ABSTRACT
Derrida’s active, productive, prowling translating activity can be conceptualised as a way of responding to an inheritance, a notion which is key to Derrida’s thought. Together with the interrelated concepts of event, haunting and the signature, inheriting involves a double movement of both affirming what one receives and responding to it in one’s own way. Translation is shown to play a vital role in exposing the heterogeneity of an inheritance – whether intellectual, philosophical, cultural or linguistic – a process which is illustrated and explored via a close reading of Specters of Marx. Translations can also sometimes themselves constitute ‘events’, or ‘signatures’, a possibility that Derrida evokes in ‘Des Tours de Babel’, but which can be further developed by being brought into dialogue with Derrida’s discussions of inheriting and betrayal in ‘Countersignatures’ and other late work.
