It's also interesting to wonder why W&B didn't simply go for 'transgender', which is surely capacious enough to capture the transgressive activities imagined by #Genet, and now encompasses the kind of challenge to binaristic thinking that Clang also represents.

#Derrida #Hegel 🌈📚 #queerbooksky 🌈🎓

The language of crossing feels a little too frontally oppositional (as Derrida might have put it), implying that we cross from one to the only other, a dialectic between two genders that the endless peals and clangs of the text overflow, deborder, infinitely multiply, render uncountable, etc.

If this is the aim, then W&B again take a surprising route in translating the transness of the Genet column, often opting for 'crossdressing' over the 'transvestism' of L&R. While the former is less old fashioned, it activates a very different semantic register, divesting us of the 'trans'.

This relève would make audible the relevance of Clang for today's scholars, allowing us to hear how this decades-old text chimes with some of the more transgressive tendencies in gender studies. And perhaps this genderqueering of Derrida also marks the relevance of trans theory for Derrida Studies.

Note that 'transing' is italicised, perhaps for emphasis, perhaps because W&B are introducing a foreign term, 'transing' not belonging to the Derridean lexicon until now. The translators are promising to translate Derrida into the language of contemporary #TransStudies and vice versa.

In the first paragraph of their Translators' Preface, W&B say that in Clang 'a wholesale queering and transing of virile (homo)sexuality takes place, to the extent that we would struggle to know, in spite of the familiar, even stereotypical practices, what constitutes (a) sex and (a) sexuality'.

Instead of relève, W&B choose either to leave aufhebung untranslated, or, surprisingly, to return to 'sublation', a rendering that hasn't been heard without the accompaniment of eager death knells for some time.

#PhilSky #AcademicResearch #AcademicSky #GenderSky

These questions chime with many moments in Derrida that explore the relève of translation. Relève is D's translation (into French) of Hegel's aufhebung. It's curious that W&B move away from D's translation--and the translations of it, like 'relief' and 'relieve', that Leavey and Rand (L&R) chose.

The #conference will be held at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, on​ 13–17 July 2026. Confirmed keynotes: Elissa Marder, Isabelle Alfandary, Marc Crépon, David Farrell Krell. More information is available here: derridatoday.com.au/conference/

#deconstruction #poststructuralism #transgender 🏳️‍⚧️

Panelists are invited to explore any aspect of the relationship between Trans Studies and deconstruction/Derrida Studies. Please send me an abstract of 350 words max by Friday 28 November, or email me before then to discuss. Suggested themes and topics (plus my email address) in this image: