When Clothing Lies: Translation, Wordplay, and the Conceptual Fidelity of Philosophical Texts

 Introduction

Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology opens chapter 2 not with a thesis, but with a gesture—a typographical disruption, a pun, a fracture within the word “vêtement.” In doing so, Derrida stages from the outset a critique of Western metaphysics and its privileging of speech over writing. The metaphor of clothing, long used to mark writing as an external covering of the more authentic spoken word, becomes itself the site of philosophical unraveling. But this critique depends not only on what Derrida says, but how he writes. Through a play on the French word for clothing—vêtement, rendered provocatively as vête ment—Derrida exposes the rhetorical structures that sustain philosophical hierarchies, calling into question assumptions about presence, immediacy, and truth.

This article explores the rhetorical and philosophical weight of this moment, examining how Derrida’s strategic wordplay deconstructs Saussure’s metaphor of writing as a “disguise,” and how the nuances of Derrida’s French resist transmission into English. What is at stake is not only the meaning of a word, but the fidelity of philosophical translation itself—its ability to preserve the force of the original argument when that argument is embedded in linguistic performance.

The Rhetorical and Philosophical Weight of "Vêtement" in Of Grammatology

In Of Grammatology, chapter 2, “The Outside and the Inside,” Derrida stages a deconstructive critique of the traditional hierarchy between thought, speech, and writing. He writes:

“Writing, sensible matter and artificial exteriority: a 'clothing.' It has sometimes been contested that speech was a clothing for thought. Husserl, Saussure, Lavelle have all questioned it. But has it ever been doubted that writing was the clothing of speech?”
« L'écriture, matière sensible et extériorité artificielle : un « vêtement ». On a parfois contesté que la parole fût un vête ment pour la pensée. Husserl, Saussure, Lavelle n'y ont pas manqué. Mais a-t-on jamais douté que l'écriture fût un vête ment de la parole ? »

The rhetorical movement hinges on a distinction between two metaphors: speech as the clothing of thought, and writing as the clothing of speech. While philosophers such as Saussure and Husserl rejected the former as reductive, they accepted the latter without scrutiny. Derrida problematizes this asymmetry not through argument alone but through linguistic performance. The French word “vêtement” (clothing) becomes his tool of disruption—specifically when he inserts a typographical rupture: “vête ment.”

This play is more than a pun; it is a material demonstration of Derrida’s thesis. The split “vête ment” destabilizes the word's unity:

• “vête” stems from vêtir, to clothe.
• “ment” visually evokes both the nominal suffix (-ment) and the verb mentir (to lie).

With this subtle gesture, Derrida suggests that what appears as neutral clothing—whether speech for thought or writing for speech—may also be a disguise, a distortion, or even a deception. Thus, he uses the ambiguity of “vêtement” to call into question the supposed innocence of speech, revealing that it too may be a mediated and potentially misleading form.

Later in the same passage, this critique sharpens. Derrida targets Saussure’s treatment of writing as a dangerous supplement:

“For Saussure it is even a garment of perversion and debauchery, a dress of corruption and disguise, a festival mask that must be exorcised, that is to say, warded off, by the good word.”
« C'est même pour Saussure un vêtement de perversion, de dévoiement, habit de corruption et de déguisement, un masque de fête qu'il faut exorciser, c'est-à-dire conjurer par la bonne parole : »

And quoting Saussure directly:

“Writing veils the appearance of language; it is not a guise for language but a disguise.”
« L'écriture voile la vue de la langue : elle n'est pas un vêtement mais un travestissement. »

Here, each term—vêtement, habit, déguisement, masque—carries both literal and figurative resonance in French, deepening the metaphorical structure Derrida is unpacking. These words do not merely describe clothing but imply corruption, misdirection, and theatricality. They reveal Saussure’s suspicion that writing introduces an element of perversion into the supposedly pure realm of speech.

Yet the rhetorical strategy Derrida employs to deconstruct this logic is muted in translation. In the English rendering, the pun “vête ment” is lost, and the deconstructive movement is marked only by the presence or absence of quotation marks. The translation flattens Derrida’s intervention into a simple metaphor, obscuring the phonetic and semantic play that made it conceptually rich.

This flattening is significant because Derrida’s point is not merely that metaphors of clothing exist in philosophical discourse. His aim is to show how these metaphors unconsciously reflect and reinforce the metaphysical hierarchy of presence: thought as the origin, speech as its expression, and writing as its distortion. If both speech and writing are revealed to be garments—mediated, externalized, and possibly deceptive—then the presumed immediacy of spoken language begins to unravel.

Derrida’s use of “vête ment” thus performs what it says: it writes the instability of speech into the fabric of the text itself. The visual spacing marks a conceptual split that no translation can fully reproduce without a footnote or commentary. In this way, translation becomes not just a linguistic act but a philosophical task—one that must negotiate the rhetorical and metaphysical stakes of every term.

Conclusion

Derrida’s insertion of the typographical split vête ment is more than a flourish—it is a conceptual intervention. It performs what it proclaims: that no signifier is innocent, no medium transparent. By rupturing the word for clothing, Derrida reveals that both speech and writing may be garments that obscure as much as they reveal. In doing so, he turns Saussure’s own metaphor against itself, showing that the “good word” which seeks to exorcise writing is itself stitched with the very materiality it would deny.

But translation struggles to carry this intervention across languages. The phonetic, semantic, and typographic nuances that make Derrida’s critique possible are flattened, and with them, the philosophical stakes are often lost. What appears in French as a subversion becomes in English a metaphor like any other. In this sense, translation becomes not merely a linguistic challenge, but a philosophical trial—a test of how much conceptual weight language can bear when it moves across borders. Derrida’s pun reminds us that even the most familiar metaphors, like clothing, can lie—and that uncovering those lies requires attention not just to what is said, but to how it is written.

Related Post

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https://derridaforlinguists.blogspot.com/2025/02/when-she-becomes-man-nietzsches.html

Bibliography

Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976.

Derrida, Jacques. De la grammatologie. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1967.

Eco, Umberto. Mouse or Rat? Translation as Negotiation. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2003.