Ear of the Other

176 Pages·1985·8.337 MB·English

by  Jacques Derrida

OTOBIOGRAPHIES
'11te Teaching of Metzsche and
the PoUtics of the Proper N8111e
JACQUES DERRIDA
7Taru;lated by Avital Ronell
Texts and Discussions
with JACQUES DERRIDA
THE EAR OF
THE OTHER
Otobiography, Transference,
Translation
E1z. .t flish etiitio1z edited b)'
Christie V. McDo1zald
(Btl,~d ou tile Ft·eucll etlitiou edited IJ}' Claude
Levesque tl1ltl c;lzri,~tie V. J\1cDoualtl)
Trau.slated b)' [Jt:_~~~ Kll11llif
SCHOCKEN BOOKS · NEW YORK
To the memory of Eugenio Donato
First published by Schocken Books 1985
10 9 8 7 6 54 3 2 1 85 86 87 88
Copyright C 1985 by Schocken Books Inc.
Originally published in French as L'oreille de J'autre by V1b Editeur:
e V1b Editeur, Montreal, 1982
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Catalogins in Publication Data
Derrida, Jacques.
The ear of the other.
Translation of: L'orellle de l'autre.
Bibllosraphy: p.
1.Autobloaraphy-Con8f8sses. 2.Translatlns
and interpretina--Congresses. I. L6vesque, Claude.
II. McDonald, Christie V. Ill. Title.
CT25.D4713. 1985 809 84-16053
Designed by Nancy Dale Muldoon •
Manufactured In the United States
ISBN 0-8052-3953-7
Contents
Preface vii
Translator's Note xi
Otobiographies 1
Roundtable on Autobiography 39
Roundtable on Translation 91
Works Cited 163

Preface
THIS BOOK started on its way to Schocken Books
when its president, Julius Glaser, happened onto several pages
from the manuscript of an article (dealing with the translation
of Jacques Derrida's Of Grammatology into English) in a post
office on a small island off the coast of Maine where he sum
mers. Sleuthing the origins of the piece, from which the name
of the author was mysteriously missing (having been acciden
tally scattered across an open field, retrieved, and exposed for
the author to reclaim), Glaser soon identified the writer and
became fascinated with the impact that Derrida's thought was
to have on American readers. In the curious entanglement of
chance and necessity, it now seems no accident that Schocken
Books should publish a book in which Derrida, as one of the
leading interpreters of Friedrich Nietzsche, sets the stage for
new and important readings of this enigmatic and controver
sial philosopher, and engages with a number of interlocutors
in a foro. '0{ active interpretation.
This book is the result of a series of meetings held at the
University of Montreal from October 22 to 24, 1979. My col
league Claude Levesque and I invited jacques Derrida to come
to Montreal to meet across the table with several academic
professionals in philosophy, psychoanalysis, and literature
and to discuss their questions about aspects of philosophy.
vii
viii Preface _ _ _
--------------- ---
From the conversations. which were taped and transcribed,
we shaped the book in its present form. making only minor
modifications of what had taken place.
The book has three parts, which follow the chronology of
the sessions. The first is a lecture by Jacques Derrida entitled
"Otobiographies.'' In it, Derrida deals with two important but
rarely juxtaposed texts: Nietzsche's autobiography, Ecce
Homo, and On the Future of Our Educational Institutions.
Through them. he discusses the structure of the ear (as a per
ceiving organ), atttehi~1!Y· anff jnlerptelijpo1!:-·how Nietz
sche defers the-meanThg Of his texts so that his signature (as
that which validates a check or document-here a book) can
come to be understood, honored as it were, only when a
reader allies himself with him and, as a receiving ear. signs
the text-posthumously. "In other words ... it is the ear of the
other that signs. The ear of the other says me to me. ... When,
much later, the other will have perceived with a keen-enough
ear what I will have addressed or destined to him, or her, then
my signature will have taken place." And this analysis begins
the cautious elaboration of the grounds upon which political
readings of Nietzsche's pedagogy might emerge, readings dif
ferent from those that have made of him predominantly a
Nazi. The readings of Nietzsche's texts are not finished, Der
rida argues: the same language, the same words, may be read
by actively opposed forces. Such a transformative view of
reading, as the incessant rewriting of other texts, marks the
prolongation of the fundamental strategy of deconstruction (as
developed in earlier works: Of Grammatology, Writing and
Difference, Dissemination, and Margins of Philosophy), in
which no text can be reduced to a single meaning.
The second part of the book is a roundtable of several par
ticipants discussing notions of what constitutes autobio
graphical writing: how the autos (the self as the subject of
biography) has been determined in psychoanalytic, philo
sophical, and literary terms, and how it might be restructured
otherwise. The third part is a similar roundtable on the subject
of translation in a wide range of senses, including the forma-
Preface lx
tion of languages and meaning (in psychoanalysis, for
example), the kinship of languages, philosophy as the transla
tion of a truth in which univocal meaning is possible, et cet
era. Everything is questioned; in the complex network of
thought concerning autobiography and translation developed
here, no original ever remains anywhere intact: neither one's
mother tongue, the empirical sense of life, nor what consti
tutes the feminine.
In addition to 'Otobiographies," two other texts served as
specific points of reference for the discussion: "Me-Psycho
analysis: An .Introduction to the Translation of 'The Shell
and the Kernel' by Nicolas Abraham"; and "Living On: Bor
derlines." La Carte postale was in press at the time; allusions
to it can be found in the discussions of destination and sex
ual identity.
In the discussions, each participant addresses Jacques Der
rida, in most cases about his work, and he then responds. He
chose the subjects for discussion, but each of the participants
pursues the particular interests of his own work. Eugenio Do
nato was a professor of comparative literature at the Univer
sity of California at Irvine; Rodolphe Gasche is a professor of
comparative literature at the State University of New York at
Buffalo. Several of us teach, or have taught at the University of
Montreal: Claude Levesque is a professor in the Philosophy
Department; Patrick Mahony is a professor in the English De
partment and a practicing psychoanalyst: Christie V. McDon
ald, a professor in the French Department, is currently Chair
of Modern Languages and Classics at Emory University;
Peraldi, a professor in the Linguistics Department, is
Fran~ois
also a practicing psychoanalyst; and Eugene Vance, formerly a
professor in the Program of Comparative Literature, is a pro
fessor of Modern Languages at Emory University.
Jacques Derrida was for many years a professor of the his
tory of philosophy at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris:
he is now a professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sci
ences Sociales. He has wrought his complex and forceful cri
tique of writing within the Western tradition by rereading the
x Preface
works of writers from Plato to our time. In this vast project,
always scrupulously exacting in its analyses. he has "re
marked" the theoretical insufficiency of conceptual thinking
and of concepts in the way we ordinarily refer to them: one of
these is the concept of context. A written sign, he notes, car
ries with it a force of breaking with its context, and this "force
of breaking is not an accidental predicate, but the very struc
ture of the written." The force of this rupture plays itself out
rhetorically in what Nietzsche called a change of style he
deemed to be plural. The style of this event is a written dia
logue in many voices. Because of the diversity of the interests
and backgrounds of the participants, because of the particular
linguistic character of the place where the discussions were
held (Quebec), and in keeping with the rules of the genre, it
seems that our questions were bound to displace the context
of Jacques Derrida's responses-as much from the French mi
lieu out of which they grew as from the ongoing American
debate toward which they are now directed. That he was
brought to formulate certain arguments which can be found as
yet nowhere else in published form adds, we believe, to the
interest and the richness of this text.
CHRISTIE V. McDONALD
Cranberry Island. Maine
August 1984