Translating to Philosophize: Exploring Derrida’s Translation Reflex

Translation studies has never known what to do with Derrida. His work is associated with a radical questioning of how language functions, undermining the assumptions about meaning and equivalence on which translators and translation theorists rely. His own reflections on translation are brief and often seem to veer off into discussion of other things. His only published translation – of Edmund Husserl’s Der Ursprung der Geometrie [The Origin of Geometry] – is surprisingly conventional and feels inconsistent with the philosopher of deconstruction. To date, the influence of this seminal figure on translation studies and translation theory has been limited. Yet Derrida was himself an incessant, almost obsessive translator, frequently pausing in the course of his lectures and writings to ask how something might be translated, or to reflect on the published translations of a given phrase. Although he rarely built on those moments to theorise translation, the potential for doing so is enormous. In this seminar, Derrida’s translation reflex – until now largely overlooked – is placed front and centre. It is interrogated alongside themes that formed the focus of his later oeuvre, such as inheritance, the event, the secret, mourning and the messianic. The result is a reconceptualisation of translation itself: as a philosophical tool, a response to our intellectual heritage, and even a way of coming to terms with our own mortality.

The seminar will serve as an introduction to my new book, Derrida Translating, due out (open access) in May 2026. https://www.routledge.com/Derrida-Translating-Reconceptualising-Literary-and-Philosophical-Translation/Batchelor/p/book/9781032763606

Speaker:
Kathryn Batchelor is Professor of Translation Studies at UCL (University College London), UK. She is the author of Derrida Translating (2026), Translation and Paratexts (2018) and Decolonizing Translation (2009/2014), and has co-edited seven volumes of essays, including Translating Thought/Traduire la pensée (2010, with Yves Gilonne), Translating Frantz Fanon across Continents and Languages (2017, with Sue-Ann Harding), Translation, Trouvailles (2023, with Chantal Wright), and Translation Studies before ‘Translation Studies’: Nothing Happened? (2026, with Iryna Odrekhivska). Kathryn’s research interests span translation theory, history and philosophy, as well as postcolonial studies and comparative literature.