Practices of translation as a way to look back on Derridean years of architecture.

In 2015, Ginette Michaud and Joana Maso published a book gathering for the first time translated into French most of Jacques Derrida's discourses on architecture (Les arts de l'espace. Paris: Ed. La différence). Presenting such a body of works as “inédit” more than three decades after his arranged encounter with some architects, this belated publication highlights how the architectural reception of Derrida's philosophy is marked by very different theoretical interests and pursuits on both sides of the Atlantic. While the Anglo-American architectural historiography inscribes the presence and influence of Derrida as crucial for what has been a “gilded age of theory” (Mallgrave, Goodman, 2011), the French-speaking part of architectural debate has long regarded this particular moment of recent history as a kind of trivial issue. From one linguistic milieu to another, what the Derridean years of architecture have produced has no equivalence. There are divergences between different versions of a same history; there is a speculative distance between its cultural and institutional effects.
This paper proposes to reconsider practices of translation as a way to recompose history with its differences – an approach developed from the works of Antoine Berman and especially Barbara Cassin. Considering that what is here at stake goes beyond the mere passage between languages, the history-in-translation can act as a reflexive distance trough different historical, cultural and generational milieus. This point will be argued from the proposal of two experimental cases: a first translation into French of Derrida's Haunt (Wigley, 1992) and an (un-)translation of Chora L Works (Kipnis, Leeser, 1996). Although this two forms of translation frames the issue on one specific encounter between architecture and philosophy, they also tend to open discussions on how recent past history can be shaped as a matter of contemporary concerns, as a specific pattern for more than one history to come (Boucheron, 2018).