Aporias of Translation in

Derrida’s Geschlecht III

ADAM R. ROSENTHAL

We are going to speak of the word Geschlecht. I am not going to translate it for
the moment. Probably I will not translate it at any point.
Jacques Derrida, Geschlecht II1
But what does Geschlecht mean? Sex, race, species, genus, family, stock, etc.
(Mais que veut dire Geschlecht? Sexe, race, espèce, genre, famille, souche, etc.)
Jacques Derrida, Geschlecht III2
The end of the paragraph defies translation more than ever. It multiplies the
strikes, the words from the ‘family’ of schlagen, Geschlecht, and its generation:
verschlagen, to separate, zerschlagen, to break, shatter, dismantle. [Elle multiplie les
frappes, les mots de la ‘famille’ de schlagen, du Geschlecht et de sa génération:
verschlagen, séparer, zerschlagen, briser, casser, démanteler.] This lexico-semantic
‘family’ imports, in what is irreducible in its idiom, two inseparable
connotations. First of all, it is that which hurts in a blow: the strike hurts, evil
strikes, one thinks automatically (why?). Next, it is that which writes by striking,
typography, the graphic stamp and imprint. And so, with the second blow
writing becomes evil. There is a good and bad strike, a good and bad writing.
Jacques Derrida, Geschlecht III3
Geschlecht. How many times will Derrida have pronounced this word?
And how many times, in doing so, will he have refused its translation?
A more difficult question: how many times will he have readily,
and perhaps even unconsciously, absent-mindedly, or inadvertently,
translated it? How many times will he have allowed it to pass silently
into the folds of French — or English — under a veil of anonymity, as
a secret? Secret Geschlecht. Secret Geschlecht of Geschlecht.
The lexico-semantic ‘family’ of Geschlecht, Derrida explains in the
epigraph above, defies translation more than ever. As readers of the

Paragraph 45.3 (2022): 302–315

DOI: 10.3366/para.2022.0406
© Edinburgh University Press
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 Aporias of Translation 303
Geschlecht series will note, Derrida’s response to this difficulty is,
precisely, not to translate the term. He opts not to translate Geschlecht,
that is, to the extent that such a decision is possible and not always
already contradicted by the same exegetical and interpretive efforts that
serve, precisely, to demonstrate its untranslatability. These difficulties
aside, what is clear is that Derrida makes deliberate and consistent use
of the German word Geschlecht in his French text. Moreover, as he
explains in ‘Heidegger’s Hand (Geschlecht II)’, the decision to do so was
itself a consequence of the problematic nature of the term. Geschlecht,
he makes clear, is not a word like any other and, therefore, it cannot
be translated like any other:
I just said ‘the word “Geschlecht”’: that is because I am not sure it has a
determinable and unifiable referent. I am not sure that one can speak of Geschlecht
beyond the word ‘Geschlecht’ — which is then necessarily cited, between quotation
marks, mentioned rather than used. And I leave the word in German. As I have
already said, no word, no word for word will suffice to translate this word that
gathers, in its idiomatic meaning, stock, race, family, species, genus, generation,
sex. And then, after saying the word ‘Geschlecht’, I amended or corrected myself:
‘the “mark” “Geschlecht,”’ I clarified. For the theme of my analysis would come
down to a sort of composition or decomposition that affects, precisely, the unity of
this word. Perhaps it is no longer a word. Perhaps one must begin by gaining access
to it from its disarticulation or its decomposition, in other words, its formation,
its information, its deformations or transformations, its translations, the genealogy
of its body unified on the basis of or according to the split of pieces of words.
We are going then to concern ourselves with the Geschlecht of Geschlecht, with
its genealogy or its generation. But this genealogical composition of ‘Geschlecht’
will be inseparable, in the text of Heidegger we should be looking at now, from
the decomposition of the human Geschlecht, from the decomposition of man.
(GII, 51)

Geschlecht is a word that is barely a word. It is, indeed, more mark

than word. To leave it untranslated is therefore to allow what remains
disarticulated in it to continue to resonate. It is, we could say, to bear
witness to the instability of the word-form and to the failure of a given
idiom, or language, to capture what remains absolutely idiomatic, of
another.
Of course, there are many words that defy translation in this way.
Why, then, highlight the untranslatability of this one? What, we could
ask, are the philosophical and political implications of the refused
translation of Geschlecht, above all given the context of Derrida’s
readings of Heidegger? In what follows, I will ask what is at stake in
304 Paragraph
not translating Geschlecht, for Derrida. How does the exposure of the
disarticulate, or decomposed, affect the philosophical text? And why,
of all possible sites for non-translation, should Geschlecht here become
exemplary?
In order to answer these questions, it is above all helpful to return
to the context from which Geschlecht III, and the Geschlecht series
in general, emerges. I therefore begin by resituating the recently
published Geschlecht III within the original seminar from which it was
extracted.4 As we shall see, far from being a secondary concern, the
problem of translation is front and centre in ‘Philosophical Nationality
and Nationalism’. Once I have laid out Derrida’s central claims
concerning translation, above all from the first session of ‘Philosophical
Nationality and Nationalism’, I then return to the pages of
Geschlecht III, in order to observe how Derrida’s translative practice
there may square with his overarching goals in the seminar.
Derrida’s decision not to translate Geschlecht is directly tied to his
problematization of the idiom. Unlike Heidegger’s characterization of
the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ blow, the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ writing, for Derrida,
neither horn of the dilemma posed by the idiom would be palatable. In
reading Derrida’s non-translation of Geschlecht, I will therefore propose
that it is by way of the act of non-translation that he attempts to think
another thought of the idiom, even if this ‘other thought’ cannot
simply be immunized from the danger for the sake of which it was
initially set out.5

Translation in ‘Philosophical Nationality and Nationalism’

As is today well known, Geschlecht III was first written for Derrida’s
1984–5 seminar, ‘Philosophical Nationality and Nationalism: The
Ghost of the Other’. Conducted under the aegis of the École des
hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), but still ‘on site’, in the
physical space provided by the École normale supérieure at the rue
d’Ulm, Paris, ‘Philosophical Nationality and Nationalism’ was the
first seminar that Derrida would freely direct, having been freshly
liberated from the pedagogical restrictions of the agrégation. It was thus
during his inaugural year teaching for the EHESS, now as the directeur
d’études, and under the title of ‘philosophical institutions’, that Derrida
produced what we now know as Geschlecht III, from the end of the
seventh to the thirteenth sessions of that seminar.6
 Aporias of Translation 305
As he explains in that seminar’s inaugural session, printed in
the Oxford Literary Review in 1992 as ‘Onto-Theology of National
Humanism (Prolegomena to a Hypothesis)’, the central concerns
around which ‘Philosophical Nationality and Nationalism’ would turn
were to be the aporias of philosophical translation. In a seminar
dedicated to philosophical nationality and nationalism, it is the problem
of translation that should take centre stage. And the reasons for this
are twofold. On the one hand, the necessity of ‘the philosophical
translation of philosophical idioms’ is an incontrovertible reality for
philosophy (OTNH, 3). No experience of philosophy can ignore
this imperative, which adheres to its irreducibly linguistic character.
On the other hand, faced with this irreducible idiomaticity, which
renders translation at once necessary and impossible, at once possible
and impossible, possible as impossible, philosophy is scandalized. The
idiom is a scandal for philosophy. But, being a scandal, it is also an
opportunity. Derrida writes:
My principal concern, here, would, rather, move towards the aporias of the
philosophical translation of philosophical idioms. In a slightly abrupt way, as with
any beginning, I shall say that there are — this is our experience and I shall speak
of this experience and its rights in a moment — there are and we experience
the fact that there are several philosophical idioms and that this experience alone
cannot not be lived by a philosopher, by a self-styled philosopher, by whoever
claims to be a philosopher, as both a scandal and as the very chance of philosophy.
(OTNH, 3)

Philosophical experience testifies to the plurality of philosophical

idioms. Be they linguistic, national, cultural, sexual or racial in nature,
this plurality, Derrida contends, cannot but pose a challenge to the
philosopher. And this challenge is both a scandal and the chance for
philosophy.
Why a scandal and why a chance — or, to be precise, the chance?
First off, philosophy cannot but experience the irreducibility of
the idiomatic. The evident untranslatability of certain philosophical
terms, or the privilege allotted to certain philosophical languages,
over and above so many others, are only the first such indications.
Constant recourse to foreign-language terms and repeated efforts at re-
translation, are so many others. These realities mark both the teaching
of philosophy and its writing and scholarship. Philosophy therefore
cannot but face the necessity of this resistance, nor the reality that
there is a plurality of idioms, which follows as a consequence. And so,
306 Paragraph
the philosopher is haunted by the fact of philosophical idioms, which
idioms the philosopher must struggle constantly to translate, while
acknowledging that they remain, in an essential sense, untranslatable.
(For, Derrida might say, if they were not untranslatable, why would
they ever again require translation?)
There is, therefore, an experience of idiomaticity in philosophy,
which experience is felt as a scandal by the philosopher. It is a scandal
because no claim to universal philosophical knowledge can tolerate
such untranslatables, which bear witness to the failure of universality
itself and, therefore, stifle one of philosophy’s central aspirations. The
scandal of the idiom thus lies in its ramifications for the philosophical
project itself. And if philosophical idiomaticity is, in some sense,
irreducible, then this idiosyncrasy affects every epistemological and
hermeneutical project from within. It inscribes philosophy within
history and denies a priori any claims to transcendental or meta-
historical status.
The idiom is a scandal for philosophy. But, Derrida goes on, it
is also its chance. That is, the experience of philosophical plurality
and untranslatability, though a disappointment for the philosopher, is
also what opens philosophy to another experience of itself. It is the
chance of an event for philosophy, we could say, because it is through
this experience that philosophy might be able to re-envision its own
project. If Derrida has elected to orient his discussion of philosophical
nationality and nationalism through questions of translation and idiom,
it is because of how their resistance might ultimately help philosophy
to reimagine its own situation and aim.
At the conclusion to this first session of the 1984–5 seminar, Derrida
lays out explicitly his goal in addressing these experiences and these
questions. Namely, he explains why it is that language should come to
the fore in these discussions and be the lens through which nationalism
and nationality are explored. Far from offering a simple substitute for
the philosophical nationalisms problematically put forward by Fichte
and Heidegger, the idiom instead becomes for Derrida the site of an
aporia. This aporia, it must be stressed, consists in two bad alternatives.
Attention to the idiom therefore does not allow one simply to escape
those difficulties that mar the philosophical writings that Derrida will
criticize. Instead, such attention allows one to put better into focus the
aporetic dilemma that haunts the idiom itself and that underlies projects
of philosophical nationalism, rendering them problematic to the extent
that there exist no simple, straightforwardly preferential, alternatives to
them.
 Aporias of Translation 307
And so, it is with a succinct expression of the double difficulty that
one encounters, when one tries to attend to the inescapable problem
posed by the idiom, that Derrida’s introductory session to the 1984–5
seminar concludes. I cite it at length:
If, in conclusion, I have insisted so much on language today, this is also
to recognize a paradox, a paradigm and an aporia. 1) Final recourse of a
universalistic philosophical nationalism, language is not language (Fichte). 2) One
can denounce, suspect, devalorise, combat philosophical nationalism only by
taking the risk of reducing or effacing linguistic difference or the force of
the idiom, thus in making that metaphysico-technical gesture which consists
in instrumentalizing language (but is there a language which is purely non-
instrumental?), making it a medium which is neutral, indifferent and external
to the philosophical act of thought. Is there a thought of the idiom that escapes
this alternative? That is one of our questions. It does not belong to the past, but
is a question of the future. And here I am not just talking about the future of this
seminar. (OTNH, 23)

As Derrida here clarifies, any confrontation with the problem of the

philosophical idiom can lead to one of two problematic paths. On
the one hand, as the reading of Fichte featured in this initial session
further develops, if one opts to embrace the idiom, even in the name
of a ‘universalistic philosophical nationalism’ that would be available
to all, the very concept of universality required for such a conception
might always culminate in the reduction of language’s materiality to
something no longer recognizable as language. But, on the other
hand, if one opts simply to reject the idiom, for example out of
fear of its nationalizing tendencies, well, then one is faced with the
alternative but not less problematic possibility of the reduction and
instrumentalization of language as ‘neutral’ medium. Neither path, in
sum, is free from difficulty, either of electing one idiom as preferential
to others or, in rejecting such election, of losing what makes language
language in the first place.
The significance of Derrida’s espoused position as he begins his
four-year investigation of philosophical nationalism is not to be
underestimated. If the idiom is both a scandal and the chance for
philosophy, then this ‘chance’ is not simply equivalent to a sure path
that would promise a kind of post-nationalistic future for philosophical
discourse. Indeed, such a future, he explains, might be just as bad
as the present against which it reacts. The chance for philosophy is
thus not one of identifying a harmonious alternative, for example in a
linguistic pluralism. It would instead be akin to rethinking the problem
308 Paragraph
of language, not so as to reground it in something more essential
but rather in order to appreciate why what we call ‘nationalism’
remains a necessary threat. The fact of the idiom, we could say, is
insurmountable, and from it follow several possibilities whose horizons
we are still trying to probe.
So, why begin with language in a seminar focused on ‘Philosophical
Nationality and Nationalism’? Why focus on questions of linguistic
idioms — and above all those of philosophy — when the ultimate
goal is nationality and nationalism? Well, Derrida here clarifies, first
and foremost because these are not two separate questions. Though
nationality and nationalism are not simply commensurate with
linguistic difference, they both frequently overlap in practice and are
each marked by the same essential aporias: that of the translatability
of the idiom. In order to think through nationalism and nationality, it
could therefore be claimed, one must think through language.
But that is not all. A second reason can be found within the specific
contexts of philosophical idioms. As the reading, in this initial session,
of Fichte, and in those that follow, of Heidegger, will show, there is
a long and troubled history precisely of reducing national difference
to linguistic difference. And even, beyond linguistic difference in the
vulgar sense, to a more essential ‘idiom of the idiom’. This is what
Rodrigo Therezo demonstrates in his careful reading of Derrida’s
Geschlecht series in the preface to Geschlecht III. According to Therezo,
for Derrida, the ‘ultimate recourse’ of philosophical nationalism is not
simply language but a ‘secret idiom’ that marks the alleged singularity
of a given language:
Derrida attempts to situate his reading of Heidegger within the thematic
of his seminar, which deals with the essentially philosophical status of every
nationalism and, conversely, the philosophical tendency that consists in supporting
nationalism even (or especially) when a philosopher gives every appearance of being
cosmopolitan — a tendency that can be quite extreme, going so far as to denounce
one form of vulgar, biological-racial nationalism while surreptitiously affirming
another form of nationalism. The national idiom, beyond the usual sense of the
‘linguistic’ term — in particular the German idiom, or the unsere Sprache of Fichte
or Heidegger (but also Adorno and Arendt) — will be, according to Derrida,
the ‘ultimate recourse’ of this more ‘profound’ philosophical nationalism, which
comes down not to affirming a simple linguistic nativity but rather to claiming
a secret idiom, an ‘idiom of the idiom,’ which alone would provide ‘the sole
true foundation of German nationality as German philosophy,’ a philosophical
nationality that claims to be the (only) philosophy through which the universal of
humanity is said and thought in German.7
 Aporias of Translation 309
The ‘idiom of the idiom’ names, in Fichte, something like the pre-
linguistic essence of a language and, through this guise, repeats the
nationalizing gesture but this time under the auspices of a higher order
of thought. Thus, given the extreme threat posed by philosophical
nationalism, it is now clear why one must attend very carefully to its
variegated manifestations, above all in appeals to idioms that appear,
precisely, to do away with language and, through them, nationalisms.
Derrida is exceedingly attentive to this problem. And yet, in light of
all this, it may come as a surprise that, throughout his consideration
of the problem of the idiom, it is for him not a simple matter of
rejecting it. The idiom, as I have already pointed out, constitutes for
Derrida ‘a paradox, a paradigm, and an aporia’. In order to understand
Derrida’s motives in setting out on his four-year long seminar, and
in order to comprehend why he opts not to translate Geschlecht, even
within the confines of a seminar in which he will highlight the kinds
of linguistic chauvinism at work in Fichte and Heidegger, what must
be grasped above all is therefore the nature of this aporetic quandary,
which allows one neither to abandon nor to embrace idiomaticity
as such.
Now, to be precise, the paradox/paradigm/aporia that Derrida refers
to above does not consist in the idiom itself but instead in one’s
response to the problem that it poses. The paradox is not simply the
situation of the idiom but rather the choice that one is confronted with
when facing its situation. To respond to the problem of the idiom is to
face a certain kind of fatal choice — what Derrida calls an ‘alternative’
— and this is the paradox, paradigm, aporia. ‘Is there a thought of the
idiom that escapes this alternative?’ he asks.
The question that will occupy Derrida throughout the seminar —
but also beyond the seminar, for it is a question of nothing less than
‘the future’ — is whether it is possible to think the idiom outside
of this alternative. As Therezo clarifies, the first (bad) alternative
that is offered consists simply in embracing nationalism. While this
form of nationalism can take the vulgar form of explicit racial or
linguistic chauvinism, it can also take more insidious forms, such as
when the true essence of Germanity is found to lie in a privileged
form of ‘German’ not universally accessible even to Germans (or to
German speakers). Though such a ‘German’ can serve to ground
a universalizing cosmopolitanism — there is nothing particularly
German about German; anyone can learn to speak German — it
grounds this cosmopolitan base only at the expense of a more deeply
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seated national essence. As Derrida explains in ‘Heidegger’s Hand
(Geschlecht II)’:
So this Geschlecht [of the seventh of Fichte’s Addresses to the German Nation] is not
determined by birth, native soil, or race; it has nothing to do with the natural or
even the linguistic, at least not in the usual sense of this term, for we were able
to recognize in Fichte a kind of claim of the idiom, of the idiom of the German
idiom. Certain citizens, German by birth, remain strangers to this idiom of the
idiom; certain non-Germans can have access to it since, engaged in this circle
or this alliance of spiritual freedom and its infinite progress, they belong to ‘our
Geschlecht.’ The sole analytic and unimpeachable determination of Geschlecht in
this context is the ‘we,’ the belonging to the ‘we’ to whom we are speaking at
this moment, at the moment that Fichte addresses himself to this supposed but
still to be constituted community, a community that, strictly speaking, is neither
political, nor racial, nor linguistic, but that can receive his allocution, his address,
or his apostrophe (. . . ) and can think with him, can say ‘we’ in some language
and from a particular birthplace. Geschlecht is a whole, a gathering (one could say
Versammlung), an organic community in a nonnatural but spiritual sense, one that
believes in the infinite progress of the spirit through freedom. (GII, 28–9)

‘[T]he idiom of the German idiom’ therefore ceases to be linguistic in

any straightforward sense of the term. But though it is, in theory, for
this reason accessible by all, it becomes no less a means of exclusion,
and one still upheld in the name of ‘Germanity’.
If the first alternative therefore consists in reducing language to non-
language, or to a ‘secret idiom’ that is found to be the one true idiom
that all philosophy speaks when it speaks from its essence, then, on the
other hand, the second alternative consists in the abandonment of the
idiom but only at the expense of the instrumentalization of language
and its reduction to a neutral medium. This neutral medium, being
external to philosophy — that is, to the real work of philosophy —
would again supply the ground for a cosmopolitan future but only
at the cost, precisely, of denying the idiom outright. Nothing, in
sum, essential to philosophy would remain idiomatic and everything,
therefore, would be available for translation (without loss).
If such a universalizing alternative appears initially to be preferable
to the provincial nationalism of the first option, we must nevertheless
remain cautious. For, at stake in this vision would be a notion of
language (and thought) without idiom, singularity or difference. Absolute
translatability is only thinkable at the expense of every alterity.
Moreover, if we accept that every linguistic and national difference
is, ultimately, reducible — be it because it is deemed to be inessential
 Aporias of Translation 311
or to be wholly translatable — then we have surreptitiously reaffirmed
the separability of the signified from the signifier, and with it every
metaphysical presumption that such a separation entails.
Thus, if there is an imperative to think the idiom and its relation
to translation for Derrida, it consists in the difficulty of escaping
this aporia, which, he here implies, it is not at all evident one may
escape. There is a certain fatality to this choice. It is not evident, but
simply a question, whether one could escape this dangerous alternative.
Nevertheless, being ‘of the future’, this question is not one that we
could simply give up on.

Geschlecht III and the Act of Non-translation

Let us now return to Geschlecht III to see how this ‘alternative’
gets cashed out there. As I have already explained, if the problems
of philosophical nationality and nationalism require passage through
questions of language and idiom, it is because they have never truly
been separate issues. We might express this even more concisely by
saying that the problem of ‘translation’ haunts the one just as it does the
other. The link between the linguistic idiom and the national idiom is
established through the aporia of translation.
Now, Geschlecht III is everywhere marked by the problem of the
translation of its titular term, which problem returns incessantly and
forces Derrida to offer entire lists of French substitutes, rather than
a single, economic equivalent. Yet if this difficulty at first appears
to be a merely contingent one (one, for example, that could be
remedied through the simple expedient of remaining within German),
one quickly perceives that it speaks to an essential, incontrovertible
difficulty, having to do with the nature of idiomaticity itself. As I
have already remarked, Derrida’s most clear and overt response to
this problem is, precisely, not to translate Geschlecht. What we must ask,
therefore, is how this refusal to translate might be understood to repeat
and even respond to the aporia of the idiom as he sets it out in the
introductory session of the seminar. How might the non-translation of
Geschlecht speak to what he calls ‘the future’?
In order to answer this question, it will be helpful to look at a
moment early on in Geschlecht III, in which difficulties of translation,
between Derrida’s French and Heidegger’s German, but also within
the German text that Heidegger sets forth, come to a head. Derrida
is attempting to gloss Heidegger’s account of the rapport between
312 Paragraph
Denken and Dichten, as it is set out in ‘Language in the Poem: A
Discussion of Georg Trakl’s Poetic Work’. Though, Derrida explains,
for Heidegger the authentic ‘two-way speech (. . . ) with the poet
must be poetic’, there is also another mode of conversation that is
also sometimes necessary (GIII, 24). This other mode is that between
Denken and Dichten. As we shall see, from the poetizing Gedicht,
to the Denken that enters into conversation with it, to the French
expression of Heidegger’s German, it is a matter not of one but of
a series of translations. And these translations, far from secondary or
contingent, are deemed by Derrida to be essential and inescapable, to
the precise extent that they are ‘impossible’. Through the inescapability
of translation (both interlinguistic and intralinguistic), we thus come
to see how another thought of the idiom, resistant to the opposition
between absolute untranslatability and absolute translatability, might
be imagined:

One can speak properly of the Gedicht only in a poetic mode that is, then, more
than a mode or genre, and according to a speech that is not only poetizing but
poetic (how, then, are we to translate dichtende?). But that does not exclude another
Gespräch, one that is always possible and sometimes necessary, which relates Denken
to Dichten. It is not a matter of philosophy but of thought, of thinking, we could
say of the act of thinking if ‘act’ were not charged with essential ambiguities, and
if we, in the case of Dichten, had an appropriate verb in French. (GIII, 24)

As always, Heidegger’s poetic lexicon poses problems for translation.

These problems are not simply ones that inhere in the gap between
French and German — though they do of course inhere there as
well — but are endemic to the nature of the Gedicht itself, which
is, strictly speaking, unspeakable, and being unspeakable, gives shape
in originary fashion to the work of poetry (dichten).8 Thus, at stake
here is a first translative act in the becoming ‘poetic’ of Gedicht; a
second translative act in the Gespräch, or conversation, that opens a
relation between Denken and Dichten, or thinker and poet; and then,
finally, a third translative act, in the French expression of this originally
German text. To call each of these translations ‘acts’ is, however,
most problematic, as Derrida himself laments. And it is, at last, the
recognition of this problem, resulting from the absence of any suitable
word in French for Dichten, that incites him to reflect, in a note to the
seminar version of the text, on the full grandeur of the difficulty here
encountered:
 Aporias of Translation 313
Not of philosophy but of thinking with poetry, with the poetic act (wrong word)
(impossible translation: the ordeal of this seminar).
(Non pas de la philosophie mais du penser avec la poésie, avec l’acte (mauvais
mot) poétique (traduction impossible: l’épreuve de ce séminaire).) (GIII, 24n.
41/54n. 2)
‘[I]mpossible translation’: the challenge, trial, ordeal but also the
experience of this seminar. ‘[I]mpossible translation’: the ‘task’ of this
seminar, which we may have already failed adequately to translate. In
reflecting on the mounting translative impasses posed by Heidegger’s
language as well as his thought, Derrida here realizes, in a parenthetical
admission, the central concern of his seminar. And it is only with
great difficulty — and therefore great irony — that we translate this
admission, into English, by making recourse to a series of words,
none of which quite captures the (French) sense of his plight:
how to translate ‘épreuve’, which does indeed mean ‘ordeal’ but
which also bears a direct, etymological relation to the verb éprouver,
which inheritance bestows the term with all the corollary senses of
‘experiencing’, ‘feeling’ and ‘testing’. ‘[I]mpossible translation: the
ordeal/experience of this seminar.’ Nor is this an ‘ordeal [épreuve]’
that we may simply observe, as if we were on the outside looking in.
This is an épreuve that we are always already inside; one, indeed, that
we may face every time that we try to ‘experience’ the épreuve itself.
The situation of Derrida’s épreuve raises the following questions:
what if the failure of translation, its impossibility, is, properly speaking,
itself impossible to translate? What if this failure (of translation) could
not be translated, but only experienced, in an ‘ordeal’? We would have
failed even to understand the stakes of the impossibility that we are
here dealing with, which would be, properly speaking, the experience
of this impossibility, rather than a simple ‘translation’ of it. Another
aporia, therefore: impossible translation fails when it is translated, but
if experienced as such a failure, it may, perhaps, remain faithful to itself,
though only insofar as it has not succeeded in becoming semantically
signified (that is, translated).
Such a double bind, endemic to the ‘trial’ of translation — to the
trial of a translation that fails in succeeding and succeeds in failing —
this trial, challenge or experience of impossible translation recalls another
trial, this time Heidegger’s. It is a trial that is found in On the Way to
Language, though not in ‘Language in the Poem’, but instead ‘The
Essence of Language’. In that text Heidegger repeatedly emphasizes
314 Paragraph
that the purpose of his lecture is to ‘undergo an experience with
language [mit der Sprache eine Erfahrung zu machen]’.9 To suffer,
encounter, and thereby to be transformed by, an experience with
language. I would propose that everything remains at stake, in the
relation between Heidegger and Derrida, in this difference between
what Heidegger calls an ‘experience of or with language’ and what
Derrida calls the ‘experience or ordeal of impossible translation’.
Everything remains at stake, not only between the two philosophers
but also for a conception of language and politics.10
All of this brings me back, finally, to Geschlecht, to the word
Geschlecht as it appears and reappears in the seminar of that name.
The interest of Geschlecht, for Derrida, will have been just as much
about the difficulty it poses to translation, through the situation of its
idiom, as it was about developing, inscribing or performing a certain
transposition of this idiom. Through the push and pull of these dual
impulses, Geschlecht perhaps refuses both sides of the traditional aporia:
untranslatable/translatable. ‘[I]mpossible translation: the challenge of
this seminar’ names, and perhaps even performs, in its tense refusal
either of strict polysemy or of pure dissemination, another form of
negotiation with the idiom. And it is here, we could say, within such a
negotiation, that we can locate what Derrida identifies as the ‘question
of the future’, which is not just the future of the seminar.

NOTES
1 Jacques Derrida, ‘Heidegger’s Hand (Geschlecht II)’ in Psyche: Inventions of the
Other, Volume II, edited by Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), 27–62 (28), hereafter GII.
2 Jacques Derrida, Geschlecht III: Sex, Race, Nation, Humanity, edited by
Geoffrey Bennington, Katie Chenoweth and Rodrigo Therezo and translated
by Katie Chenoweth and Rodrigo Therezo (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2020), 4n. 5, hereafter GIII. References to the French are taken from
Geschlecht III: Sexe, race, nation, humanité, edited by Geoffrey Bennington,
Katie Chenoweth and Rodrigo Therezo (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2018),
37n. 2. Where appropriate, page references for this French edition will be
given following the English.
3 GIII, 47–8/74.
4 The Geschlecht series, or ‘Geschlechter’, includes four texts in all. The
first, ‘Geschlecht: Sexual Difference, Ontological Difference’, was initially
published in 1983, in English and French. See ‘Geschlecht: Sexual Difference,
Ontological Difference’, Research in Phenomenology 13 (1983), 65–83. The
 Aporias of Translation 315
next two, ‘Heidegger’s Hand (Geschlecht II)’ and Geschlecht III: Sex, Race,
Nation, Humanity, were given as part of the 1984–5 seminar, and only
subsequently published. The fourth, ‘Heidegger’s Ear: Philopolemology
(Geschlecht IV)’, first appeared in French as an appendix to Politiques de l’amitié
(Paris: Galilée, 1994), 343–419, a number of years later.
5 On Derrida’s difficulty with Heidegger’s ‘Platonic-Christian polarity’, see
especially Rodrigo Therezo, ‘Preface’ in GIII, xviii–xix.
6 Jacques Derrida, ‘Onto-Theology of National-Humanism (Prolegomena to a
Hypothesis)’, translated by Geoffrey Bennington, Oxford Literary Review 14:1
(1992), 3–23 (8–9), hereafter OTNH. On the history of Derrida’s teaching
engagements and their relationship to his seminar publications, see Adam
R. Rosenthal, ‘Introduction: Derrida’s Classroom’, Poetics Today 42:1 (2021),
1–8.
7 Therezo, ‘Preface’, GIII, xx–xxi.
8 This is what Derrida explains a few pages earlier: ‘The poem is there. Its
being-there is that of the written or spoken Dichtung, but also, and already, of
the unspoken Gedicht whose place is being sought after’ (GIII, 13).
9 Martin Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe I. Abteilung: Veröffentlichte Schriften
1910–1976. Band 12. Unterwegs zur Sprache (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio
Klostermann, 1985), 149.
10 For an attempt to come to terms with this relation, this time in terms of the
problem of poetry as it is set forth in the Given Time seminars, see Adam
R. Rosenthal, ‘On Derrida’s Donner le temps, Volumes I & II: A New
Engagement with Heidegger’, Research in Phenomenology 52:1 (2022), 23–47.
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