492 Jacques Derrida 1984–2004
secular and playful religion’.^42 Scrutinizing etymologies was not, for
him, the quest of a pre-existing truth: keeping the language in a state
of ‘expansion’, it was primarily invention.
Derrida could produce a whole text from French words such
as ‘pas’, ‘demeure’, or ‘voile’, playing with them in diff erent ways,
celebrating all the resources they contained.
I am always guided by untranslatability: when the phrase is
forever indebted to the idiom, when the translation can only
lose it. It is an apparent paradox that translators have taken
much more interest in my texts than have the French, trying to
reinvent in their own languages the experience that I have just
described.^43Derrida loved the French language so much that he was always
trying to enrich it. ‘We owe him new words, active words (and in
this respect his writing is violent, poetic),’ Roland Barthes had noted
back in 1972.^44 And Derrida himself liked telling the story of how,
shortly after the word ‘diff érance’ had made its entry in the Petit
Robert dictionary, Avital Ronell had mentioned this fact in the
presence of Jacques’s mother as an event that deserved to be cele-
brated. Georgette Safar, with a frown of disapproval, had turned to
her son and asked: ‘But Jackie, have you really written “diff erence”
with an “a”?’
Over the years, Derrida had coined more and more new words,
despite the risk of shocking people other than his mother. In his little
book The Vocabulary of Jacques Derrida, Charles Ramond listed and
analysed scores of these neologisms and portmanteau words so avidly
fabricated.^45 Some were ephemeral, others have become brand names:
adestination, archi-écriture, arrivance, clandestination, destiner-
rance, exappropriation, hantologie, médiagogique, mondialatinisation,
restance, stricture... (adestination, archi-writing or arche-writing,
arrivance, clandestination, destinerrancy, exappropriation, hauntology,
mediagogic, globalatinization, remnance, stricture... ).*
Syntax was aff ected too: in Derrida’s hands, it was forever freeing
itself from the models of traditional philosophical writing. In this
respect, his evolution is comparable to that of Francis Ponge,
moving from the brevity and extreme density of The Voice of Things
to the multiple variations of The Notebook of the Pine Wood or
Soap. Derrida’s texts were increasingly written for reading aloud.
This gives them a highly individual rhythm in which ‘writing always
follows the voice. Whether or not this voice is internal, it always
puts itself or fi nds itself on stage.’^46
- Translations of these terms vary; these are just indicators. – Tr.