As Thomas Dutoit explains in more detail in his editor’s note, the original French text of the course here printed is the result of the transcription of around four hundred handwritten pages. As anyone who has seen Derrida’s handwriting can attest (and as is readily confirmed by a glance at the pages reproduced here), this was an immensely arduous and time-consuming task, which might well have been simply impossible without the help of Marguerite Derrida, who is able to decipher her late husband’s handwriting with less difficulty than most. We owe them both an immense debt of gratitude for their very many hours of care and perseverance in managing to produce anything approaching a publishable text.
When the French edition was eventually published in October 2013, however, it rapidly became clear to me that a number of problems remained. I was able to check suspect transcriptions (passages that seemed incoherent or that simply did not “sound like Derrida”) against the PDF file of the manuscript, which I had originally scanned for Tom and Marguerite in 2007, and after twice carefully rereading the published text against the manuscript, I was able to confirm that a significant number of errors had made their way into the French edition. These errors are of many kinds, ranging from misidentification of the H that Derrida often uses to refer to Heidegger, Husserl, or Hegel, through presentation as part of Derrida’s discourse what are in fact direct quotations from Heidegger, and through omissions of legible words and misconstruals of syntax, to inaccuracies in registering Derrida’s underlinings and punctuation marks, more or less adventurous conjectures as to the reading of words not flagged in the published text as “uncertain” or “illegible,” and many misspellings of German words. Pending publication of a corrected edition of the French text by the Éditions Galilée, Marguerite Derrida has graciously agreed to the publication of this translation, based on the text as I have corrected it rather than on the French original. As publication of that corrected edition will make the detail of those corrections otiose, however, I did not think it advisable to signal every departure from the French that I have been led to make here.
· · ·
I have used published translations of the texts Derrida discusses where these exist. I have on occasion modified these translations in light of the French translation Derrida uses or supplies himself (often with greater accuracy than the published versions), and I have not systematically pointed out discrepancies in the use of italics, spaced characters, and quotation marks within the quotations that Derrida gives. Interpolations within quotations are in almost all cases his, usually supplying German words (in parentheses), or providing glosses on the translation [in brackets]. In cases where Derrida’s text is paraphrasing rather than quoting, I have supplied references to the relevant passages in the published translations. I have followed the French edition in letting stand some inconsistencies in Derrida’s own practice (notably in the choice to hyphenate or not the German Da-sein). For many details involving tracking down incomplete references or identifying misspelled German words in the French original, and for a number of more humble but crucial editorial tasks, I am extremely grateful to Rodrigo Bueno Therezo for his vigilance, rigor, and patient hard work. Finally, I am indebted to all the participants in the 2014 Derrida Seminar Translation Project summer workshop for their uncompromising commitment to accuracy in the translation and their help in avoiding a fresh round of errors and omissions. Remaining mistakes and infelicities in the final translation are, of course, my own responsibility.
Geoffrey Bennington
NEW YORK, MARCH 2015