Review of the literature

Michel Foucault in his article called “What is an Author?” (1984) removes the originality of

the text. He says author is not an individual to whom some sort of discourses attributed

spontaneously, but is “a mode of existence, circulation and functioning of certain discourses

within a society” (p. 110). It is somehow a response to Roland Barthes’ “The Death of the

Author” (1977) in which the very beginning of the process of writing is supposed to be the

death of the author (p. 142). Indeed, Barthes as a structuralist attributes some kind of

passivity to the author, while Foucault believes in an institutionalized personality for the

person who writes a text.

Deconstruction is a term coined by French Philosopher, Jacque Derrida. He aims at

deconstructing the Western metaphysical considerations. He argues that the foundations of

Western philosophy and its thought system is built on the Logos i.e. the absolute originality

of every thing in the universe. So, the operation of logocentrism should be shown in the text

in order to deconstruct a text. Logos makes the relationship between signifier and signified

fixed, consequently, the meaning of the text stays stable and as a result, it determines the

world-view of the addressee. Derrida thinks that thought is shaped by language, not

expressed by it. The main strategy of deconstruction is removing certain opposition called

binary oppositions. The deconstructive reading of a text, then, is to show the logo-centricity

of the text by some sort of close reading (more or less similar to what is meant by New

Criticism), presupposition or transcendental signified (doxa) of the text, its dependence on

binary oppositions, its self-contradiction, its aporia and the way it resists the free play

(Habib, 2011, pp. 241-244). Deconstruction does not simply mean non-conformity. It
cannot be named as a theory or a method or a strategy, because it keeps deconstructing itself

(Lucy, 2004, pp. 11-14).

Barbara Johnson (1985) holds that deconstruction “destructs the unequivocal domination of

one mode of signifying over another” (p. 5), then, the deconstructive reading is some sort of

analyzing a text’s self-contradiction i.e. its difference with itself.

Derrida creates the word deconstruction based on Heidegger’s Destruction or destructive

task for philosophical thinking (Gaston & Maclachlan, 1998, p. 24). Heidegger in his

“Being and Time” uses a very difficult language to point out that “our conventional terms

and linguistic constructions are ultimately inadequate” (Wheeler, 2018). By destruction,

Heidegger means destruction of Western metaphysical thoughts.

Playing with the word des tours, Derrida in “Des Tours de Babel” refers again to a notion

by Heidegger. In French des tours means towers but because of its pronunciation, it could

be mistaken with détour, the key term in Heidegger’s philosophy. So, Derrida believes that

we need to follow the detour to language instead of being agreed upon the central path

(Gentzler, 1990, p.312).

Being affected by Heidegger’s philosophy, Derrida in his Margins of philosophy introduces

some expressions like trace and Différance. Différance, like the idea of deconstruction

carries many meanings (1982). This neologism is created by Derrida based on Saussure’s

concept of difference “without positive term” (Saussure, 1959, p.121). Derrida adds to it a
spatial aspect in which the meaning is always deferred. He changed the letter e to a in order

to give it duration while the pronunciation stays the same. So, he implicitly removes the

importance of speech over writing (Munday, 2016, p. 263) and more importantly, shows

that his theory is not based upon what is but, what is not. In literary criticism, what is

important really is the mute aspect of the text, the unspoken instead of spoken or “audible

conformity” (Gentzler, 1990, p. 311).

Saussure (1959) states that signification is a play of differences. Therefore, the meaning of a

sign depends not only on what is present but also on what is not present (Lucy, p.144).

Derrida uses different words with similar meanings, in fact what he says of Pharmakon,

arche-writing or différance, all say the same thing and this is exactly what he wants to show

about trace.

Derrida uses the word trace to pass the notion of Dasein by Heidegger. Heidegger’s Dasein

is something outside of an entity and it is in a way or another similar to what Derrida calls

transcendental signified. Derrida holds that a sign is a play of différance. A sign’s meaning

is not dependent on some extra linguistic things but it depends on other signs which forms

an endless chain (Derrida, 1989 pp. 110-134). “A text is a fabric of traces governed by a

logic of the non-presence” (Royle, 2003).

In Dissemination, the part about Plato’s Pharmacy, Derrida discusses about a concept in

Plato’s Phaedrus: “Pharmakon”. Plato made an analogy between writing and

“Pharmakon” that is a poisonous or deceptive panacea which should be avoided because it

is a tool for reminding not memory, it is the representative of the reality (speaking), it is
absent while speaking is almost always present (Derrida, 1981, p. 136). Criticizing Plato’s

naivety in writing Phaedrus, Derrida says Plato got the meaning of poison for “Pharmakon”

as writing while repeatedly uses this word in that very pamphlet as “remedy”, “charm”,

….since “Pharmakon” contains all of these meanings for writing, the “trace” of remedy is

still available in the presence of poisonous aspects of “Pharmakon” (writing) (Derrida,

1981, pp. 63-170). Here, he criticizes the Western metaphysical tradition because of putting

more emphasis on speaking over writing. In translation, he says, only one of the meaning of

“Pharmakon” is reserved. But he believes each translation evokes new meanings in a text

and this helps the text stay alive. So, the text is unstable and keeps disseminating

(Nojoumian, 2004, p. 46) because translation faces us with multiplicity of meanings, not one

meaning (Gentzler, 1990, ). Translation theory is equipped to follow the dirty play of all

mistakes, problems, accidents, insufficiencies, divergence and differences (Gentzler, 1990,

p.325).

Aporia, in Greek philosophy, means a conceptual impasse, so that a concept cannot be

explained logically. In Derrida’s term, aporia is undecidability (Royle, 2003, P. 92). It is the

most doubtful or contradictory moment, when meaning is not reachable and when the text

contradicts itself; thus, a blockage happens.

Translation is a play of differences in Derrida’s term, i.e. eliminating, distracting and

deferring meaning. Derrida refers to Greek word, diapherein in which he means attempting

to think the unheard-of thoughts (Derrida, 1982, p. 22). Derrida’s translation theory

following Benjamin’s idea, does not look for a fixed meaning from the original but the

relationship among languages. The communication, the representation, the reproduction and
the copy of the original are not the main issues in translation but the survival of language. It

modifies the original text in order not to survive the corpus of the original, but to survive

language. Thus, “the promise of reconciliation of the tongues” will be fulfilled.

Accordingly, translation should render the performative act of language, this makes a text

both translatable and untranslatable, because the pure language i.e. the language of the

languages, is not reachable (Derrida, 1982, pp. 122-124). Translation is the transformation

of ourselves through the thought of the other. Even if translation is the exact rendering of

the original, as in Borges’s case, the meaning changes because the context is not the same.

Derrida believes that translation is a kind of transformation. He makes a distinction between

transformation and transportation. He says since no word is innocent or neutral, we cannot

only transport the pure idea or signified from one language to another. This transformation

is “a regulated transformation of one language by another, of one text by another” (Derrida,

1981, p. 21).

Jacques Derrida in his The Ear of the Other (1985) refers to one of the Borges’ short stories

called Pierre Ménard, author of Don Quixote. Ménard was a Frenchman who desired to

translate Don Quixote, he did not want to create another Quixote, but exactly the same

Quixote (Borges, 1962, p. 91). He did exactly what Quixote did in the story but the result

was a story exactly the same as Cervantes’ Don Quixote. Although Ménard’s translation is

verbally the same as the Cervantes’, the history to which Ménard’s story belongs is different

from that of Cervantes’ (Baldissone, 2018, p. 2). Derrida (1985) also says Don Quixote is

written in Spanish but with some sense of frenchness imposed on it, this shows “the

difference of language systems within a single tongue” (pp. 99-100). He, in fact, criticizes

Roman Jacobson’s three modes of translation which was stated in Jacobson’s on Linguistic
Aspects of Translation (1959) i.e. interlingual, intralingual and intersemiotic translation (p.

233). By interlingual he means translation from one language to another, intralingual refers

to a kind of transformation within a single language, it is not necessarily paraphrasing

because meaning will slightly changes by choosing a synonymous word, and finally in

intersemiotic translation, ideas are translated or explained using other semiotic resources

than language (O’Halloran, Tan & Wignell, 2016). Derrida (1985) says these three concepts

consider one language and one translation and not the plurality of languages, because “the

unity of the linguistic system [is not supposed] to be a sure thing” (p.100).

Derrida in his The Ear of the Other (1985) refers to the biblical story of Babel. Pointing to

the proper name of Babel, Derrida says God deconstructed the tower and imposed the

plurality of languages, therefore, he wanted men to do an impossible thing: to translate and

not to translate (p. 103). This leads to another notion stated by Derrida that is translatability

and non-translatability. He believes that a text is translatable and non-translatable at the

same time. It is untranslatable because a text is like a proper name or a sacred text that

“meaning and the nature of the letter cannot be dissociated.” It is translatable when it is

univocal and can be translated to only one language” (Derrida, 1985, pp. 103-104). What

matters is studying the strategies used by the translator and finding the hidden discourse.

Deconstruction is defined by Derrida as “plus d’une langue” (more than one language)

(Derrida & de Man, 1989, pp. 14-15). Language manifests itself in its differences through

multiplicity of languages. Translation is a translation of thoughts from one language to

another (Derrida, 1991, pp. 241-242).

Using the word supplement, Derrida defamiliarizes what seemed normal and deforms what

we think as original concept which he calls strange strategy (Royle, 2003). Supplement is

used by Derrida to show the instability of meaning. The shifting relationship between

speech and writing. In fact, suppléer means both to substitute and to add, i.e. substitution of

traces and at the same time deferral of it.” Each term both replaces and supplements the

other”. It also means no priority in binary oppositions (Cuddon, 1998, p.881). Derrida

defamiliarizes the reader by using the word supplement in that he attributes meanings to this

word which seems to be familiar to the reader (Royle, 2003).

Derrida believes that only in translation, merging self with the other is possible. He refers to

Maurice Blanchaut’s story called Death Sentence and says we feel responsible in our own

language but we feel free for taboo words, for example, in language of the other. There is

an unwritten contract between two languages (Derrida, 1985, pp. 124-125). Thus, what

Derrida believes in is some sort of pluralization in translation.

Michel Foucault (1961) assumes that the history of order imposes the sameness and shuts

away the foreign, while the history of madness is a combination of the self and the other.

Derrida holds that during the process of translation, trying to find the meaning of the

original text is fruitless. What actually speaks out loud in a text is multiplicity of meanings

and interconnection or intertextuality (Gentzler, 1990, p. 312). Derrida agrees with

Heidegger and Foucault that the Greco-Western thoughts (order) “force us to make

reference to objects, narrow meaning and closes off all the alternative possibilities”,

therefore we need to unveil the masques during the reading of a text (Gentzler, 1990,

pp.313-314).
The ethical issue for Derrida is avoiding “totalization”. He insists on the presence of an

Otherness without turning to the Sameness, without any hierarchy in any direction between

the Self and the Other. He thinks that the self can be appropriated by the imperial Other and

the Other can be appropriated by the self; in each cases the ethics fails (Roffe, 2004, p. 41).

Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer (2002), in the Dialectic of Enlightenment talked

about the Enlightenment period in the West as being against the myths. Thus, it was

supposed to replace myth with knowledge. He posed a question that how does

enlightenment which was supposed to liberate people leads them to fascist ideology (pp. 1-

35).

Adorno talks about a so-called culture industry, the mass production of cultural things

which makes people choose or like them unconsciously, being delusional they think that

they are in charge while they are not (Horkheimer & Adorno, 2002, pp. 94-137). Adorno

believes that art does not copy the reality but it is an image which is depicted as reality

(Melaney, 1997, pp. 44-45). The only way to overcome this is to gain the pure art

(Tavanbakhsh, 2006, p. 48) which Adorno talks about in his Aesthetic theory.

Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory is a combination of Hegelian and Marxian questions about art.

Hegelian in that whether art can be survived in a capitalist society and Marxian in that

whether a society can be affected by the art. Adorno uses Kant’s autonomous art as well

(Zuidervaart, 2015) but discusses that Kant’s disinterestedness suppresses heteronomy, so,

Kant considers an art work of a simplistic not a complex nature, art should have a social or

political meaning (Melaney, 1997, p. 41). He regards art as “the social antithesis of the
society, not immediately deducible from it” (Wilson, 2007, p.48). Refusing both Kant’s

autonomous art and Hegel’s subjective consideration of it, Adorno believes in the closeness

of theory and practice (Melaney, 1997, p. 46).

The link between ideas of Adorno and that of Derrida is in the concept of otherness. Derrida

defines deconstruction as “responsibility to the other” and urges individuals to become

aware about the conservatism that tradition imposed on them (Caputo, 2000, p. 109). In fact,

he repeats the notion stated by Walter Benjamin as pure language which means the plurality

of meanings. He suggests that the meaning cannot be reduced to one and should contain all

the meanings in translating a text (Lawlor, 2018). Derrida in his monolingualism of the

other (1998) criticizes those who seeks for a single language to be dominated. Adorno in his

Negative Dialectic believes that “the experience of otherness is part of any genuine aesthetic

experience and produces a new understanding of past and present” (Melaney, 1997, p. 45).

The work of art is negating what is immediate. This is the dialectical way of interpreting

taken from Hegelian dialectic but this dialectic is not positive, but negative. Therefore,

Adorno stated that through this dialectical action, the otherness will emerge and the indirect

historical meaning of a text will be revealed (Melaney, 1997, p. 45).

To pass the culture industry, Adorno in praising Samuel Beckett’s plays says that Beckett

through some sort of self-alienation and its own absurdity, negates language, because the

combination of galvanized language which is the commodity sign and the so-called pseudo-

logical language is restructured in an artistic work (Adorno, 1994, p. 162).

The aforementioned discussion is linked in a way or another to Jacobson’s Information

Theory. Jacobson (1971) believes that the addresser, in order to communicate, encodes a

message and the addressee is supposed to decode it. He says the obtained information is

increased if the addressee gets as close as possible to the codes used by the addresser

(p.130). Therefore, the amount of information depends on the addressee i.e. the less the

addressee knows about something, the higher information s/he receives. The amount of

information increases sharply if the reader gets defamilarized by a text (Najafi, 1992) and

the more a message is familiar, the more understandable it becomes (Ahmadi, 2001, p. 66).

Jacobson differentiates between everyday language and poetic language. He argues that in

everyday conversations as well as in scientific texts, language is transparent but in poetic

language the message depends on the way it is expressed. The creativity of the reader is in

the lowest level when reading a scientific text, while s/he has to create meaning from a

literary text (Ahmadi, 2001, pp. 67-69).

Pierre Bourdieu discusses this phenomenon in a larger scale. He is against the notion of

naturalization in a society. He states that “every established order tends to produce the

naturalization of its own arbitrariness.” Bourdieu calls these experiences which appear as

self-evident, doxa (Bourdieu, 1977, p. 164). He argues that language, myth and art are kind

of collective thoughts which are expressed by institutions and in their turn are reinforced

both by them and also by the members of the society. These cultural products, as Adorno

names them, are completely confirmed because their “conditions of existence are very little

differentiated.” When the immediate impression of a text is broken and the text seems no

longer self-evident, the doxa will get questioned (Bourdieu, 1977, p. 167).
Bourdieu (1977) believes that when something is looked at objectively, the innocence of

doxa is confirmed by sticking to the orthodoxy, in contrast to which, heterodoxy refers to the

“existence of competing possibles”, Orthodoxy conceals the discourse of the other. He

concludes that in crisis situation i.e. the extraordinary discourses, the everyday order is

challenged (pp. 170-171).

In translation studies, most scholars have worked on deconstruction only theoretically and

few research is done on practical aspects of this theory. Edwin Gentzler in his Ph.D

dissertation, talks chronologically about the history of translation studies, from the

beginning to deconstruction, how deconstruction raised and how it is related to translation.

After talking about Foucault, Heidegger and Derrida, he gives a practical example of

deconstruction in translation.

A research by Jacquline Risset has done on translation of Finnegans Wake from the

perspective of deconstruction. Finnegans wake was self-translated by James Joyce to Italian

language. Risset works on the plurality of languages in the original and the translation.

Because Finnegans wake was written in many languages, its translation to a single language

should be so challenging. She works on the strategies used by Joyce and concludes that

Joyce by creating different accents and shifting between archaic and modern languages,

using idioms and dialects and different tones, creates plurality in translation, while in the

original this plurality achieved by some references to the foreign languages. However, Joyce

could not translate some parts of his own work and kept them intact. During the process of

translation, Joyce paid attention to different meanings his own work carried out in both

English and Italian. The poetic quality of the text was reserved even in idiomatic dialogues.

Even the proper nouns were Italianized. Joyce did not consider the meaning of the original
text but looked for a strategy to achieve the plurality of languages. He deformed language

deliberately to gain his own desired results. (Gentzler, 1990, pp. 327-335).

The article The Otherness within Ownness analyzes Ash-Wednesday, taking the hermeneutic

motion stated by George Steiner (initiative trust, aggression, assimilation and compensation)

into account. The author reads Ash-Wednesday as a performative and not referential act and

believes that the idiosyncratic style by Eliot creates multiplicity of meaning. He makes a

connection between the form i.e. the salvation of the text with the content i.e. the salvation

of a soul, as the poem is about changing and mutation from earth to heaven, the language

itself shows this change and mutability. The language, he says, is not used to describe what

is going on but it is doing what is going on. He says the reader engages with the text to

create meaning (Meyer, 2002).

In Poe’s Shadow_ A Parable and The Problem of Language, Michael Williams (2016)

states that the content of the story is an “implication of disjunction between signifier and

signified.” The Greek proper name Oinos which means both one and wine remains

untranslated because the proper name carries with itself some sort of confusion (Derrida,

1982, p. 107), the binary opposition of writing/reading from the very beginning of the story,

the shadow which is implied as the signified as something which is absent all the time and

the nature of Parable in the topic which demands the reader’s engagement in creating

meaning are analyzed by the author. He finally concludes that this narrative separates itself

from “univocal” reading and rejects the “irreducibility of language.”

Deconstruction, is basically about removing the unequivocal power or domination of one

group over another. It has something to do with Adorno’s culture industry in a way or

another. It is against centrality in language. In translation studies it changes drastically some

determinate concepts such as “equivalence”, “function” and all theories and do’s and don’ts

based on these concepts. Deconstruction is mainly based on plurality in translation.

Appearing the other in the translated text makes a work unpredictable by which the work

does not fall into the culture industry. This section also presents some researches which take

deconstruction into account practically either on translation or on literature. All consider

plurality and integration of the self and the other.