On the Handing Down of Deconstruction

This article examines the role played by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's ‘Translator's Preface’ in the ‘handing down of deconstruction’ as a tradition. It compares Spivak's ‘Preface’ to that given by John P. Leavey for his 1978 translation of Jacques Derrida's Introduction to Edmund Husserl's The Origin of Geometry. In this way, the question of the ‘origin’ or inaugural moment of the reception of Derrida's work in the anglophone world is posed based on a close reading of the Introduction and on the interrogation of further questions relating to the scientific and literary orientations of deconstruction and the various intellectual-historical contexts that framed his early writing. The article concludes by broaching the possibility of ‘communities of deconstruction’, communities of readers by which the tradition is both handed down and remains open to further iterations and inscriptions of Derrida's thought.