ABSTRACT
Derrida published only one book-length translation in his lifetime, a translation into French of Edmund Husserl’s Der Ursprung der Geometrie [The Origin of Geometry]. This conventional, scholarly translation is Derrida’s demonstration that he can play by the rules, and gives little hint of the forceful challenges to conceptualisations of meaning that were to come in Of Grammatology and other works a few years later. To explore the reasons for this conformity, the translation is contextualised within the institutions of the French academy and Derrida’s own career trajectory. In contrast, in the many citations from Hegel that are included in Glas, Derrida prefers a mode of translating that piles up synonyms and defers the moment of decision. Hegel’s original German terms are often retained alongside multiple French translations, allowing Derrida to track the confluences between the German language and Hegel’s thinking, as well as to flag Hegel’s manipulations of German and create some multilingual fakeries of his own.
