Williams, Jacques Derrida and Raymond

(Vidéo) [ENG] Jacques Derrida & Raymond Williams - La linguistique de l'écriture

Artesquieu · May 10, 2021 · partial coverage

• Jacques Derrida
• Raymond Williams
• linguistics of writing
• translation
• film
• English language
• academic legitimation
• Strasbourg conference

Coverage note: full (about thirteen minutes; YouTube auto-generated captions without punctuation, so speakers' turns are not marked)

Core ideas

Being filmed is part of the subject. The speakers start from the presence of cameras at the conference. They say one forgets it quickly, and that it became a subject of the conference itself: the new kind of intellectual has to integrate technical modalities (recording, filming) into academic and social activity. One of them says that "the linguistics of writing have to integrate the linguistics of filming", since film and recording are kinds of writing and not an obstacle but a necessity today, even if filming involves its own selection and different medium.

Translation in two senses. They discuss how ideas travel across frontiers within particular social situations. "Translation" means both the strict linguistic sense and the broader reception of a style of thinking: academics can fail to understand each other on the same author because of layers of implicit assumptions and evaluations. They give an example from the conference: hesitation over the word "nature", whose meaning differs between intellectual traditions. They also note how selection for translation (the history of Russian formalism written through accidents of translation) shapes what is read, and how a younger generation created a market for French theory outside the academy, which the academy then saw as subversive.

The power of English and the American market. One speaker, a Frenchman speaking English "with great difficulty", points out the authority of the English language and of the North American academic market: every legitimation passes through the United States, so that people reorient themselves towards what will be legitimate there. The other adds the tension between British and American academics, sometimes stronger than between American and French; part of the English reaction to French theory is "provincial", part of the denunciation of a "Franco-American intellectual hegemony" is not frivolous, and the only remedy is a frank examination of these processes.

Excerpts