The Nickname of the Father: Grammatology vs Determinate Negation

In the ‘Translator’s Preface’ to her 1976 English translation of Jacques Derrida's De la grammatologie (1967), Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak highlighted the centrality of the nickname ( surnom) to its argument. Unlike ‘proper’ names, indissolubly connected with a signified, nicknames are openly improper. For Derrida, nicknames therefore make legible the play in signification: the movement of writing that De la grammatologie could never name, but only nickname. This article challenges that account by arguing that nicknaming exposes how proper signification operates through Hegelian ‘determinate negation’. Comparing Derrida's nicknaming to Marx and Engels's name-calling in The German Ideology (1846), I argue that names properly refer by positing the proper blind spot that will turn out always to have defined the nominee. This entails that Spivak's 1976 translation, instead of being just an ‘improper’ nickname for the French original, and reaffirming the impropriety of naming, determinately negated De la grammatologie and fixed its proper meaning.