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according to the single law of change, natural to the human mind,' Villemain,
*Preface du Dictionaire de l'Academie*."
Problem of translating the word: Naturally it will be necessary to translate
all of this into Japanese but that only postpones the problem. It goes without
saying that if all the significations enumerated by the Littr interested me
because of their affinity with what I "meant" [voulais-dire], they concerned,
metaphorically, so to say, only models or regions of meaning and not the totality
of what deconstruction aspires to at its most ambitious. This is not limited to a
linguistico-grammatical model, let alone a mechanical model. These models
themselves ought to be submitted to a deconstructive questioning. It is true
then that these "models" have been behind a number of misunderstandings
about the concept and word of "deconstruction" because of the temptation to
reduce it to these models.
How Deconstruction Takes Place: If deconstruction takes place everywhere
it [a] takes place, where there is something (and is not therefore limited to
meaning or to the text in the current and bookish sense of the word), we still
have to think through what is happening in our world, in modernity, at the time
when deconstruction is becoming a motif, with its word, its privileged themes,
its mobile strategy, etc. I have no simple and formalizable response to this
question. All my essays are attempts to have it out with this formidable
question. They are modest symptoms of it, quite as much as tentative
interpretations. I would not even dare to say, following a Heideggerian schema,
that we are in an "epoch" of being-in-deconstruction, of a being-indeconstruction that would manifest or dissimulate itself at one and the same
time in other "epochs". This thought of "epochs" and especially that of a
gathering of the destiny of being and of the unity of its destination or its
dispersions (Schicken, Geschick) will never be very convincing.
What is deconstruction? : What deconstruction is not? everything of course!
What is deconstruction? nothing of course! I do not think, for all these reasons,
that it is a good word [un bon mot]. It is certainly not elegant [beau]. It has
definitely been of service in a highly determined situation. In order to know
what has been imposed upon it in a chain of possible substitutions, despite its
essential imperfection, this "highly determined situation" will need to be
analyzed and deconstructed. This is difficult and I am not going to do it here.
One final word to conclude this letter, which is alread too long. I do not believe
that translation is a secondary and derived event in relation to an original
languag or text. And as "deconstruction" is a word, as I have just said, that is
essentially replaceable in a chain of substitution, then that can also be done
from one language to another. The chance, first of all the chance of (the)
"deconstruction", would be that another word (the same word and an other) can
be found in Japanese to say the same thing (the same and an other), to speak of
deconstruction, and to lead elsewhere to its being written and transcribed, in a
word which will also be more beautiful. When I speak of this writing of the other
which will be more beautiful, I clearly understand translation as involving the
same risk and chance as the poem. How to translate "poem"? a "poem"?...