ‘tradieren’ (to pass on or hand down). The fact that Derrida arguably reduces Husserl’s variable usage of German phrases to a more consistent range of French terms (‘transmettre’ , ‘transmis’, ‘transmission’) perhaps indicates that he is trying to focus on ‘handing-down’ as a more central and persistent problem of the original German text and that he is doing so in a manner that Husserl did not. The question of the handing down of tradition comes to us, it seems, in a series of successive translations which need to be understood as transformative re-inscriptions within different contexts.